I fully support unions and strikers, however I'm not sure how I feel about this kind of action. The similarity ends with differences such as strikers have names, faces, spokespeople, they decide together if they are for or against striking, it isn't one or more people with nothing to do with the company who makes the decision.
This kind of action is asymmetric and unbounded: Anon can hurt MasterCard without cost to himself (presumably) and he can theoretically carry it out for as long as he wants. This can only lead to some kind of escalation if MasterCard (and similar entities) want to survive.
Presumably getting caught and jailed/fined is a potential cost? So it's not an action without risk/cost.
Also, is it better to let those populations suffer in "jail" for generations? (If I was Eastern European, I'd be pretty pissed to have been left to rot until 1989.)
If nothing else, the dictators spread their problems (support of terrorists, atom weapon programs etc).
Look at WW II for what will happen when democracies are pressed. At the start of the war, British military argued against bombing private property (German factories). Compare that to a few years later.
(I guess the place where this is closest to happen next, is Israel and the humongous Hezbollah (/Hamas?) arsenals of rockets optimized for attacks against civilians.)
Point is, those juntas are arguably a blight on humanity that needs to be solved, the longer it takes the worse it might be.
Ah well, this is both after the discussion and irrelevant to Wikileaks.
Edit: Made a bit clearer.
"Legal" just means the government agrees with it. The state claimed a monopoly on "law" along the way.
The tension we see today is that the "legal" does not represent the "socially desirable" / "law" anymore.
Granted, a binary offline/online result using DDOS attacks is a very rude reputation system, but the reputation feedback processes can be improved upon by competition (semantic web startups anyone?).
Exactly. In the US we have a system of checks in balances to pit competing mobs against each other in a way such that it is sufficiently difficult for a mob to rule over a large population. But if the mob gets sufficiently large, they can rule. And likewise, for small geographic regions we often do have mob rule.
It's Mastercard's choice whom they do business with, and by launching this attack Anon is only further solidifying the misguided popular belief that Wikileaks is akin to a terrorist organization. It may seem like a victory in the short term, but in terms of Wikileak's PR I think it's a huge setback.
No it's not.
Can you explain how it isn't their choice? Mastercard, VISA and American Express turn down applicants ALL the time, so doesn't this go against what you are saying here?
I'm not saying it isn't their choice, but there is no real advantage to them angering politicians who could screw them on votes or funding at some point in the future.
Why would anyone do business with someone if there was even a tiny chance that they would get screwed over the next day to the tune of MILLIONS and MILLIONS of dollars. The fact that mastercard.com is down and their SecureCode service is offline has already cost thousands of small businesses millions of dollars. Do you think these companies are going to support something like Wikileaks after this event?
Anon has reduced Wikileaks' available resources by making people less likely to facilitate donations to them.
Visa and MasterCard can block payment providers if they believe those generate a lot of fraudulent activity, not because they disagree with those organisations activities.
Let's put aside what is "legal" and focus on what is "socially desirable" business behavior from the perspective of Anon. MasterCard, as a private entity, has wide leeway in how it chooses to deal with other private entities such as Wikileaks. Is this socially desirable? While I have no special insight into what Anon is thinking, I would surmise that they are not pleased that private entities are restricting free-flow of information and acting as a state's agents even when not compelled to do so by the force of law.
We've heard from many business (Amazon, PayPal, etc) that blocking WikiLeaks (and consequently inhibiting free distribution of classified US documents and secret corporate information) is, at its core, a profitable business decision. I would guess that Anon is trying to send a message that such an "anti-freedom" decision (scare quotes intentional) can instead become very expensive.