Hacktivism

Hacktivism is a portmanteau of hack and activism. This leads to a controversy of meaning because both the terms "hacker" and "activism" are opposing terms. The term "hacking", which in relation to computers originally meant invisible break in through the security code and/or firewall with "clever computer usage/programming" - the terminology used in the mainstream media, almost exclusively to mean "illegally breaking into computers". Activism similarly includes both explicitly non-violent action (Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi) and violent revolutionary activities (Malcolm X and Che Guevara). The term hacktivistm was first used by designer/author Jason Sack in a 1995 InfoNation article about the media artist Shu Lea Cheang.

If hacking as "illegally breaking into computers" is assumed, then hacktivism could be defined as "the nonviolent use of illegal or legally ambiguous digital tools in pursuit of political ends". These tools include web site defacements, redirects, denial-of-service attacks, information theft, web site parodies, virtual sit-ins, and virtual sabotage.

If hacking as "clever computer usage/programming" is assumed, then hacktivism could be understood as the writing of code to promote political ideology - promoting expressive politics, free speech, human rights, and information ethics through software development. Acts of hacktivism are carried out in the belief that proper use of code will be able to produce similar results to those produced by regular activism or civil disobedience.

Hacktivist activities span many political ideals and issues. Freenet is a prime example of translating political thought (anyone should be able to speak) into code. Hacktivismo is an offshoot of Cult of the Dead Cow; its beliefs include access to information as a basic human right. The loose network of programmers, artists and radical militants 1984 network liberty alliance is more concerned with issues of free speech, surveillance and privacy in an era of increased technological surveillance.

Hacktivism is a controversial term, and can often be misconstrued as cyberterrorism. What separates hacktivism from cyberterrorism is a distinctly political or social cause behind the "haction". Some argue it was coined to describe how electronic direct action might work toward social change by combining programming skills with critical thinking. Others use it as practically synonymous with malicious, destructive acts that undermine the security of the Internet as a technical, economic, and political platform.

Essentially, the controversy reflects two divergent philosophical strands within the hacktivist movement. One strand thinks that malicious cyber-attacks are an acceptable form of direct action. The other strand thinks that all protest should be peaceful, refraining from destruction.

Controversy

Some people describing themselves as hacktivists have taken to defacing websites for political reasons, such as attacking and defacing government websites as well as web sites of groups who oppose their ideology. Others, such as Oxblood Ruffin (the "foreign affairs minister" of Hacktivismo), have argued forcefully against definitions of hacktivism that include web defacements or denial-of-service attacks. Within the hacking community, those who carry out automated attacks are generally known as script kiddies.

Critics suggest that DoS attacks are an attack on free speech; that they have unintended consequences; that they waste resources; and that they could lead to a "DoS war" that nobody will win. In 2006, Blue Security attempted to automate a DoS attack against spammers; this led to a massive DoS attack against Blue Security which knocked them, their old ISP and their DNS provider off the internet, destroying their business.

Following denial-of-service attacks by Anonymous on multiple sites, in reprisal for the apparent suppression of Wikileaks, John Perry Barlow, a founding member of the EFF, said "I support freedom of expression, no matter whose, so I oppose DDoS attacks regardless of their target... they're the poison gas of cyberspace...". However, depending upon who is reporting on Barlow, you may reach a very different conclusion, since the same week of the Anonymous event, he tweeted: "The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops." .

Depending on who is using the term, hacktivism can be a politically constructive form of anarchist civil disobedience or an undefined anti-systemical gesture; it can signal anticapitalist or political protest; it can denote anti-spam activists, security experts, or open source advocates. Critics of hacktivism fear that the lack of a clear agenda makes it a politically immature gesture, while those given to conspiracy theory hope to see in hacktivism an attempt to precipitate a crisis situation online.

Elements of Hacktivist "Hactions"

A Haction usually has the following elements.

• Politically motivated
• Place a premium on humor, and often resembles a digital form of clowning
• Owns a moderate "Outlaw Orientation" as opposed to severe
• The result of aggressive policy circumvention - rather than a gradual attempt to change a policy
• Always non-violent- a haction never places another in direct danger
• Capacity for solo activity - while most forms of political activism require the strength of masses, hacktivism is most often the result of the power of one, or small group.
• Is most often carried out anonymously, and can take place over transnational borders.

Forms of Hacktivism

In order to carry out their operations, hacktivists use a variety of software tools readily available on the Internet. In many cases the software can be downloaded from a popular website, or launched from a website with click of a button. Some of the more well known hacktivist tools are below:

1. Defacing Web Pages Between 1995-1999 Attrition.org reported 5,000 website defacements. In such a scenario, the hacktivist will significantly alter the front page of a company's or governmental agency's website.

2. Web Sit-ins In this form of hacktivism, hackers attempt to send so much traffic to the site that the overwhelmed site becomes inaccessible to other users in a variation on a denial of service.

3. E-mail Bombing Hacktivists send scores of e-mails with large file attachments to their target's e-mail address.

4. Code Software and websites can achieve political purposes. For example, the encryption software PGP can be used to secure communications; PGP's author, Phil Zimmermann said he distributed it first to the peace movement. Jim Warren suggests PGP's wide dissemination was in response to Senate Bill 266, authored by Senators Biden and DeConcini, which demanded that "...communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications...". WikiLeaks is an example of a politically motivated website - it seeks to "keep governments open".

5. Website Mirroring Used as a circumvention tool to bypass censorship blocks on websites, mirroring is a technique that copies the content of a censored website and posts it to other domains and subdomains that are not censored.

6. Geo-bombing is a technique in which netizens add a geo-tag while editing YouTube videos so that the location of the video can be displayed in Google Earth.

Notable hacktivist events

• The earliest known instance of hacktivism as documented by Julian Assange is as follows:

Hacktivism is at least as old as October 1989 when DOE,

HEPNET and SPAN (NASA) connected VMS machines world wide were

penetrated by the anti-nuclear WANK worm. [...] WANK penetrated machines had their login screens altered to:

      W O R M S    A G A I N S T    N U C L E A R    K I L L E R S
    _______________________________________________________________
    \__  ____________  _____    ________    ____  ____   __  _____/
     \ \ \    /\    / /    / /\ \       | \ \  | |    | | / /    /
      \ \ \  /  \  / /    / /__\ \      | |\ \ | |    | |/ /    /
       \ \ \/ /\ \/ /    / ______ \     | | \ \| |    | |\ \   /
        \_\  /__\  /____/ /______\ \____| |__\ | |____| |_\ \_/
         \___________________________________________________/
          \                                                 /
           \    Your System Has Been Officially WANKed     /
            \_____________________________________________/

     You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war.

• The first public use of DDoS as a form of protest was the Intervasion of the UK orchestrated by a group called the Zippies on Guy Fawkes Day, 1994.
• One of the earliest documented hacktivist events was the "Strano Network sit-in", defined "Netstrike, a strike action directed against French government computers in 1995.
• The term itself was coined by techno-culture writer Jason Sack in a piece about media artist Shu Lea Cheang published in InfoNation in 1995.
• On the night of Monday, 30 June 1997, at 4:30am the Portuguese hacking group UrBaN Ka0s hacked the site of the Republic of Indonesia and 25 other military and government sites as part of the hacking community campaign against the Indonesian government and the state of affairs in East Timor. This was one of the first mass hacks and the biggest in history.
• The hacking group milw0rm hacked into the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in 1998, replacing the center's website with an anti-nuclear message; the same message reappeared later that year in what was then an unprecedented mass hack by milw0rm of over 300 websites on the server of hosting company Easyspace.
• In 1998, the Electronic Disturbance Theater conducted "virtual sit-ins" on the Web sites of the Pentagon and the Mexican government to bring the world's attention to the plight of Indian rights in the Mexican state of Chiapas. A Mexican hacking group took over Mexico's finance department website in support of the same cause.
• Another one of the more notorious examples of hacktivism and the continuation of the 1997 attacks, was the modification of more Indonesian web sites with appeals to "Free East Timor" in 1998 by Portuguese hackers.
• On December 29, 1998, the Legions of the Underground (LoU) declared cyberwar on Iraq and China with the intention of disrupting and disabling internet infrastructure. On January 7, 1999, an international coalition of hackers (including Cult of the Dead Cow, 2600 's staff, Phrack's staff, L0pht, and the Chaos Computer Club) issued a joint statement condemning the LoU's declaration of war. The LoU responded by withdrawing its declaration.
• Hacktivists attempted to disrupt ECHELON (an international electronic communications surveillance network filtering any and all satellite, microwave, cellular, and fiber-optic traffic) by holding "Jam Echelon Day" (JED) on October 21, 1999. On the day, hacktivists attached large keyword lists to many messages, taking advantage of listservers and newsgroups to spread their keywords further. The idea was to give the Echelon computers so many "hits" they overloaded. It is not known whether JED was successful in actually jamming Echelon, although NSA computers were reported to have crashed "inexplicably" in early March, 2000. A second Jam Echelon Day (JEDII) was held in October 2000, however the idea never regained its initial popularity. JED was partly denial-of-service attack and partly agitprop.
• The Federation of Random Action calls for a virtual sit-in on Occidental Petroleum in support of the U’wa’s protest against drilling on indigenous land during 2001.
• The Electronic Disturbance Theater and others staged a week of disruption during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, conducting sit-ins against Republican web sites and flooding web sites and communication systems identified with conservative causes. This received mixed reviews from the hacktivist community.
• The Hackbloc collective started publishing Hack This Zine a hacktivist research journal
• Hacktivists worked to slow, block, or reroute traffic for web servers associated with the World Trade Organization, the World Economic Forum, and the World Bank.
• Throughout 2006, Electronic Disturbance Theater joined the borderlands Hacklab for a number of virtual sit-ins, against the massacre in Atenco, in solidarity with striking French students and against the Minutemen and immigration laws.
• On March 25, 2007, hacktivists organized the event freEtech in response to the O'Reilly Etech conference, and started a series of West coast hackmeetings.
• Electronic Disturbance Theater stages a virtual sit-in against the Michigan Legislature against cuts to Medicaid.
• On January 21, 2008, a message appeared on YouTube from a group calling itself 'Anonymous'. The group declared "Project Chanology", essentially a war on The Church of Scientology, and promised to systematically expel The Church from the internet. Over the following week, Scientology websites were intermittently knocked offline, and the Church of Scientology moved its website to a host that specializes in protection from Denial-of-service attacks.
• A computer hacker leaks the personal data of 6 million Chileans (including ID card numbers, addresses, telephone numbers and academic records) from government and military servers to the internet, to protest Chile's poor data protection.
• Throughout early 2008, Chinese hackers have hacked the CNN website on numerous occasions in response to the protests during the 2008 Olympic Torch Relay and claims of biased reporting from western media. The majority of the DDoS attacks took place between March and August, at a time where Chinese nationalistic pride was at an all time high due to the 2008 Olympic Games.
• Electronic Disturbance Theater and the Hacklab stage a virtual sit-in against the war on Iraq and biotech and nanotech war profiteers, on the 5 year anniversary of the war, in solidarity with widespread street actions.
• Intruders hacked the website of commentator Bill O'Reilly and posted personal details of more than 200 of its subscribers, in retaliation for remarks O'Reilly made on Fox News condemning the attack on Palin's Yahoo email account.
• In 2008 hacktivists developed a communications and monitoring system for the 2008 RNC protests called Tapatio.
• In early 2009, the Israeli invasion of Gaza motivated a number of website defacements, denial-of-service attacks, and domain name and account hijackings, from both sides. These attacks are notable in being amongst the first ever politically-motivated domain name hijackings.
• During the 2009 Iranian election protests, Anonymous played a role in disseminating information to and from Iran by setting up the website Anonymous Iran; they also released a video manifesto to the Iranian government.
• On August 1, 2009, the Melbourne International Film Festival was forced to shut down its website after DDoS attacks by Chinese vigilantes, in response to Rebiya Kadeer's planned guest appearance, the screening of a film about her which is deemed "anti-China" by Chinese state media, and strong sentiments following the July 2009 Ürümqi riots. The hackers booked out all film sessions on its website, and replaced festival information with the Chinese flag and anti-Kadeer slogans.
• August 24, 2009, New Hacktivism: From Electronic Civil Disobedience to Mixed Reality Performance workshop at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics led by Micha Cárdenas in Bogota, Colombia
• In November 2009, computers of the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University were hacked, and email purporting to expose a conspiracy by scientists to suppress data that contradicted their conclusions regarding global warming was made available on a Russian FTP server.
• On February 10, 2010, Anonymous DDoS-attacked Australian government websites against the Australian governments attempt to filter the Internet.
• On July 23, 2010, European Climate Exchange's website was targeted by hacktivists operating under the name of decocidio #ϴ. The website showed a spoof homepage for around 22 hours in an effort to promote the contention that carbon trading is a false solution to the climate crisis.
• On December 8, 2010, the websites of both Mastercard and Visa were the subject of an attack by hacktivist group Anonymous, reacting to the two companies' decision to stop processing payments to the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks, following a series of leaks by the site. Mastercard said the attack had no impact on people's ability to use their cards, though there were claims by an unnamed payment firm that their customers had experience a complete loss of service. Anonymous was later blamed for the DDoS attacks on om.nl and politie.nl ( Dutch government websites ). The attack was performed by a unaccepted minority of people who do not share the same goals as Anonymous.
• In January 2011, The websites of the government of Zimbabwe were targeted by anonymous due to censorship of the Wikileaks documents.
• In January 2011, Anonymous launches DDOS attacks against the Tunisian government websites due to censorship of the Wikileaks documents and the 2010–2011 Tunisian protests. Tunisians were reported to be assisting in these denial-of-service attacks launched by anonymous. Anonymous released an online message denouncing the government clampdown on recent protests. Screenshot of message Anonymous has named their attacks as "Operation Tunisia". Anonymous successfully ddossed eight Tunisian government websites. They plan attacks in Internet Relay Chat networks. Someone attacked Anonymous's website with a ddos on January 5.
• In January 2011, Anonymous, in response to the 2011 Egyptian protests attacked Egyptian government websites and voiced support for the people of Egypt.
• Google worked with engineers from SayNow and Twitter to provide communications for the Egyptian people in response to the government sanctioned internet blackout during the 2011 protests. The result, Speak2Tweet, was a service in which voice mail left by phone was then tweeted as text.

Hacktivism and Brands

Hacktivists seeking greater attention to a particular cause have realized the media exposure they can gain from attacking well-known brands, magnifies the effectiveness of their actions. Brands have become powerful political, social, and economic symbols. They have grown far beyond being a simple symbol for a product promise.

• 
  Brands are becoming potent political symbols and thus are ripe targets for hacktivists.

Brands are, by their nature, fast, emotional, and very effective communication tools. The December, 2010 attacks on the Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, and Amazon brands may have been partly in retaliation for those brands' actions against Wikileaks and partly an effective attention-getting ploy for the political message of the attackers.

See also

• Anonymous (group)
• Chaos Computer Club
• Citizen Lab
• Crypto-anarchism
• Culture jamming
• Cypherpunk
• E-democracy
• Electronic civil disobedience
• Hacker culture
• Hacker ethic
• HackThisSite
• Internet activism
• Open source government
• Project Chanology
• Reality hacking
• Script kiddie
• Tactical media
• 1984 network liberty alliance
• Patriot hacking

External links

• Hacktivismo's Projects Page
• Hacktivism and the Future of Political Participation Political science dissertation on the history and political significance of hacktivism
• Hackbloc Home of the hacktivist zine "HackThisZine"
• What is Hacktivism?
• Hacktivism and Politically Motivated Computer Crime History, types of activity and cases studies
• Wikileaks defended by Anonymous hacktivists BBC News, 7 December 2010.