Well, I think that is a very important concern. This is a serious place of business, and it should be treated as such.
We have a lot of experience with petitioning in paper form. Rarely do you currently get frivolous petitions when you are sitting in the House of Commons. That's because, although the public generates the initial petition, it is sponsored by an MP, and I think that as MPs we all take our reputations very seriously. If we put in frivolous petitions....
That is the first check that I envision for the e-petitioning system: the sponsoring MP would be the initial filter and guardian to stop that.
The second check is that the clerk would still have to review any petition sponsored by an MP. There are rules outlining what can be in a petition. For example, if somebody is swearing in a petition, even if an MP does sponsor it, the clerk would say, “I'm sorry, this is out of order.”
The third check, of course, is the signature threshold, which is high. I think it is 1,000 to be treated as a paper petition, but 100,000 to have a debate in the House.
The last and final check, which I think is quite strict, is the requirement for 10 members of Parliament to sign on to any petition that gets more than 100,000 signatures. The U.K. has a permanent backbench committee that sifts through all these things. We don't have a backbench committee, so these 10 MPs would in some way act as a floating or ad hoc backbench committee. I think that would really stop it.
Concerning the death star example, we have checked with the clerk's office, and we doubt that it would even hit the floor in Parliament here, so it wouldn't hit as an e-petition either.