The Coming Swarm : : Ddos Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet

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Foreword / by Ethan Zuckerman -- Introduction: Searching for the digital street -- 1. DDoS and Civil Disobedience in historical context -- 2. Blockages and blockages: DDoS as direct action -- 3. Which way to the #press channel? DDoS as media manipulation -- 4. Show me what an activist looks like: DDoS as a method of biographical impact -- 5. Identity, anonymity, and responsibility: DDoS and the personal -- 6. LOIC will tear us apart: DDoS tool development and design -- 7. Against the man: State and corporate responses to DDoS actions -- Conclusion: The future of DDoS.
"This book examines the history, development, theory, and practice of distributed denial of service actions as a tactic of political activism. The internet is a vital arena of communication, self expression, and interpersonal organizing. When there is a message to convey, words to get out, people to organize, many will turn to the internet as a theater for that activity. As familiar and widely accepted activist tools--petitions, fundraisers, mass letter-writing, call-in campaigns and others--find equivalent practices in the online space, is there also room for the tactics of disruption and civil disobedience that are equally familiar from the realm of street marches, occupations, and sit-ins? Grounding the analysis historically, focusing on early deployments of activist DDOS as well as modern instances to trace its development over time, this book uses activist DDOS actions as the foundation of a larger analysis of the practice of disruptive civil disobedience on the internet"-- Provided by publisher.

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By academics for academics... but interesting content submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on July 2, 2015, 3:09pm This is hard to rate. It's Sauter's dissertation, in book form. It's written by an academic, for academics, in academic-ese, if you get my drift. Academic papers are written in a certain way: format, language ("There are many confluences of computational circumstances that appear identical in form to a DoS or DDos action but that are not DDos actions."), style ("Here's this important thing, but we're not going to talk about it for four more chapters."). This book reads like that.

I heard of this book on a Science Friday interview, and thought it sounded fascinating. Based on that interview, we read it for my book club, and for those of us who managed to get through it, it sparked a fascinating discussion.

This book makes for some GREAT conversation. Does intention make a difference in an internet action? How have internet (DDos) actions changed over time? Does claiming them vs. being anonymous make a difference? Is Civil Disobedience online the same as the CD of the Civil Rights Era, as it claims to be? How are public and private spaces defined on an internet that is entirely owned by private entities? How are punishments being meted out, by whom (are they technologically savvy enough to be fair?), and are they commensurate with IRL CD?

But reading it was painful. Unless you are still in the academic world, this isn't easy to read. And the basic editing misses drove many of us nuts (grammatical errors, spelling misses, etc.). Read it for content if you dare, or go look up audio interviews. That may be the better way to go unless you are currently fluent in reading academic writing.