Strike actions have symmetry and boundedness. Withholding labor obviously affects both the company and the workers and the action can only go so far since both sides need each other to survive.

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.

> Anon can hurt MasterCard without cost to himself (presumably)

Presumably getting caught and jailed/fined is a potential cost? So it's not an action without risk/cost.

As one of their propaganda posters says, "Just say you've gotten a virus." The chances of anyone getting nailed for this are pretty low.

I wouldn't be so sure. This was organized somewhere and I doubt every one of the people involved was technically good enough to completely hide their IP address. Don't be shocked if someone gets jail time and a fine of millions of dollars over this.

Agreed. My comparison was purely in reply to the concept of "you shouldn't hurt a company to improve things, because it hurts their customers too."

Well the you can compare it with commercial sanctions to Cuba, Irak or North Korea that the international community don't suffer too much (they're not big players) but the people of those countries do, not only their governments.

OTOH, you can't let dictators use their own population as hostages, when they buy weapons instead of feeding the populations (Saddam, which you mentioned, had lots of money from smuggling).

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.

Oh, there wasn't much of a disagreement on my part; I was just pointing out the essential differences more explicitly.

The difference might not be as huge, Round Robin was not invented for nothing. Just that the online world has more opportunity for anonymous sabotage.