Hacktivism and tensions in American culture

Hacktivism

One Expression of the Haves vs. The Have-Notes

Once upon a time, not very long ago and in our very own galaxy, hackers just wanted to have fun. Hacking -- breaking into someone else's computer system -- began primarily as a way for computer geeks to show off their talents. Hacking into another system was a puzzle, an intellectual challenge, akin to a mathematical problem with the additional appeal of breaking social rules of a world that generally rejected the type of individual most inclined to become a hacker.

Teenage boys -- the primary demographic of the first generation of hackers -- had very little power in terms of overall social structures. Hacking provided them a higher status within a community of their own than they could ever possibly attain in the society that they saw portrayed in popular culture that celebrated the physically beautiful and athletically gifted. Hacking was something that they were better at than anybody else. And competence is almost necessarily something that one revels in.

Those who are seen by society as generally incompetent are likely to take full advantage of whatever realm they can gain a sense of competence and even mastery in. Hackers came from the ranks of the disenfranchised, although they were not disenfranchised in the ways that that term has generally been applied. They were not disenfranchised by virtue of race or gender or age or class or any other demographic quality. Rather they were disenfranchised simply because they could not fit in. This gave them a natural alliance with others who could not fit in to whatever society they lived in and for whatever reason. When hacking became hacktivism, this empathy for the underdog would often translate into empathy for human rights activists in repressive regimes.

The original hackers had certain anti-social tendencies about them. Not all of them, but a large percentage. Fitting the popular image of the nerd who only emerged from the darkened room that he shared with his hardware to grab some chips and sugary cereal to be eaten directly out of the box, many hackers understandably felt a certain degree of antagonism toward pretty girls and women, adults who had none of their technical skills yet had good jobs with good salaries, and society as a whole.

Hackers almost necessarily began to translate these feelings of exclusion and anger into their hacking, blending their technical skills with their personal anger and angst (www.theatlanticwire.com, 2011). This is the line that differentiates hacking from hacktivism: Hacking was far more individual in its philosophy, a way for individuals to strike back at a society that had rejected them than for collectives of the cyber-intelligentsia to band together across every human divide to act together. Hackers of the first generation would hardly recognize hacktivism as the same kind of activity that they had devised as a form of personal expression.

Somewhere along the way between the beginning of hacking and about a decade ago, the initial waves of hacking (which were often done either simply to cause problems for other people or organizations or to reap some degree of financial reward) was replaced by two different types of hacking. The first was simple fraud or destruction: People who perpetuated the kind of mayhem that criminals have done since the beginning of human society. Only the weapons had changed.

Hacking New Frontiers

The second kind of relatively new hacking is the subject of this paper, the kind of hacking called hacktivism. Hacktivism (the term was first used in 1996 by a hacker collective called Cult of the Dead Cow) was a combination of hacking and activism, or the use of technological burglary for activist ends (Old-time hacktivists, 2012). This combination allowed hackers to do good for the world, or at least to believe that they were doing good in the world (Old-time hacktivists, 2012).

Samuel (2004) addresses this point:

The lines that separate hacktivism from related areas of political (and apolitical) activity are tactical, principled, and cultural. At a tactical level, hacktivists adopt tools and strategies that are more direct and transgressive than the tools used by online activists, because they believe that the confrontational tactics of hacktivism can be more effective than more conventional forms of online activism. For reasons of principle, they stop well short of cyberterrorism out of respect for human welfare; and turn from hacking to hacktivism because they believe their skills should be harnessed to meaningful social ends. And for cultural as well as tactical reasons, they diverge from the tradition of offline civil disobedience in order to tackle issues on the digital playing field: this field is both their home turf, and (many hacktivists believe) an increasingly powerful political realm. (Samuel, 2004, p. 8)

For the first time since the beginning of the practice of hacking, there was a large contingency of hackers who began to define themselves as being the guys in the white hats, galloping in to save society from its darker elements. Seen from a certain perspective, this shift from hacking to hacktivism could be seen as a way of making amends by the hacking community for the harm that it had collectively caused (Castells, 2001). Of course, there remain many traditional hackers who are still at work, doing harm either for financial ends or simply because they have the ability to harm others.

In the first dissertation to address the technical and social dynamics of hacktivism, Samuel described hacktivism in the following way:

…hacktivism combines the transgressive politics of civil disobedience with the technologies and techniques of computer hackers. The result has been the rapid explosion and diffusion of a digital repertoire of political transgression, harnessed to a wide range of political causes. (Samuel, 2004, pp. 1-2)

Samuel, as do others, distinguish hacktivism from online activism, which also tends to be politically oriented but does not break laws in terms of its cyber-activity.

Samuel (2004) further distinguishes hacktivism from other forms of hacking as well as from forms of cyber-violence:

First, by specifying that hacktivism is nonviolent, it differentiates hacktivism from cyberterrorist acts that harm human beings. Second, by specifying that hacktivism involves illegal or legally ambiguous activity, it differentiates hacktivism from non-transgressive forms of online activism. Third, by generalizing hacktivism to encompass any use of digital tools, it explicitly includes all forms of nonviolent, transgressive digital actions that have sometimes been labeled hacktivism. (Samuel, 2004, p. 3)

Hacktivists are interested in doing harm, but for all the right reasons, a framework that forbids violence in the real, non-virtual world.

Not a Monolithic Community

Before exploring the realms in which hacktivism has been more prominent, it is important to note that from the beginning there has been conflict within the hacking community and within the broader world of those whose lives revolve around pushing the borders of what is technically possible. One of the causes that hactivists have taken up is a defense of free speech, especially in repressive realms. However, they have tended to do so by blocking the ability to "speak" on the part of others.

In December 1998, a U.S.-based hacker group called Legions of the Underground declared cyberwar on Iraq and China and prepared to protest human rights abuses in those countries by disrupting their Internet access.

About a week later, a coalition of hackers & #8230; issued a statement condemning the move. "We - the undersigned - strongly oppose any attempt to use the power of hacking to threaten to destroy the information infrastructure of a country, for any reason," the statement said. "One cannot legitimately hope to improve a nation's free access to information by working to disable its data networks." (Old-term hactivists, 2012).

As noted, hactivists have generally taken up political positions that are more libertarian than anything else, not falling neatly on the spectrum between left and right, or rather including positions from both the left and right. While some individual hacktivists can be easily categorized as either conservative or liberal, as a whole the community is more libertarian than anything else. These differing political perspectives have resulted in a mixed series of hacktivist targets that demonstrate differing loyalties.

While hactivists have tended to target repressive regimes that employ conservative rhetoric, they have also in many cases attacked large corporations, upsetting conservative corporate interests. Hactivists appealed to socialist concerns about the unequal distribution of wealth in society (the current banner of which is the 99% vs. The 1%) and to an international concept of human rights.

For example, one early key hacktivist website cited the United States declaration on human rights to underscore the politically virtuous nature of hacktivism:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." (Ruffin, 2004).

This kind of rhetoric, which was and is authentically believed in by many hactivists, was also used as a cover for a range of activities that could be seen as little more than venting of spleen. Anonymous is one of the groups that can be seen as participating in this form of hacktivism, as is Wikileaks.

Wikileaks is probably the best know hactivist site to the general public because of the sheer volume of political information that it has made public and because of the unapologetic nature of the owner of the site. This is unfortunate in many ways because it has given individuals a false view of what hacktivism is because Julian Assange seems to have been motivated more often by pique than by genuine political concerns for making the world a better place. This is not, as one might guess, how the Wikileaks founder sees the nature of his mission.

Wikileaks, like Anonymous, is based on the idea that information -- all information -- should be available to everyone. This is a radical claim, and indeed resembles radical claims made by groups in the 1960s and 1970s, with the difference being that current radicals have the power to make good on their promises of crashing the system. Wikileaks has taken an extreme position in a world in which governments have often taken extreme positions to justify hiding information from their citizens in the name of national security.

Assange and Wikileaks do not take advantage of the essential advantages of the internet, treating it more like a mimeograph machine:

[T]he many-to-many and one-to-many characteristics of the Internet multiply manifold the access points for publicity and information in the political system. The global dimension of the Web facilitates transnational movements transcending the boundaries of the nationstate. The linkage capacity strengthens alliances and coalitions. Moreover…the values that pervade many transnational advocacy networks….seem highly conducive to the irreverent, egalitarian, and libertarian character of the cyber-culture.(Norris, 2001)