AUTHOR: Sarah Cove TITLE: BotNets and Political Change DATE: 12/29/2006 02:39:00 AM ----- BODY: In a world where months of rioting in Paris produced no major policy changes and disappeared from many peoples’ (Americans’) concerns before they had even finished, how can one produce large-scale change? How does power change hands? How have the large-scale social changes happened throughout history? The barricading of Athens during the Peloponesian War. The storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution. Organizing and violence in the streets in the 60s and 70s in multiple countries through the world? And now? What can we learn from the past and what can no longer be applied? I read an article in Wired’s Nov 2006 issue about bots/botnets, programs that install themselves on Net-connected computers, respond to external commands, and execute coordinated attacks, often overloading servers with requests so valid computers cannot make and receive requests. According to the article, some attackers claim that they can build a large enough network of bots to take out Google. The article goes into detail about how one spammer took out a spam-blocking company called Blue Security. The company had a tool called Blue Frog which allowed e-mail users to opt up from span and sending an e-mail to spammers. This worked fine, overloading spammers with e-mail, until one spammer from Russian decided to fight back. He used a bot to overload the Blue Security server and eventually caused the company to close. As a read, I asked myself if this was going to be the way of producing social change in the future: overthrowing the powers-that-be via the internet. One difference I noticed between this form of attack and the ones from the past is the bot attacks can be perpetrated by one individual while previously a large impact on the status quo took a network of socially-organized individuals. So perhaps it is not useful to think of botnets as anything but an extreme measure. Maybe it is useful to think of it as terrorism. I am using terrorism or extremism here as violence or disruption from an individual or small group of “insignificant*” individuals. Social change movements are violence or disruption of the status quo by a “significant” number of individuals. But perhaps the powers-that-be should listen to how terrorism moves. If certain forms of disruption become the main source of a “significant” number of people to take care of their concerns, then what was once terrorism, and didn’t need to be listened to, will change. *I’m not sure what significance means here and what it takes for a group to move from terrorist to extremist to a social movement. ----- --------