Can 'Operation Chokehold' be stopped? Will you join the AT&T DoS?

The strangeness spinning around AT&T's quality of service is starting to make Christmas feel like Halloween. It's scary and tantalizingly inviting to observe. It's like watching a train wreck or freeway pileup in horror and awe. Does Apple have an app for that?

Tomorrow, a service which reliability many customers have questioned, may be intentionally brought down. Whether or not there is any action or even if it fails, everything is different now -- not just for AT&T but any company looking to manage customer relations. The crowd has found a voice. Will the AT&T mob be more American Revolution or French Revolution and its "reign of terror?"

What a strange 10 days it has been for AT&T. How did it comes to this? On December 7, AT&T released the "Mark the Spot" app that lets iPhone users notify the carrier about service problems. The next day, Network World recapped a Root Wireless study that revealed AT&T consistently has the fastest 3G service of any major U.S. carrier. OK, if data's so fast, why can't telephony be more reliable? A day later, AT&T's Ralph de la Vega started talking about imposing data caps on wireless users, which would be one way to address service problems. Say what? Cap the same people who are required to purchase a data plan with their smartphone?

Then Fake Steve Jobs (aka writer Dan Lyons) called for "Operation Chokehold," in response to AT&T's demand that customers use less data. The idea: To consume even more data on AT&T's network tomorrow, December 18, at 3 p.m. ET, thus bringing down AT&T's service. He wrote on December 14:

Subject: Operation Chokehold
On Friday, December 18, at noon Pacific time, we will attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees. The goal is to have every iPhone user (or as many as we can) turn on a data intensive app and run that app for one solid hour. Send the message to AT&T that we are sick of their substandard network and sick of their abusive comments. THe idea is we'll create a digital flash mob. We're calling it in Operation Chokehold. Join us and speak truth to power!

Plan of Attack

If I hadn't switched from AT&T to T-Mobile in October, I likely would join in tomorrow's planned denial-of-service attack. Whether or not the call to action was real or a gag designed to drum up pageviews for Fake Steve Jobs no longer matters. There appears to be real momentum behind AT&T customers -- particularly iPhone users -- venting their frustrations in one massive crowd-sourced DoS.

That said, surely AT&T is planning for the attack and people often flake out last minute. Chokehold could yet be a half-hearted headlock that AT&T easily escapes. Success or failure is no longer the point, but what the noise means.

Today, at Gizmodo, Adam Frucci threw his support behind Fake Steve Jobs in post: "FSJ's Anti-AT&T Manifesto Makes Me Raise My Fist in Solidarity." Frucci has plenty of company. Operation Chokehold support is surprisingly widespread, with social media services joining -- and perhaps usurping -- bloggers and news sites driving the message.

Over at the Apple 2.0 blog, Philip Elmer-DeWitt asks: "Can kids bring AT&T to its knees?" He observes that the Facebook Operation Chokehold fan page has a young audience: "Scroll down the members list for affiliations and you'll see a few companies, a bunch of colleges and a whole lot of high schools."

Maybe, but how many high school students have AT&T phones with data capabilities/plans? It's the large number of college participants that pose a greater risk. As of this posting Operation Chokehold has more than 3,400 Facebook fans. That's not bad for something that started as a gag -- or seems to be. It's sometimes hard to separate Fake Steve Jobs' sarcasm from Dan Lyons' anger.

Crowding 'The Man'

This isn't just noise or one blogger -- Dan Lyons -- ranting. The planned attack on AT&T demonstrates the new power of the crowd, and it should be big lesson to any company about how social media is changing customer relations. One voice easily becomes many, particularly when there are shared common problems -- or frustrations. If the mob does unite and successfully brings down AT&T's network, customer relations will never be the same, anywhere.

The social media services that have allowed people to create fan pages and organize impromptu meet-ups or parties can be used to organize something else: Actions against the corporate establishment. There have been plenty of minor actions, but nothing quite as visible or on the potential scale of Operation Chokehold. Perhaps in a different era, these tools would be used more to express social outrage. "The Man" is no longer the government but more the corporation and the quality of services it provides.

There is a Facebook fan page, Operation Cuckoo, opposing Operation Chokehold, but as of this writing it has less than 70 members. The mob isn't against action but for it. Fake Steve Jobs may have tapped into something much, much bigger than he ever expected. It's now Frankenstein out of control.

Today's question: Can the one voice silence the mob it generated? Yesterday, Lyons applied some friction to Operation Chokehold. Jennifer Van Grove writes at Mashable:

With the crusade date and time (Friday) fast approaching, and proponents and opponents coming out of the woodwork, Fake Steve appears to be doing the that's-not-what-I-really-meant backtrack dance. In his latest blog post, Lyons's conscience makes an appearance and seems to drown out the voice of Apple's fake -- and now fearful -- leader.

Fake Steve Jobs writes in that blog post: "For what it's worth, we don't expect many people to participate in the flash mob. Even if all 1,600 fans of the Facebook group participate, that's probably not enough people to crash a network. Is it? Truth is, I hope not." The number of Facebook fans has doubled since yesterday, and surely there are many more. Then comes the reversal of Lyons' earlier outage: "I really don't want to cause any actual harm to my fellow AT&T users. Quite the opposite -- I feel as if we're all caught in the same horrible prison, suffering alongside one another."

That was yesterday. Today, Lyons shows continued interest in Operation Chokehold and as Fake Steve Jobs has written post after post attacking AT&T. The picture above was sent to Fake Steve Jobs' by reader Luis. Meanwhile, AT&T is preparing its defenses. Today, the Wall Street Journal reported that AT&T plans to offer customers incentives to cutback data usage rather than penalize them for heavy usage. But is there really difference? That's a question I ask you to answer in comments -- and please tell everyone if you support or oppose Operation Chokehold.