RIAA and MPPA Go Down: Pirates 1 – Suits 0

Last weekend a bunch of folks at the 4chan internet forum organized and launched a series of Denial of Service (DDoS)  attacks against the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)  and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)  websites. CNET reports that the attacks resulted in 37 service interruptions and 1 hour and 37 minutes of downtime for the MPAA, and 24 separate down-times for the RIAA.

Now I know what your thinking: “yeah, my server at the office goes down that much every time we have a quarterly sales call”. But, hey, is that a coordinated attack? Were all your salespeople deliberately trying to bring down headquarters? Well maybe, but that’s not likely. Not at least until now.

And yes, this ain’t exactly a French-style national strike that shuts the whole country down but it’s a taste of things to come.

Here you have a bunch of folks 1) coming together,2) for a single purpose, 3) to protest in an organized fashion 4) against something and someone that they feel is forcing them to do things their way and doesn’t want to listen to an alternative point of view or realize that history is passing them by. Do I hear King George anyone?

I just want to posit that we’ll see more of these types of protests.

In the future – that’s a time far, far away like five years from now – we’ll see people band together and protest from the comfort of their homes or while at a stoplight. They’ll coast over to their favorite protest site, enter in their favorite online ID, obscure their IP, anonymize their presence and hit send to protest against their government, their school, their employer or whatever it is they want to protest about.

Hey, could this be the start of the anti-Facebook, anti-MySpace, generation. The one that re-discovers plausible deniability… Hey, that’s not me protesting on the steps of Columbia University, that’s someone else. Maybe people need their anonymity to take back their collective voices? Maybe they need to get their voices back without the fear that some Facebook or MySpace picture is going to cost them their job. Maybe, just maybe, Democracy as we know it is evolving right before out eyes.