Just as I was finishing up my previous post, about the seeming self-sabotage involved in the development of the Obamacare website, this interesting piece of news turned up in my feed:

Denial-of-service tool targeting Healthcare.gov site discovered

Here is the message from the supposed hacktivists:

Destroy Obama Care.

This program continually displays alternate page of the ObamaCare website. It has no virus, trojans, worms, or cookies.

The purpose is to overload the ObamaCare website, to deny service to users and perhaps overload and crash the system.

You can open as many copies of this program as you want. Each copy opens multiple links to the site.

ObamaCare is an affront to the Constitutional rights of the people. We HAVE the right to CIVIL disobedience.

Perhaps it is just the coincidence with the other blog post (which I started writing yesterday), but I feel a bit skeptical here. First of all, this is not a serious threat on a technical level (see the article for details), but rather a symbolic action of some kind. The note strikes me as odd, not the kind of thing I would expect either from hacker types or constitutionalist activist types. I generally appreciate this kind of civil disobedience, but given the ineffectiveness of the attack itself, I wonder if this does not play into the hands of the White House, which is already building a narrative where threats of external sabotage is used to explain the failed website launch.