Hacktivism and publicity: An unavoidably necessary evil (redux) 104!

Vegh also recognises the reciprocal relationship between the media and hacktivism, likening hacktivists’ attempts to garner positive publicity for their cause to an attempt to hack the very process of reporting (ibid.: 199-200). Again, the conclusion is that this is often unsuccessful. Pre-9/11, hacking and hacktivism were feared because of their threat to the networks that had become “the life line of developed post-industrial nations” (ibid., p. 209), and post-9/11, because they are increasingly conflated with cyberterrorism. Even though (as he repeatedly points out) cyberterrorism is still hypothetical, Vegh believes that its media prominence is a function of governmental desire to maintain it as a valid threat, “under the disguise of which legislation can be passed that increases the power of the government” (ibid.) (and by association, corporations) and restricts civil liberties and individual rights. Legislative examples are the so-called Patriot Act and proposed Cyber Security Enhancement Act.

Vegh establishes through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of articles from five American newspapers16 _{mentioning the word ‘hack’ or some variant in the year}

encompassing 9/11, that media coverage of hacking is generally negative and became more so in the 6 months after the attack on the World Trade Centre. Overall trends identified were the tendency to use the conditional tense but overshadow this through the use of strongly negative, sensationalistic language; overuse anonymous ‘official sources’; and be vague about the place, time and

nature of the attacks or attackers, but much more precise when referring to the actual and possible targets. The ‘standard nightmare scenario’ is again apparent, with air traffic control, nuclear power plants and electrical and water infrastructures the ‘usual suspects’. The coverage as a whole became more negative post-9/11, despite a decreased actual incidence of reported hacking and hacktivism17_{. Most}

significantly, ‘attackers’ were increasingly identified as cyberterrorists rather than criminals, as part of a larger focus on the subject of cyberterrorism (despite its non- occurrence). This empirical analysis is a major contribution to the literature on hacktivism, finally providing some quantitative proof of hacking and hacktivism’s fraught relationship with the mass media.

The ‘necessary evil’ component of hacktivism’s representation in the news media was something that all the Kiwicon organisers and attendees spoken to had similar views on, in that media exposure is often an integral part of successful hacktivism, but that hacktivists need to manage this exposure if it is to benefit them. Several stated that they felt the negative media and public perceptions of hacking were a disadvantage to hacktivist methods when compared with traditional activism, with this ‘vilification’ and the increasing “privitisation and development of undemocratic mechanisims” online (Farrell 2007) lessening the impact of the political message.

the challgenges faced are intergral to the paradigm. there is an attempt to fight against what is happening to the online world, however it is these changes that are reducing the capability. there is also the vilification- we are scared to exercise any rights online for fear of being discredited or defamed.

(Farrell 2007)

Metlstorm discussed the publicity prank the Kiwicon organizers used to advertise the conference as an example of the perception management required when utilising hacker or hacktivist techniques in aid of causes, be they political or otherwise:

17 _{Vegh argues that this was essentially the result of the majority of hackers and activists wanting to}

the “pranks” we pulled to advertise Kiwicon were pretty good examples of low-level hactivism style techniques, but of course without a political motivation. In this case, we were dissatisfied with the lack of attention paid to our media release, and decided that if the media wouldn’t write our story, we’d write it for them. :) We used XSS (cross site scripting) to inject a fake story into several media sites (and continue to maintain the ability to do so!) to attempt to bait other journalists into reporting on their competitors misfortune. It was effective …

[They used XSS to hack the New Zealand Herald website, one of New Zealand’s major newspapers, and the story was covered by their competitor, the Fairfax-owned Stuff.co.nz website which agglomerates New Zealand’s other major newspapers’ content (see Figure 4: The Stuff.co.nz coverage of the Herald.co.nz XSS 'hack'). Computerworld.co.nz was also hacked.]

… The coverage we received for the Kiwicon incidents (IDG’s coverage of it’s own hack, Fairfax coverage of the Herald hack) was sensationalist, and would have been wildly inaccurate had we not ensured that we talked to the journalists and spun things “right”. Reporting of technology issues in the mainstream media is always poor, and if you’re trying to use the media, you have to be very proactive in spin control.

(Metlstorm 2007a)

Figure 3 shows the coverage given to the prank by Stuff.co.nz, with Metlstorm’s comments explaining that the article was clearly marked as a joke, in that it contained ‘wildly unreasonably comment that no sane person would believe” (‘Hackers hit NZ Herald website’).

4.4.3 Mass Action and Digitally Correct: An internal differentiation of hacktivism

Paul Taylor’s (2004) ‘Hacktivism: Resistance is Fertile?’ generally reiterates previously identified concepts such as hacktivism’s relevance in opposing increasingly abstracted capitalist structures and its evolution from the previous generations of hacking. In line with CAE’s hopes, Taylor sees hacktivism as a convergence of increasingly politically aware hackers and increasingly technologically ‘savvy’ activists. However, like Vegh, he argues that these different origins have led to two distinct trends in hacktivism, the first constituted by web hacks and computer break-ins such as site defacements, and the second by acts of ECD such as virtual sit-ins. Little elaboration on these terms is given; hence, it is not precisely clear where their boundaries lie. Hacktivism as a whole is compared to culture jamming, in that it seeks to “reverse engineer global capital” (Taylor 2004: 487); and hacktivists to spiders who spin dynamic webs of resistance on the static networks of global capitalism (ibid.: 494-5). This metaphor is borrowed from Klein (2001) and Lash (2002).

Hacktivism and Cyberwars was also published in 2004, another joint sociological effort from Taylor and Jordan. Like Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime (1999), it relies heavily on interviews with hacktivists and various statements and manifestos made by different hacktivist groups. As such, it presents a slightly idealised image of the protagonists, though it is a broadly appealing read that offers new insights into potential internal categories of hacktivism. As discussed in the previous section, and as initialized by Taylor (2001, 2004), hacktivism is seen as an ethically resurgent final generation in the evolution of hacking:

Hackers remain obsessed with a wilful immersion in the abstract environment of computer code, whereas hacktivists connect this immateriality to the importance of a social or political rationale, even when an action is coordinated in cyberspace or is about cyberspace. (Jordan & Taylor 2004: 35)

The wider context of the information age is the second thread leading into hacktivism, with hacktivism emerging in the lacunae of the “complex communication systems of advanced capitalism… where institutional control becomes increasingly difficult” (ibid.: 20). The mass-mediated vilification of hacktivism is again a function of wider feelings of technological and informational vulnerability. The third thread is simply that of modern social protest and resistance, especially that of the anti-Neoliberal-globalisation movement. Hacktivism is “an attempted solution to the problem of carrying out effective political protest against a system that is expanding its global reach in increasingly immaterial forms” (ibid.: 30).

Hacktivism generally is defined as “a combination of grassroots political protest with computer hacking… Hacktivism is activism gone electric” (ibid.: 1). Expanding on Vegh (2003) and Taylor (2004), two distinct but not mutually exclusive trends are identified within hacktivism. These two categories are dubbed ‘Mass Action Hacktivism’ (MAH) and ‘Digitally Correct Hacktivism’ (DCH). MAH is the virtualisation of street protest; effectively ECD, it is “a combination of politics and inefficient technology. It is an attempt to defy the lack of physicality in online life, in favour of a mass collection of virtual bodies that are yet not present to each other” (ibid.: 69). Hacking influences DCH more than street protest; it is “the political application of hacking to the infrastructure of cyberspace. It is an attempt to use the lack of physicality in online life to amplify a political message” (ibid.). An example of MAH is the use of FloodNet by EDT, which has already been mentioned. Other virtual sit-ins are also included, such as those carried out by the now-defunct Electrohippies as part of the ‘Battle in Seattle’ in 1999 against the World Trade Organisation (WTO) summit, which reputedly attracted 450,000 participants over five days, and crashed the WTO servers twice (ibid.: 75).

doing is creating the unbearable weight of human beings in a digital way” (Meikle 2002: 142). Parody mirror sites such as those used during the etoy.com/etoys.com conflict18 _{and by ®™ark}19 _{and the ‘Yes Men’, and other satirical performance-}

based hacktions are also included under the mantle of MAH.

DCH is generally more interested in the ‘bandwidth rights’ component of human rights, which can bring some of its proponents and other hackers into opposition with MAH. They see virtual sit-ins as bandwidth abuse, as they can slow down sections of the Internet ‘near’ but unrelated to their target, which contravenes the hacker ethic privileging the free flow of information. The 1999 use of FloodNet by EDT in support of the Zapatistas actually brought threats from other hackers, who threatened to ‘shut them down’ in retaliation to their disruption of the network (ibid.: 90). The ‘Foreign Minister’ of the hacktivist group Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), Oxblood Ruffin, is cited as calling them “illegal, unethical and uncivil… One does not make a better point in a public forum by shouting down one’s opponent” (Ruffin 2002. in ibid.). Others are merely concerned that MAH is inventing “the first self-drowning politics” (ibid.: 167-8).

Hacktivismo, an offshoot of cDc committed to circumventing Internet censorship, have undertaken a number of projects exemplifying DCH, including Peek-a-Booty, Back, Six/Four, and Camera/Shy. These projects will be discussed in more detail later in the thesis, but in short, their intents are as follows. Peek-a-Booty is essentially a distributed anonymous network acting as a server and using cryptographic techniques to elude detection, thus allowing its users or network nodes to bypass firewalls and censorship. For example, a Chinese citizen could use

18 _{The etoy.com/etoys.com conflict occurred in 1999 as the result of etoys.com, an online toy store,}

trying unsuccessfully to buy out etoy.com’s domain name. etoy.com are an artist-activist collective, and reacted to the injunction obtained against them by etoys.com by undertaking an online smear campaign, which included parodying the etoys.com site. The result was that etoy.com kept their domain, etoys.com’s share price fell 70% over the period of the incident, and they eventually collapsed. Although this could not be linked conclusively to etoy.com’s campaign, it seems significant.

19 _{®™ark were a web-based activist group (‘RTMark’) who essentially attempted to subvert the}

corporate universe. Perhaps their most infamous stunt was swapping voice boxes of three hundred Barbies™ and G.I.Joes™ then putting them back on the shelves, where they were sold. They created a parody of the WTO website, and a software tool for generating mirror sites for satirical purposes. Their WTO parody site (‘World Trade Organisation’) was passed over to the Yes Men (‘The Yes Men’), two activists who respond to the emails sent to them in error as WTO members, and thus gain the opportunity to give satirical presentations to unsuspecting applicants.

it to safely view a Falun Gong website excluded by the Chinese Internet gateways or servers. Six/Four is similar, while Camera/Shy is a steganography tool that encodes text in images (digital steganography of this kind is the concealment of information within computer files; for example, using the bits or binary code in an image file and modifying them in such a way as to embed a message within the image but have the alterations remain invisible to the naked eye (which is possible due to the huge amount of digital information necessary for image files)). However, there is some concern that DCH may occasionally fall foul of the retrograde hacker tendency to privilege the means of the hack over the end (ibid.: 169).

Jordan’s 2008 Hacking, although offering new insight into the FLOSS movement, Creative Commons and other ‘non-programming’ hackers, does not add anything substantial to his and Taylor’s previous work. Hacktivism is grouped in with cyberwar, cyberterror, and cybercrime, all of which are collectively described as “hacking the social” (2008: 66). “[T]he social” is defined as “various aspects of the way we live in twenty-first-century societies” (ibid: 70), and is differentiated from ‘society’ in that these forms of hacking do not address the entirety of what we call society, and simultaneously address extra- or co-societal systems such as politics and economics. These four forms of hacking:

…address aspects of ‘the social’ in the following areas: grassroots or popular political activism, conflict between nation states, the nature of security and terror and shifting forms of crime.

(ibid: 70)

The section on hacktivism largely reiterates ideas and cases previously addressed in Jordan and Taylor’s previous literature, although what was previously known as digitally correct hacktivism is now described as informational hacktivism. Jordan continues to maintain that mass action and informational hacktivists overwhelmingly gravitate towards different kinds of political issues, a thesis that is borne out within the somewhat dated cases and examples used within the text, but that is arguably increasingly redundant, as is evident in the more recent cases

informational flows is seen as distinct from those of mass action hacktivists, who apparently “have their eyes firmly on other political issues, particularly those developing from the alter-globalisation movement” (ibid: 76). As Chapter 7 contends, this is an increasingly false or outdated distinction, as there is ample evidence of mass action hacktivism being used to campaign against disruptions to the free flow of information online. Jordan’s description of hacktivism as applying primarily to “the politics that dominates the front pages of our newspapers” as opposed to “the politics that dominate discussion in the backroom of IT support” is a clear articulation of this assumed dichotomy (ibid: 71) – technological politics are ever increasingly incorporated into and coterminous with the ‘front page’ world of mainstream politics, at least within post-industrial societies, and are engaged with by all kinds of hacktivists.

4.4.4 Political coders, performative hacktivists and political cracking: An