When Donald Trump is inaugurated as the U. S. President on Friday, Juan Soberanis intends to protest the event\u2014digitally.
His San Francisco-based protest platform is calling on Americans to oppose Trump\u2019s presidency by visiting the Whitehouse.gov site and overloading it with too much traffic. In effect, he\u2019s proposing a distributed denial-of-service attack, an illegal act under federal law. But Soberanis doesn\u2019t see it that way.
\u201cIt\u2019s the equivalent of someone marching on Washington, D. C,\u201d he said on Monday. \u201cCivil disobedience has been part of the American democratic process.\u201d
Soberanis\u2019s call to action is raising eyebrows and highlights the isssue of whether DDoS attacks should be made a legitimate form of protest. Under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, sending a command to a protected computer with the intent to cause damage can be judged a criminal offense. But that hasn\u2019t stopped hacktivists and cyber criminals from using DDoS attacks to force websites offline.
In 2013, the U. S. charged 13 people affiliated with the hacktivist group Anonymous for launching DDoS attacks on government entities, trade groups and law firms.
Typically, hackers launch such attacks by using several servers, or huge numbers of infected PCs called botnets, to flood their targets with an overwhelming amount of traffic.
Soberanis\u2019s protest effort is simpler. He\u2019s hoping that millions of individuals join his protest by visiting Whitehouse.gov and continually refreshing the page.
\u201cThere\u2019s nothing illegal,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are just a large group of people, making a GET request,\u201d he said, referring to the HTTP request method to access a webpage.
Soberanis, who works as a software engineer, created his Protester.io platform about a month ago to encourage activism. It currently has no funding, but the site managed to gain a bit of buzz last week. The PR Newswire public-relations service circulated a press release from Protestor.io, only to retract it later after realizing the release was calling for a \u201c take down \u201d of Whitehouse.gov.
\u201cThere\u2019s also been some detractors,\u201d he said. \u201cThey support Trump and have a very different viewpoint.\u201d
Soberanis isn\u2019t the first to argue that DDoSing can be a form of legitimate protest. Briefly in 2013, a failed online petition was posted on the White House\u2019s website about the same subject. It argued that DDoSing a website was not a form of hacking, but a new way for protesting.
\u201cInstead of a group of people standing outside a building to occupy the area, they are having their computer occupy a website,\u201d the petition said.
Some agree and think that DDoS attacks, in certain scenarios, can work as a valid form of protest.
Laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act are \u201cover broad\u201d and \u201cchilling\u201d political speech, said Molly Sauter, author of The Coming Swarm , a book that examines DDoS attacks used in activism.
A DDoS attack on Whitehouse.gov\u2014a site designed more for public relations than for operations \u2013 also wouldn\u2019t disrupt any major government activities, Sauter said. Taking it down could be seen as \u201cmore or less like protesting outside on the street,\u201d she said.
\u201cNow, is that going to be successful?\u201d she asked. \u201cFrankly, it\u2019s not likely that the Whitehouse.gov site wouldn\u2019t have DDoS protection.\u201d
But others think a DDoS attack on the Whitehouse.gov is still a crime. Making it legal would open a can of worms, they say.
\u201cIf they can do this to Whitehouse.gov with impunity now, can they also do it to Exxon without worry of legal troubles?\u201d said Mark Sauter (no relation to Molly Sauter), a former U. S. Army officer who consults security and tech companies.
He questions why protestors like Soberanis are resorting to DDoS attacks when they can publish their own websites or speech against Trump.<\/p>\n