New Technology for Digital Democracy 176
Votester, A New Tool for Digital Democracy and Digital Demonstrations
by Anonymous
The Problem: Free-speech and right to assemble are threatened
Peaceful public assembly, free-speech and even civil-disobedience are essential to maintaining the balance of democracy in the USA and worldwide. Yet as recent public demonstrations have shown us (for example those against war, the IMF and the World Bank) in our modern-day society it is increasingly difficult, ineffective, and even dangerous for citizens to exercise their democratic rights to assembly and free-speech.
- Many nations do not allow open public dissent at all, and the penalties for participating in demonstrations are severe. In several cases, international governing and policy-making bodies have deliberately selected such nations for their meetings, in order to prevent demonstrations.
- Even in democratic nations such as the USA, peaceful demonstrators are often violently harassed, attacked, detained, arrested and imprisoned by police.
- The police are more organized and equipped than ever before with tear gasses, irritant sprays, stun guns, rubber bullets, water cannons, body armor, etc.
- Demonstrators can now be arrested and prosecuted as "domestic terrorists" if they participate in civil disobedience or their actions are deemed a threat to "national security."
- The mainstream media provides only scant, token coverage of large public protests and civil unrest, often whitewashing out incidents of police brutality, human rights violations, and violations of the right to free-speech and assembly.
- An increasingly large percentage of the world population (especially in developed nations) is over the age of 50 and cannot safely participate in public demonstrations due to the physical fragility and health risks associated with aging. They simply cannot risk getting beaten up by the police. In other words, the majority of citizens cannot safely assemble and demonstrate.
The Solution: Votester, a new tool for Digital Democracy
What is needed is a new technology that enables all citizens to safely and peacefully assemble, exercise their rights to free speech, and perform civil disobedience if necessary. This can be accomplished using an innovative application of open-source, peer-to-peer (P2P) technology on the Internet, which we call "Votester." Votester does not exist yet. It is the hope of the authors that one or more groups of technologists reading this document will be inspired to create versions of it and make them freely available to the general public.
Votester enables peers to automatically send recurring email messages and/or HTTP requests to a set of addresses associated with a digital demonstration. The rate at which messages/requests are sent by each peer to each address is determined by either (a) a function of the number of people in the digital demonstration, or (b) the peer-owner's individual preferences.
The Votester function mentioned in (a) increases the number of messages and requests sent per peer, per unit time, proportionally as the number of peers in the digital demonstration increases. In other words, the number of parties endorsing a digital demonstration is used as an implicit measure of its legitimacy and thus allows for the digital demonstration to be "louder." This prevents Votester from being used to harass individuals on a small-scale, while still enabling it to be used for large-scale protests. As the number of peers in a digital demonstration increases, the number of email messages and http requests received per unit of time by the targets of the demonstration can become large enough their organizations and IT infrastructures are overloaded. For small digital demonstrations, Votester results in the equivalent of letter-writing campaigns. For large digital demonstrations - such as demonstrations that attract hundreds of thousands or millions of participants, Votester results in significant inconvenience or even denial-of-service for the targeted addresses.
For example, to protest the policies of the World Bank and the IMF, parties could run copies of Votester on their personal computers around the Internet. They could join a group called "World Bank and IMF demonstration." Members of this group would all receive a set of email formletters, email addresses and HTTP addresses. These might include addresses for the World Bank, IMF, politicians, corporations and even media organizations. Their peers would periodically send out the email formletter(s) to each address, and/or issue HTTP requests to any URLs included in the demonstration as well. The rate at which their peers send out messages and requests is determined as a function of the number of participants in the demonstration group: If more peers participate, each peer is allowed to send more messages per unit/time. For small scale demonstrations each peer might only send the email message once per week, but for large demonstrations each peer might send the email message once per day or even once per hour.
Votester provides a number of additional useful features to users:
- Peers report their activity to other peers in the digital demonstration, thus all peers can see the statistics of demonstrations that are taking place. Relevant statistics are included in email messages sent by peers for particular demonstrations. For example, an email protesting a policy includes information about the protest, stats about the number of peers involved in the protest and the number of messages sent by them.
- Peers also provide a directory of current and proposed protests, and a means for users to join protests, leave protests, post messages to discussion groups, propose new protests to the community, manage protests they start, and send announcements to protest-participants.
- Votester peers may send email messages via their owner's email accounts and/or via built-in sendmail capabilities and/or via public email servers on the network.
- Votester peers have dynamic IP addresses that change each time they are launched.
Benefits of Votester
It's legal. In the USA democratic system, it is not illegal for a citizen to send an email containing their opinion on an important issue to others in the society. Even if they send their email more than once, this is legal. It is also not illegal for a citizen to visit a Web page repeatedly. Since each Votester peer only sends a few messages (such as once per day, or once per hour, etc.) no individual peer can be considered to be engaging in illegal harassment, hacking, denial of service, etc. Rather it is only the totally decentralized, emergent activity of the entire group that results in large volumes of messages and requests being received by target addresses. Therefore no individual is liable. (Please Note: We are not lawyers and the legality of these claims still needs to be evaluated and established by professional lawyers, and no doubt they will be challenged by governments and others if and when Votester is deployed.)
It's non-violent. However annoying Votester may be it is not comparable to violent demonstrations in which property is damaged and/or humans are injured. Votester demonstrations are peaceful, they are simply email and HTTP campaigns. All that is exchanged is information.
It's safe. Participants in digital demonstrations are not physically at risk. They can make their opinions known without getting beaten up, tear-gassed, pepper sprayed, etc. They can also protest without getting arrested.
It's effective. Digital demonstrations get noticed - they may actually cause enough inconvenience to target addresses that they can't help but notice them. They also cannot effectively be blocked by the police, so they last longer and can accomplish their objectives with fewer obstacles.
It's open. Anyone can participate in Votester demonstrations, including people who for reasons such as age, disability, ethnicity, economic status, etc. would not feel safe participating in physical demonstrations, or simply do not have the time or money to travel to a remote location and risk several days of detention etc.
It's unstoppable. Digital demonstrations are hard to block. Since messages come from dynamic IP addresses all over the network, targets have no effective way to shield themselves from them. They cannot anticipate the IP addresses that messages will be received from, and even if they block particular addresses, new parties are always joining and the IP addresses of participants change dynamically.
Conclusions
It is our hope that someone reading this will be inspired enough to create an implementation of Votester, and that they will release it as a free, open-source tool for the public. We believe that creating Votester will be an interesting project in its own right - for it presents a number of technical, social and user-interface design challenges that are worth solving. In particular, in order for Votester to succeed, it must provide strong anonymity protection to users, it must also facilitate a sense of community such that users can easily locate and participate in demonstrations of interest to them, finally it must be immune to attempts at hacking or misusing it so that it cannot be used for harassment by small groups and it cannot be blocked or manipulated by various parties.
Is it just me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a scary thought..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, this looks like you are knowingly installing a Ddos zombie on your box, which is just waiting to be cracked and abused.
Not trolling.... sincerely worried.
Similar to other demonstration (Score:5, Insightful)
On first reading, this seems like it would be less effective than the flooding demonstration found in the slideshow from the link up top. The slideshow details basically a flood attack designed to essentially produce the "slashdot effect" to the website--this method just floods them with emails.
The /. method has the problem that the more bandwidth the target has, the less effective it is (and with demonstrations, it's likely we're going up against bigger purses). This e-mail deal seems way too easy to block and therefore does not solve the outstanding complications of the other.
I applaud their efforts (and to some extent success--consider Lufthansa), but since we're not anonymous in the digital world like we are in public, I think it'd take radical approaches to be effective. Of course, with the DMCA and it's broad verbiage, at what point is a digital demonstration an illegal digital riot? Imagine a few boxen on a webserver designed to filter out repeated protest e-mails--if the implementation mentioned above were improved enough to get past these filters, would that be breaking a security system?
Step away from the computer! (Score:2, Insightful)
What gets more press for your cause, e-mailing the IMF or trying to shut-down DC by sitting in the streets? It doesn't matter what you delieve in (right, left, whatever), effort and personal sacrifice gets the word out, sitting at home on your ass does not.
Since when did DDoS become political speech? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would suggest that the authors stop wasting time working on a thinly disguised DDoS tool and instead actually try to see how political speech and democratic ideals can actually fit together. The past few years have seen the emergence of weblogs, community forums, indymedia, and a host of other digital tools for helping people build communities of discussion and distribute ideas and information that can be used to educate and inform. I would suggest that people actually interested in digital democracy seek out these tools and help to make them better.
There is nothin more immature than a child proclaiming that if people will not listen to what he has to say then he will scream and throw a temper tantrum so that no one else can have a conversation. Grow up!
Re:Bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Filter. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Since when did DDoS become political speech? (Score:2, Insightful)
History? You mean like in the '90s and everything? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me be blunt: you are spoiled. To even attempt a comparison between the timid crowd control at IMF meetings and -- oh, I don't know, the entirety of the civil rights and labor movements in the U.S.? -- is naive. To suggest that the current state of affairs is somehow worse is laughable.
Tell you what -- I'm going to start an counter technology to Votester. It'll be called Cluester. Instead of spamming [pick a boogeyman] with P2P email, it'll bombard pampered activists with copies of Zinn's "People's History of the U.S." And the more people who join in, the more copies we can send out.
Seriously. Some people need to be reminded there was a world before CNN.
P.S. - Don't get me wrong; I'm all for civil disobedience where appropriate. I plan to be down in D.C. along with everyone else for next month's march against the U.S.'s Iraq policy. And I recognize there clearly remain a great many opressive regimes throughout the world. But it just hurts my teeth when people don't recognize how far they've come as they survey the distance left to go.
Re:Filter. (Score:2, Insightful)
agoraphobia (Score:3, Insightful)
I can understand your frustration with the voting system. I think, though, that your feelings about it can be better channeled by looking at the following problems:
-Not everyone would have the money to vote. Not everyone is fit for military service. (etc.) Imposing any restriction besides registration would imply a class-level difference, between those who can afford to vote, and those who cannot. I'd really rather not live in a country where only the (even mildly) rich may vote -- the laws have an effect one everyone's lives. As such, I'd even rather children be allowed to vote. And tourists. And anyone else who (at least for a short while) must live under the laws of the land. If the jurisdiction of law is going to be based on land-borders, votes should also be defined purely by land-borders.
-It's not apathy that is the root of the problem. It's not that people don't care about the issues; it's that they've already made up their minds ahead of time. I come from a rather (D) family, by girlfriend from a quite staunch (R) family. In both cases, I've observed people who will go to the voting booth because they care about the issue, but would willingly 'vote down the line' (check the box at the top saying you agree with said party on all issues.) We need to educate people to care about issues rather than grand theories. I grew up in europe, where there are quite a few more parties available to vote for. Here, you rarely have more than two choices: and two choices cannot possibly represent, accurately, all the different combinations of voting preferences of the american people. But they do. Because people here refuse to deal with individual issues. And that, I think, is even worse than apathy.
-Not being able to distinguish between (D) and (R) shouldn't surprise you: in europe, they're both considered centrist movements, compared to all other available political parties. You don't see here campaigns by neo-nazies or communists. The anarchists are barely represented. Independent? What does that mean? So really, no, the two aren't that different. If you see them as radically different, then you just have an extremely narrow vision of the political spectrum. Open your eyes.
-Representation is a problem: would it have mattered if I had voted (D) in the last presidential elections? No, because the deciding factor wasn't the state I'm in -- only in Florida did every vote count (that is, obviously so.) If we had a more direct approach, where 'popular vote' were actually the vote that counted, perhaps people would be more inclined to vote, no?
-Apathy isn't surprising: consider slashdot. Most of us are pissed off that our congresscritters (what a fond name) won't listen to us. Shouldn't they be listening? If they're not, and our votes don't really matter, then we're not left with much but civil disobedience. And with recent laws, that's not nearly as safe as it used to be. Check around -- police violence is a problem, and it's stifling even our ability to hold protests outdoors. Check the videos available from indymedia, raisethefist, etc. of protests, say, at the presidential elections? I hadn't even seen those on television
I'm sure others can add to this list. I'm all for democracy -- fair democracy. Democracy in which people feel empowered to make a difference in how their country is run, how their lives will be changed by the powers that be. If they don't feel they have that, it's useless. Lobbyists, people like our families, who vote based on how their parents (and churches) vote
Re:Filter. (Score:3, Insightful)
Money is what matters.
When people block the whitehouse they used to stop the flow of communication, the flow of governing, now they do not. Cash still flows. The governing goes on. To be effective one must stop the flow. The form it takes now is the internet. It is time to use this medium that has brought back the ability to have civil disobedience.
I am a part of the activist community. I am also a geek. I think people all bring a trade to the table. So if you have the ability to bring computers to the activist table you should do so.
I suggest you get yourself a copy of "electronic civil disobedience" by the critical art ensemble.
Earth to left-wing anti-IMF whiners (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Bad idea (Score:2, Insightful)
He has a point, just look at our president.
OK, but where's the blood? (Score:3, Insightful)
Quoth the anonymous one: You have exactly zero proof that this will be effective, and I have a few points you don't appear to have considered.
Protests and civil disobedience depend largely on appeals to the "good side" of human nature. GandhiThe Mahatma [mahatma.org.in] and his followers were successful by-and-large because the Brits couldn't justify their actions to the rest of the world. Modern mass media played a huge role in Gandhi's success. There was tremendous pressure from home and the rest of the world to stop the brutality of British colonial rule.
Now, some of this brutality was carefully provoked by Gandhi & Co. specifically to discredit the Brits in the eyes of their own citizens and the rest of the world. Much like the war in Vietnam, once the public saw what was happening they had little stomach for it.
So what am I ranting about? What we need to learn about this is that the problem with protest is how you spin it in the media. Gandhi knew this, and you should learn it. Unarmed young men getting beaten is a sympathetic image, and impossible to deny. The excuse of, "They walked into my club" (while true), doesn't work as well when the blood is on their faces, but your hands and uniforms.
Digitally, however, no one gets hurt. Great. But no-risk protests don't work because you only win if the public sympathizes with you, and who's going to sympathize with a bunch of P2P geeks mailbombing Congress? No one - you'll be called a group of anarchist, terrorist hackers trying to interfere with the duties of the government.
If you were getting the shit kicked out of you on the Capitol steps it wouldn't matter what they called you - you're the one doing the bleeding, so you're going to get the sympathy.
But your plan entails no bleeding. No risk at all, you say. If Gandhi's followers had all stayed home and written polite letters, even in great volume, they would have gotten nowhere. No risk, no reward.
Re:It's still a good idea (Score:3, Insightful)
In a State with 10 million inhabitants, 2 million of which will "pay to vote" the probability of your vote making a difference = damn small
Therefore only stupid people will vote, and intelligent people will invest this $400 in the lottery which gives better odds.