Electronic Vigilantism?

Well this is choice. MediaDefender an electronic hired gun for the RIAA and MPAA brought down the site of Revison3 this past weekend. The attack brought down Revision3’s internal website, RSS and mail systems. FBI is now on the case. –

It’s an open debate whether MediaDefender’s actions were lawful, even when it targets illicit torrent-tracking sites pointing the way to unauthorized, copyrighted material. The FBI is examining the Revision3 affair.

One bureau source told Threat Level that it was a “gray” area in federal computer security law.

Then there’s the area of corporate responsibility. Louderback said in an interview that Revision3 closed the hole in its tracker over the Memorial Day weekend and subsequently got slammed by MediaDefender.

“That’s when MediaDefender went into overdrive and started pummeling us,” Louderback said. “If a tracker was previously open and suddenly shut, their systems are automatically configured to put them out of business.”

So what’s wrong with MediaDefender protected the property of their clients? Well to concede a point, yes Revision3 servers were supporting a bitTorrent feed pointing to locations where copies are hosted. But here are MediaDefenders’ problem(s):

• The feed has an IP address. Doesn’t take much to do a quick whois search and call the assigned tech contact for that listing. MediaDefender made no attempt to contact Revision3
• By MediaDefenders approach the attack is indiscriminate and harms others. SYN floods typically end up as a router level attack to firms like Revision3. That is also where the defense occurs as well. As the flood continues the router is brougt to its knees impacting the service of all rather than the single server that is the culprit.
• Such defense attacks impact not just the receiver but the backbone traffic as well. Why should the public be impacted by such actions when the issuer has not even taken the preliminary steps of contacting the hosting company?
• Finally, such actions by MediaDefender are a form of electronic vigilantism. Our legal system does not permit a victim to take the law into their own hands as MediaDefender has done. Which is the core problem here. To allow the actions of MediaDefender to stand is to open a major pandora’s box. Every person with a grudge would posses legal standing to do this to anyone without recourse.

I hope the FBI invokes RICO, and nabs MediaDefender, MPAA and RIAA. Would do them justice.

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