Hacking and hacktivism: Conclusions and the lack of a public sphere

In summary, there has clearly been a reasonable amount of academic attention paid to the subjects of hacking and hacktivism. This is unsurprising; in a rapidly changing and increasingly complex socio-technological environment, it is only natural for the actions of those who are at the forefront of and comfortable with this environmental evolution to be objects of fascination. Understandably, this fascination has been and is shared by the general population, and is coupled with a widespread inability to grasp the full technological complexities of hacking. This is not intended as a condemnation – the average citizen22 _{can no more be expected to}

understand the full technological complexity of computers and the Internet than they can be expected to grasp, say, quantum physics.

However, the difference is that we do not interact with the equipment used by quantum physicists in our daily lives, whereas most of us within the post-industrial world do interact with computers and the Internet on an exceedingly regular basis. At the very least, we understand that they provide a large proportion of our global communications and financial infrastructure, and thus have an immense role to play in facilitating slows of political-economic power. It is this combination of interactional familiarity, reliance, and incomprehension, coupled with an increasing tendency towards malicious activity within certain branches of hacking, that has contributed to the installation of the negative popular image of hacking that exists within society and the mainstream media today. The negativity of this perception is both echoed and reified by ever-increasing and unnecessarily harsh legislative criminalisation of the activity, invoked by state and corporate concerns over its anti- authoritarian nature and tendency towards agendas incompatible with the commercialisation and control of digital information.

This popular perception of hacking has been given much attention within the literature discussed, with a variety of qualitative and quantitative research on the

media’s role in promulgating it provided in support. It is also clear that hacktivism if sometimes tarred with the same brush, and that this negative characterisation of both hacking and hacktivism has only been exacerbated since the events of September 11, 2001. Formerly, hacking (and by extension hacktivism) was portrayed and regarded as the online equivalent of offline crimes such as breaking and entering, trespass, fraud and vandalism. As discussed, the sentences applied to such crimes certainly tended to be harsher than those applied to their offline equivalents, arguably due primarily to a legislative fear of the unknown and the desire to discourage a form of crime that is notoriously difficult to detect and control. Nevertheless, the crimes of which hackers stood accused were fundamentally mundane, their glamour imparted largely by their online status and technological sophistication.

However, since the attacks on the World Trade Centre, the demonisation of hacking (and therefore hacktivism, as a branch of hacking) has become more pronounced, as Costanza-Chock (2001) and Vegh (2002, 2003, 2005) have shown. Illegal or borderline-legal hacking of any kind has been increasingly and erroneously conflated with cyberterrorism, just as terrorism has been conflated with Islam. It does not take too much effort to identify the common denominators within these chains of association – a fear of the unknown (be that unknown technological, cultural, political, or religious), and of the fact that everyday technical infrastructures can be subverted and turned back upon those supposedly in control of them. Indeed, is not the hijacking and utilisation of American aeroplanes as weapons against American lives and property nothing if not a massively simple and violent hack, in the original and ephemeral sense of the word?

This conflation attempts to characterise all hacking activity as running counter to democracy and freedom, when the reality is infinitely more complex and nuanced. Certainly, some strands of hacking are criminal and malicious and could never, by any stretch of the imagination, be aligned with democratic values. However, hacktivism is a new form of political participation, as has been explored by some of the literature reviewed. This literature has broadly explored hacktivism’s role in democracy, and has begun to explore its function as a form of deliberative

democratic participation, and as such, has briefly engaged with public sphere theory.

However, this theory has been paid only minimal attention within the literature, and what attention it has received has been rather shallow and unsatisfying. It has largely been passed over in favour of investigations into the sociology of hacking and hacktivism; into categorically defining hacktivism’s emergence from the evolutionary tree of hacking; into the construction of typologies to demarcate different groups and group identities within hacktivism; and into the crisis of public perception suffered by all hacking, be it political or not. This is not to say that these projects are invaluable – far from it. They have served to lay down a foundation that facilitates and eases the continued and extended study of the subject area. Indeed, the concentrated application of public sphere theory to the phenomenon of hacktivism is a logical investigative path revealed by some of this prior literature. Vegh (2003) and Samuel (2004a) in particular have tangentially highlighted its appropriateness to the study of hacktivism, and as such, have substantiated the presence of a direction for new research.

Vegh (2002, 2003, 2005) assessed hacking and hacktivism from a broad democratic theory perspective, using it as a window with which to explore his thesis that the U.S. government and corporations use the media to negatively characterise politically empowering Internet-based activities, in order to legitimise the installation of oppressive legislature and thus control widespread instances of political opposition. However, his engagement with both online and offline democracy theory is somewhat scattered and unfocused – he does not engage strongly with any one particular theory. His interest lies more with the general democratising potential of the Internet and the forces opposing it, than with assessing this potential through any strongly coherent and well-defined theoretical lens.

This is even truer with regards to his discussion of hacktivism – it is regarded as a form of democratic political participation per se, rather than this status being explored through any particular theoretical lens. This is not to say that this assumption is wrong, just that it is worthy of deeper and more complex attention and investigation. A more thorough exploration of how exactly hacktivism

functions as form of democratic political participation is required. Additionally, while Vegh does refer to the concept of the public sphere several times in passing, he does not rigorously examine or apply it with any theoretical complexity, depth, or precision, and certainly not with regards to hacktivism, merely with regards to the Internet in general.

Samuel (2004, 2004a) engages with the concept of deliberative democracy a little more deeply, but it is essentially tangential to her primary goals of investigating the motivations for and forms of political participation, and the relationship of these to the identity of participants. Her assessment of hacktivism’s relation to the traditional deliberative values of free speech and accountability is perceptive and valuable, but like Vegh, the democratic theory she deploys is quite broad, and does not home in on any strongly unified theoretical subsection, or engage significantly with (any particular) concept of the public sphere. It should be noted that these comments regarding Vegh and Samuel’s work are not intended as criticisms – both authors have made intensely valuable contributions to the literature on hacktivism within their own particular theoretical fields and approaches. But they are the two contributors to the literature on hacktivism who have come closest to assessing it through the lens of public sphere theory, and neither has done so adequately (an understandable omission, given that this was not the intent of their theses).

Following from this deficiency in the literature on hacktivism, this thesis will explore hacktivism through a public sphere theoretical lens. Before proceeding to the theoretical chapters that focus this lens, let us first briefly recap the definitions of hacking and hacktivism that have emerged from the literature review as a whole.