ricardo dominguez on 20 Apr 2001 17:40:12 -0000 |
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<nettime> The Free Trade Area of the Americas protest site is now online! + Reports |
The Free Trade Area of the Americas protest site is now online! http://www.gn.apc.org/pmhp/quebec.html The first action that commenced at 00.00UTC, 20th april 2001, consists of a "virtual sit-in" of web sites associated with the FTAA conference. The purpose of the 'virtual sit-in' is to indicate your objection to the FTAA conference and the entire FTAA process by generating an electronic record of public pressure through the server logs of the organisations concerned. The objective of the action is not to crash the servers of these organisation (although this is possible if a few hundred thousand people take part), it is to provide a record of the public's participation in the sit-in. We are then challenging the organistions concerned to release their server logs to show the level of take-up of the sit-in. Shortly, there will be an opportunity to take part in an "automated letter-writing lobby" - this will be uploaded sometime during Friday/Saturday. Please participate, and let the FTAA and it's supporters know the level of public opinion against them. DJNZ (technical and media contact, the electrohippie collective) <<<MSNBC REPORT>>>> http://www.msnbc.com/msn/561761.asp?cp1=1 Activists target 28 government and corporate Websites to disrupt during the Summit of the Americas By Lesia Stangret MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR TORONTO, April 19 - The 2 1 mile long fence surrounding the site of this weekend's Summit of the Americas and the 6,700 police officers on hand to control protestors on the streets of Quebec City may succeed in keeping demonstrators away from visiting heads of state, but they'll do nothing to protect the Summit's most vulnerable targets. THE HEAVY SECURITY may be encouraging a far less predictable form of protest at the three-day summit, one aimed at computer systems rather than delegates. As one Website -thehacktivist.com- is pointing out, "The Mouse is Mightier than the Baton." "Where governments and authorities are actively restricting protest and public expression, we regard it as valid to exert some form of restriction back," the Website says. The site has posted a call to participate in an "electronic civil disobedience campaign" against the Summit and its corporate sponsors. "We call upon hackers, activists, hacktivists and netizens to engage in an Electronic Civil Disobedience campaign against the Summit of the Americas, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and the Corporate Sponsors. Let data bodies join in non-violent direct action on-line in solidarity with the real bodies on the streets." Leaders from 34 countries, aiming to create a vast trading bloc of 800 million people spanning from Canada in the north to Chile in the south, are gathering this weekend to discuss ways of dismantling hurdles to hemispheric trade. But opponents of globalization, expressing many of the concerns that were voiced at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in December 1999 and at subsequent international meetings, see dangers with the trade momentum. As many as 20,000 oppenents of the Summit are expected to rally on the streets of Quebec City. Organizers at thehacktivist.com say they are concerned that the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas was negotiated in secret. "The secrecy has gone on too long," the site asserts. "The right to know is fundamental in a democracy." They demand that the text of the draft agreement be made public and that it be posted to the Internet in at least four languages. They warn that "if these just and reasonable demands are not met," they will endorse "legitimate and strictly non-violent means" to "obtain the texts, physically and electronically." TWENTY-EIGHT TARGETS On Wednesday, one group, called the "electrohippies," which runs the site www.gn.apc.org/pmhp/quebec.html, released a list of twenty-eight Internet targets to disrupt. They said the targets were chosen because "they are involved with the operation of the FTAA conference, they are corporate sponsors of the FTAA conference, or they are involved in the extremely excessive security measures being arranged . to restrict the ability of the public to access the conference.," While the group notes that one of the reasons for organizing the action is the lack of public consultations on the FTAA, it says "the issue that really convinced us of the need to provide support in this instance was the excessive level of security to prevent any form of meaningful lobbying and protest." Indeed, about 1,200 troops, in addition to police have been dispatched to Quebec City. And a 10-foot high chain link fence snakes through the walled city. The "electrohippies" said their primary disruptive efforts will begin late on April 19 and continue through April 23 and will be targeting various federal and provincial Canadian government Websites. Prime Minister Jean Chretian's Website is on the list, as is the site for Quebec's premier. Quebec's city police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are also on the hit list. Corporate targets include Cisco System, Alcan, Telus, and Bombardier, as well Sun Microsystems, Barrick Gold Corporation, CIBC and KPMG. Also targeted are the sites for the FTAA and the Inter-American Development Bank. Activist have used hacking to promote their causes at a number of forums in recent years. With protestors at January's meeting of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland stymied by heavy security, hackers broke into the database containing information on delegates and posted the itineraries of visiting world leaders to the Internet. The World Economic Forum said hackers had also stolen credit card numbers and personal information on 1,400 previous delegates. A hacker group called Virtual Monkey-wrench claimed responsibility, saying the theft was aimed at "attacking the powerful and those in power." The stolen information included Bill Gates' email address, the direct phone number of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and the credit card number of Pepsi-Cola CEO Peter M. Thompson. In some cases, attacks on government sites have yielded retaliation. In at least one instance, the Pentagon responded to a Web attack by redirecting participants' browsers to a page that downloaded an applet program to their computers. Once installed, the program endlessly tied up their computers trying to reload a document until they rebooted. In a similar action against the site of Mexico's president, the government retaliated with software that crashed protesters' browsers. For companies or organizations that believe they may become potential targets, the safest route may be to take preventative measures. "Before an event like this, I would backup everything," said René Hamel, a former officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and now a manager at KPMG's Forensic Technology Services, which itself is on the list of the electrohippies' 28 targets. "Whenever you have a feeling that you might become a victim, it's time to raise your system monitoring and logging," he added. "Logs are like fingerprints. They're like an electronic trail, and they make it a lot easier for us to investigate." Hamel said that with the client-based distributed denial of service attack that the electrohippies have coordinated in the past, "it is pretty tough to defend yourself." What about the people on the other side of the screen - the protestors participating in the online campaigns? Dan Lambert, a spokesman for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, says the agency is monitoring the potential for politically motivated online attacks. He said attacks that might amount to computer crimes under the Criminal Code would likely be investigated by the RCMP. >From a legal perspective, it doesn't matter if the action is for a good cause or if a participant is just one of many. "People have to be aware of the fact that they do it for a political purpose is not going to protect them from prosecution," said Jennifer Granick an American criminial defense lawyer, and a director with the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University. Lesia Stangret is an information technology lawyer with Mann & Gahtan LLP in Toronto and an Internet law columnist for the National Post. <<<WIRED REPORT>>>> long article: Wired News Hacktivists Target Trade Summit By Jeffrey Benner 2:00 a.m. Apr. 20, 2001 PDT http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,43137,00.html A coalition of cyber-protesters plan to flood 28 websites associated with this weekend's free trade negotiations at the Summit of the Americas with page requests and e-mail messages. If enough people participate, the action could amount to a denial-of-service attack. Led by a group called "electrohippies collective," the "hacktivist" actions will mirror the summit's schedule, beginning Friday evening and running through Sunday in Quebec City. Leaders from 34 nations are meeting there to discuss the establishment of a single free trade zone from Canada to Chile. <snip> -------------------------------------------------------------------- t h i n g i s t message by Joy Garnett <joyeria@walrus.com> archive at http://bbs.thing.net info: send email to majordomo@bbs.thing.net and write "info thingist" in the message body -------------------------------------------------------------------- <<OVER AND OUT>> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net