Dive Brief:

• An online campaign published on Protester.io is calling for what amounts to a DDoS attack on the White House on Inauguration Day, Softpedia reports.

• Juan Soberanis, who launched the campaign, is asking Americans who want to protest against President-elect Donald Trump to load the White House website on Inauguration Day and refresh it frequently to take the site down.

• Soberanis says there is nothing illegal about what he’s doing. "It’s the equivalent of someone marching on Washington, D.C.," Soberanis told CSO Online. "Civil disobedience has been part of the American democratic process."

Dive Insight:

Soberanis also offers instructions on how to participate in the process and offers a subscription system to alert people when it’s the time to load the White House website during the inauguration, and that may be where his efforts cross the line.

DDoS attacks are illegal under federal law, but some have questioned whether they should now be made a legitimate form of protest. In 2013, an online petition was posted on the White House’s website about the same subject. The petition failed.  

While hacktevism is popular for those computer aficionados who are trying to support, or sometimes undermine, a cause, their efforts are still illegal. Anonymous, for example, has called on its followers to find and reveal any information that could compromise Trump, which goes against anti-hacking laws. 

Though Soberanis wants a civilian uprising to take down the site, it is more than likely the White House has tools in place to defend against page refreshes creating denial of service, one expert told The Register. For an attack to work, it would have to be much larger in volume.