Chester Fields: summary please

I'll try:

Ricardo Dominguez launched a simultaneous FloodNet attack on the Pentagon and several other sites.

Pentagon programmers detoured FloodNet traffic into a hostile applet of its own.

Dominguez complained that when he attacked the Pentagon, he was the victim of government "violence . . . against civilians."

/left out some details.
//isn't that the point of a summary?

KrispyKringle:

It's probably important to note that "FloodNet" is probably legal in most jurisdictions, and doesn't really count as an "attack," since all the users are doing is visiting an open HTTP server with their computers.

Faster and more repetitively that a blood & guts human being could ever do while reading the screen on a usable browser. Probably legal, but not very nice.

KrispyKringle:
Most laws against "hacking" (like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) seem to require you to access something "without authorization." Of course, the CFAA also forbids damaging the use of a government computer (or something like that)--and undoubtedly, DDOSes are illegal in most jurisdictions (or are intended to be)--so they might be able to prosecute him under that. But generally speaking, this is, at worst, in a gray area; it's hardly clear that this is an "attack."

I don't recall reading that Electronic Disturbance Theater's Ricardo Dominguez and Brett Stalbaum were prosecuted for anything. In fact, they have cushy jobs at UCSD now.

FTA: The DOD used a counter-hostile Java applet against FloodNet.

If you don't want your FloodNet to meet a counter-hostile Java applet, don't point it at the pentagon. Meanwhile, the pentagon is free to maintain their servers for traffic that is not disruptive.

Electronic Disturbance Theater said what they were doing was "civil disobedience". If they had staged their civil disobedience carrying picket signs blocking the gates of a military base they would have been dragged away so that the military could get their normal traffic in and out. Electronically, the pentagon's counter-hostile java applet (virtual Military Police) did exactly this to the FloodNet (virtual picket line).