The past week has been like a tournament of DDoS-attacks against several major enterprises involved in cutting off vital services for the Wikileaks enterprise. Simultaneously, an alternative service named OpenLeaks was initiated, as was Operation Leakspin.

A few days ago, a 16-year old was arrested in the Netherlands for having participated in the cyberattack against Wikileaks adversaries. Bruce Schneier, a sane and reasonably well-known security expert comments on these activities as being "a common type of attack, ”and not a particularly interesting one at that…It’s kids playing politics, no threat whatsoever.”

I've followed Swedish, Spanish, Dutch, British and American media over the course of the events. Nothing particularly interesting. Mostly he is described as a cyber-attacker (CNN Mexico, NU.nl, El Reg, Skånskan, WSJ, NRC, ITAvisen) sometimes a hacker (P4.no, AGI, AFP, Andina, La Jornada) and then...

Suddenly I realized that Swedish newspaper DN.se describes him as a 16 year old net activist. In a headline. DN is the largest national newspaper in Sweden with 883'000 readers every day and 1.1 million unique hits on their website every week. No Swedish newspaper that I've read has described him as a hacker.

An activist makes statements, engages in political protests, does all those things Bruce Schneier says these people are doing. They have a goal, they might be reactive, but they're certainly distinguished from random attackers, war mongerers or hooligans. The distinction between attacking, hacking and participating in a political protest wasn't made in any other international media.

DN.se describes the 16 year old as belonging to a group that "wants to protect anonymity and freedom of speech" and attributes the wish "to catch more of the attackers" to the Dutch police.

In a somewhat nonsensical statement from my political party, we condemned the attacks since they're associated with terrorism. Well. One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. It seems that Swedish media has decided that this 16 year old and his friends are freedom fighters.

I'm assuming that the subject of arrest, through LOIC, was a perfectly knowledgeable and willing participant in the demonstration. He admitted his participation to the police immediately. I heard from someone (online) that no one who values anonymity would use LOIC, but someone who makes a political statement might actually want their name attributed to the statement. Like me, I publically declare my political affiliation, and I'm quite proud of it.

A most reasonable overview of DDoS and cyberpower is a Dutch talkshow episode where a reasonably clever ISP-owner (I guess) gives a brief overview of what denial of service might be. He explains that he has enough bandwidth to take down a small country, and that many people do. To have the necessary strength to take down a slightly larger country, you would however need either a major telco (like Telefónica) or be a state (like the US). See for example ISOC on states needing to restrain themselves.

Comparatively, Burma was DDoS:ed earlier this autumn. A few years ago Estonia was a victim. As the Estonia reference mentions, much is to be gained from increased network sturdiness, stronger ties with surrounding nations, backbones and ISP:s openly collaborating with each across borders. Neither case of which were true in Estonia 2007. In Burma presumably not either, even in 2010. Or for that matter in Belgium prior to 2001. Just like in any other social environment, connecting with people online both infrastructurally and socially is not only a possibility but also a security.

Being a moderate person, whose politicalcompass.org score on authoritarianism just jumped up from -8.65 to -6.72, I would say a moderate protest is not that bad, you know? And that Swedish media is way ahead of any other paper media in reporting about net activism. We're simply better than you.

UPDATE: A 19-year old arrested for defending the 16-year old activist last week was let out of custody yesterday and says he didn't anonymize his IP-address because he wanted it to be known that he supports Wikileaks.

I apologize retroactively for using too many emphasizing techniques in the post.