When you say it is illegal, which part are you referring to? hosting the website that offers the betting platform? donating to the cause through betting? hacking the targeted website?
The hacking of the targeted website.
is also possible that this service could be requested of a non governmental organization.
So now it's a service? I thought you were betting which site would get hacked. Offering a hacking service is definitely illegal.
This thread is not intended to address who should or shouldn't determine and/or enforce what is (il)legal
Nope, it's to discuss the practicality of offering a "hacking politics" site along the lines of the "assassination politics" of the original article presented by James Bell. Hacking and defacing a site does nothing except annoy your target. And annoying the people who have declared that action to be illegal (and have the willingness to use force to back that up) is, as I said, akin to walking in to a cave and poking a sleeping bear. It's asking for a mauling.
I would argue that something cannot be 'stupid'. Instead, it can only be judged by the risk/reward associated with that action. Are you implying that the risk reward associated with this idea is undesirable? If so, are you saying that for the host of the website offering the service? The hacker who attempts to claim the reward? The individuals that donate to the cause? To the host of the targeted website? For you personally?
I'm saying that the risk far outweighs the potential gain. Not just to the hacker who actually carries out the deed, but to the site operator. And to the donor, the cost outweighs the gain by a similar amount. All you're doing is paying to annoy an IT guy, and maybe get 5 minutes of news time.
The original assassination politics was intended to gain real political change, you're just looking for a few bucks and an excuse to trash a website. It's bad enough if you stoop to their level in an attempt to affect change, but if you do it just for money and thrills, you're no better than the jackass in his mom's basement using a rented botnet to bring down a blog that pissed him off.