Electronic Civil Disobedience bei der ARS 1998

Auf Umwegen über das “The Hacktivist Magazine” bin ich eben darauf gestoßen, dass FloodNet – ein Tool zum kollektiven Fluten eines Servers mit Anfragen (wobei mir noch nicht klar ist, ob das mit FloodNet bis zum Denial of Service möglich ist) – 1998 als Teil der ARS ELECTRONICA vorgeführt und vom Pentagon abgewehrt wurde. Auf den Seiten der ARS kann ich jedoch nichts dazu finden. Hat zufällig jemand einen Katalog von 1998 und kann mal nachschauen?

Hier ein Auszug aus dem Hacktivist:

Zapatista — SWARM

SWARM was one of the first clearly hacktivist attacks on a political target.

Part of a series of protests conducted by the burgeoning Zapatista movement,

SWARM was billed as part-activist demonstration, part- artistic installation.

From reading the literature the hacktivists themselves produced at this early

stage, the impression is that they themselves were still unclear as to the

effectiveness or possible scope of action that their accumulated tools and

skills are capable of. SWARM was hacktivism by trial and error.

The main software tool used in this first action was a specially created

program called Floodnet.

” The Electronic Disturbance Theatre has produced a Java script program

called Floodnet, which is used to flood and block a targeted Website by

repeatedly calling for a specific or non-existent Web page on that

server.”(xx)

When the action was first proposed, it was envisioned that participants would

manually load and reload the target page. In the hacker spirit of ‘there is

always a better way,’ the Floodnet utility was created to do the reload work

automatically.

During the SWARM action, the activists estimate that up to 10,000 users joined

in the Floodnet action, sending approximately 600,000 hits to the server

every minute.(xxi)

The authors of Floodnet considered it to be part-hacktivist tool, part

“conceptual net.art that empowers people through activist/artistic

expression.”(xxii)

“In an artistic sense, this is a way of remembering and honoring those

who gave their lives in the defense of their freedom. In a conceptual

sense, the Floodnet performance was able to facilitate a symbolic return

of the dead to the servers of those responsible for their murders.”(xxiii)

On April 10th, 1998, the action was announced to the general Internet

community. By the end of April, the SWARM proposal was part of the Ars

Electronic Festival. On July 12, one of the instigators of the action,

Zapatista activist Stefan Wray, arrived in Amsterdam and started alerting

non-Internet sources (i.e.: newsmedia) of the upcoming action. On August 25,

a bulletin was released outlining ideas for dual virtual and street protests.

On September 4, the HEART (Hacker Electronic ART) was established in front of

the physical location of the SWARM activation at Ars. Overnight, the list of

targets for the action were announced and disseminated to activists

throughout the web.

By September 7, activists started analysing the efficiency of Floodnet and

began examining concerns raised by the hacker community. On September 8,

hacktivists tested the technology on a local network to ensure that all

hacker concerns had been addressed. Bulletin’s announcing the action were

then distributed by RTMark (http://www.rtmark.com)/.

Within hours of the action being launched on the 9th, countermeasures to the

Floodnet tools were detected. Those monitoring Floodnet used software patches

to try and avoid these countermeasures. During the day, action coordinators

discussed the action within the Festival and with the international media.

The following day (September 10) the DOD (Pentagon, US) admitted to being the

author and user of the hostile countermeasures. The action was considered

successful, even though the sites were only intermittently blocked.(xxiv)