The New Flak: Wikileaks, Mastercard and online direct action
In the past, companies only had to take public opinion into account in their decision making in as much as letter writing or boycotts would affect their bottom lines. McDonalds, Nestle and Coca Cola prove that while such protests might be an annoyance, they could pretty much ignore them with little adverse impact.
However, in recent times, a new kind of protest action has become more prevalent, and much much more effective. “Distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks, such as the one currently being waged against credit card companies that have withdrawn services from WikiLeaks, present a much greater threat to corporations.
Since yesterday, a worldwide distributed organisation of activists, collectively known as Anonymous and networked via web communities, has been bombarding the Mastercard’s website with traffic, overloading their servers and putting the site out of action.
At the time of writing, Mastercard’s website is down, and it’s emerging that “SecureCode” transactions aren’t working either. While the former is merely a symbolic victory, the latter will affect millions of online transactions the world over.
Mastercard, along with Paypal and Visa, cited brand protection among their reasons for withdrawing services. Ignoring the apparent pressure placed on at least one of the above companies by the US State Department, one has to wonder if we are approaching a time when the threat of direct action which entirely takes place online will take over from real world flak as the biggest concern to corporations.
Previous Anonymous campaigns, most notably against the Church of Scientology have certainly made headlines, and the massive spikes in traffic to their website costs money in both bandwidth costs and improved infrastructure to prevent it happening again.
But not until today’s attack have we seen an attack which managed to place functions of a financial institution out of commission, doubtless costing them a good deal in lost business and damaging their brand further as customers are turned away from the service.
At a time when petitions and letter writing campaigns have less and less impact, we may be seeing the emergence of a new way for activists to put pressure on corporations. It’s underground, it’s grimy, but it seems like an effective method of democratic discourse in a cynical world.
The New Flak: Wikileaks, Mastercard and online direct action
In the past, companies only had to take public opinion into account in their decision making in as much as letter writing or boycotts would affect their bottom lines. McDonalds, Nestle and Coca Cola prove that while such protests might be an annoyance, they could pretty much ignore them with little adverse impact.
However, in recent times, a new kind of protest action has become more prevalent, and much much more effective. “Distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks, such as the one currently being waged against credit card companies that have withdrawn services from WikiLeaks, present a much greater threat to corporations.
Since yesterday, a worldwide distributed organisation of activists, collectively known as Anonymous and networked via web communities, has been bombarding the Mastercard’s website with traffic, overloading their servers and putting the site out of action.
At the time of writing, Mastercard’s website is down, and it’s emerging that “SecureCode” transactions aren’t working either. While the former is merely a symbolic victory, the latter will affect millions of online transactions the world over.
Mastercard, along with Paypal and Visa, cited brand protection among their reasons for withdrawing services. Ignoring the apparent pressure placed on at least one of the above companies by the US State Department, one has to wonder if we are approaching a time when the threat of direct action which entirely takes place online will take over from real world flak as the biggest concern to corporations.
Previous Anonymous campaigns, most notably against the Church of Scientology have certainly made headlines, and the massive spikes in traffic to their website costs money in both bandwidth costs and improved infrastructure to prevent it happening again.
But not until today’s attack have we seen an attack which managed to place functions of a financial institution out of commission, doubtless costing them a good deal in lost business and damaging their brand further as customers are turned away from the service.
At a time when petitions and letter writing campaigns have less and less impact, we may be seeing the emergence of a new way for activists to put pressure on corporations. It’s underground, it’s grimy, but it seems like an effective method of democratic discourse in a cynical world.
