DDoS versus human rights organizations

Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet Law and Society has released a new report on the use of Distributed Denial of Service attacks by censors and oppressive governments against human rights organizations. It's pretty grim.

Our research suggests that:

• DDoS attacks against independent media and human rights sites have been common in the past year, even outside of elections, protests, and military operations. With recent highly publicized DDoS attacks on Wikileaks, and "Operation Payback" attacks by "Anonymous" on sites perceived to oppose Wikileaks, we expect these attacks to become more common.

• Independent media and human rights sites suffer from a variety of different types of cyber attacks, including filtering, intrusions, and defacements in addition to DDoS attacks, and those attacks interact with each other in complex ways.

• Independent media and human rights sites suffer from both application DDoS attacks, which exhaust local server resources and can usually be mitigated by a skilled system administrator; and network DDoS attacks, which exhaust network bandwidth and can usually only be mitigated with the help of a hosting provider at considerable expense.

• Mitigating DDoS attacks against independent media and human rights sites will likely require moving those sites closer to the core of the Internet: inside the small number of major ISPs, websites, and content distribution networks* (CDNs) that have the experience and resources to defend against these attacks, particularly network DDoS attack

2010 Report on Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks

DDoS versus human rights organizations

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/qpIVWdPcrDg/ddos-versus-human-ri.html

Human rights organizations around the world condemn Wikileaks censorship

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Katitza Rodriguez has rounded up the responses of many human rights organizations around the world to the commercial and governmental attacks on Wikileaks. It coincides with EFF's new Say No to Online Censorship campaign.

• On December 10, International Human Rights Day, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights addressed this issue in her statement: "While it is unclear whether these individual measures taken by private actors directly infringe on states' human rights obligations to ensure respect of the right to freedom of expression, taken as a whole they could be interpreted as an attempt to censure the publication of information thus potentially violating Wikileaks' right to freedom of expression."

• Amnesty International ~ "Freedom of expression is an internationally recognized human right that limits the power of the state to prohibit the receipt and publication of information. The burden is on the state to demonstrate that any restriction is both necessary and proportionate, and does not jeopardize the right to freedom of expression itself."

• Human Rights First ~ "This issue transcends the particulars of the Wikileaks case. No matter what you think of Julian Assange, anyone who cares about Internet freedom should be concerned that in its zeal to cripple Wikileaks, governments and companies are taking steps in this case that pose a threat to fundamental rights."

• Reporter without Borders ~ "We stress that any restriction on the freedom to disseminate this body of documents will affect the entire press, which has given detailed coverage to the information made available by Wikileaks, with five leading international newspapers actively cooperating in preparing it for publication."

Human Rights Organizations Worldwide Decry Attacks on Freedom of Expression

 

• 2600 Magazine condemns DDoS attacks against Wikileaks censors ...
• MPAA: ACTA's censoring firewalls will help governments avoid ...
• Wikileaks.de domain-owner's house raided over publication of ...
• Wikileaks 'ousted' from Amazon - Boing Boing
• Wikileaks reveals secret blacklist behind proposed Great Firewall ...

Human rights organizations around the world condemn Wikileaks censorship

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/Vowx77zMx0Y/human-rights-organiz.html

Sri Lanka: Rights Groups Say Video Links the Military to Executions

International human rights groups said Thursday that new video evidence has emerged linking the military to execution of prisoners during the final hours of the civil war last year.

Sri Lanka: Rights Groups Say Video Links the Military to Executions

Backlink: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/world/asia/10briefs-Srilanka.html?partner=rssnyt&emc;=rss