DDoS - Democratic Denial of Service Attack?

Amidst the recent brouhaha surrounding wikileaks one thing has really caught my attention—the behavior of Anonymous.

Anonymous has made it easy for anyone to participate in their DoS attacks by distributing their software, LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon). It gives you a cute user interface—all you do is type in an IP address and press the big button. Et, voila.

LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon)

Personal feelings for Anonymous aside, I can't help but think it's a very democratic approach to DoS—illegal, obviously—but democratic. It's not just one person with a large botnet anymore, now if you get enough people angry they can attack.

I wonder what would happen if a more legitimate organization pushed such an effort. No one gives Anonymous much credibility (I guess you lose that when you spend your day on /b/ sharing porn and being a skript kiddie), but maybe a group with an actual face could be effective. Assuming that organization had a little bit more clout than Anonymous, they could really turn themselves into a weapon.

Maybe human-rights activists will use a tool like LOIC to take down the Nike website to protest sweat shops, or when people leave for a peace rally they'll leave LOIC-like software running on their machine, pointed towards a government website.

Will there be less physical protests and more cyber protests like this in the future? I'm thinking it will be difficult since such attacks are illegal; legitimate organizations won't be able to publicly support such attacks without facing prosecution. The system works well for Anonymous because they're, well... anonymous. Sure they're all real people, and being skript kiddies a lot of them could be easily hunted down, but since they don't have a legitimate face to their organization collectively they have nothing to lose.

Whatever the future holds, at least for now it appears as if groups desiring to launch such protests will have to do so without the banner of a legitimate organization. To be sure, however, this is only the beginning. Crazy things are to come.