|
Hacktivism
and Indy Media
This page looks at 'hacktivism' and indymedia.
It covers -
introduction
Hacktivism - online action that has been variously denounced
as cybervandalism and online terrorism or hailed as agitprop
by a digitally literate vanguard on behalf of the unwired
or otherwise oppressed.
The following paragraphs also offer pointers to Indy Media,
hailed as a basis for political change by telling the
truths supposedly not found in other media.
the cracker ethic
What is hacktivism? One enthusiast claims
that
Hacktivism
as a movement can be directly linked to the 1994 pro-zapatista
guerrilla. It is still a movement in its infancy. Over
the past five years it has grown to encompass many new
areas, from the free and open source software movements,
to localized community pressure campaigns and global
online direct action. During a hacktivist talk at the
London ICA in March 2001 "Hacktivists: Cyberwarriors
or political agoraphobics?" both public and speakers
where trying to define these new connections. At the
moment they can be anything the context defines. Culture
Jammers in method and attitude, they use the spaces
of media communication as arena and battleground, publicizing
the basic dilemmas, problems and contradictions of societies
that include demands of civil scope.
There
is a somewhat more nuanced discussion in Alexandra Samuel's
Digital Disobedience paper (PDF).
One
student commented that
Hacktivists
typify a breed of hackers who exploit or attack computers,
networks and websites to make political statements and
protest actions by governments and corporations. The
development of the Internet has led to an explosion
of this type of activity, and it has received considerable
attention from the media due to the effective use of
computers for 'electronic civil disobedience.'
and
overoptimistically opined that
Hacktivism
occurs in the relatively uncontrolled environment of
the World Wide Web, making it virtually impossible to
trace the perpetrators. Hence, repercussions for Hacktivism
are essentially nonexistent.
In
practice 'digital civil disobedience' runs the gamut from
poking holes in government-run firewalls aimed at preventing
citizens from browsing political content through to the
defacement of sites and denial of service attacks highlighted
in the Security & Infocrime guide
on this site.
It is the online equivalent of a continuum that extends
from coffee mornings and nonviolent protest marches through
to bricks through corporate windows and the firebombing
of your local police-station or woodchip mill. Disagreement
about terms is one feature of that continuum: one person's
hacking (benign) is another's cracking (bad, illicit).
You're an extremist, I'm a noble fighter for truth ...
A succinct justification for action is provided in Stefan
Wray's 1998 On Electronic Civil Disobedience paper,
supplemented by the longer Electronic Civil Disobedience
and the World Wide Web of Hacktivism: A Mapping of Extraparliamentarian
Direct Action Net Politics paper
and thesis
on The Drug War and Information Warfare in Mexico.
Graham Meikle's Future Active: Media Activism &
the Internet (Annandale: Pluto Press 2002) offers
an intelligent but often rosy view of action by "citizens
of cyberspace".
There is an equally reverent discussion in Harry Cleaver's
The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of
an Alternative Political Fabric paper
and in Maximillian Dornseif's Demonstrations Online
Between Exercising a Basic Right and DDoS paper
and 2001 Hackers as an Important Part of the Information
Society paper.
Sando Vegh's 2002 Hacktivists or Cyberterrorists? The
Changing Media Discourse on Hacking article
frets that demonisation of hacking by government reports
and the mass media "serves the political and corporate
elites" and has a chilling effect on online political
dialogue.
Cleaver takes off from John Perry Barlow's deliciously
silly but influential A Declaration of the Independence
of Cyberspace (DIC) -
Cyberspace, the new home of Mind .... naturally independent
of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have
no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods
of enforcement we have true reason to fear ...
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants
of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new
home of Mind ... I declare the global social space
we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies
you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to
rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement
we have true reason to fear
Fans
of Mr Barlow may be impressed by the self-regarding (indeed
self-indulgent) view in the Electronic Civil Disobedience
site,
replete with accounts of "Digital Zapatizmo"
and "E-Guerillas in the Mist".
That is questioned in François Fortier's foucauldian Virtuality
Check Power Relations & Alternative Strategies in
the Information Society (London: Verso 2001). A version
is available in his 1998 paper
Virtuality Check: A Political Economy of Computer Networking,
announcing that
the
so-called electronic frontier has not been the vanguard
of a renewed democracy ...
we must recognize that ICT are first and foremost instruments
of exclusionist capitalist appropriation, accumulation,
globalization, de-socialization of political economic
power, homogenization and hegemonization of discourse,
and repression of dissent hegemony fails.
There
is a more sceptical account in The Internet & State
Control in Authoritarian Regimes: China, Cuba, and the
Counterrevolution paper
by Shanthi Kalathil & Taylor Boas, Dorothy Denning's
2000 paper
Hacktivism: An Emerging Threat to Diplomacy or
the 2001 US National Infrastructure Protection Center's
Cyber Protests: The Threat to the US Information Infrastructure
(PDF).
John Arquilla & David Ronfeldt's 1998 RAND paper
The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico questions
some of the digital pieties. Richard Rogers offers a perspective
on the Zapatistas in his 2000 paper
on Internet & Society in Armenia & Azerbaijan? Web
Games and a Chronicle of an Infowar.
Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder
on the Electronic Frontier (New York: Bantam 1993
and online here)
and Mike Godwin's Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech
in the Digital Age (New York: Times 1998) are dated
but more insightful than works such as Jonathan Littman's
The Watchman: The Twisted Life & Crimes of Serial
Hacker Kevin Poulsen (Boston: Little Brown 1997).
We've pointed to particular resources in the Security
& Infocrime guide.
selected hacktivist sites
Some hacktivist groups and sites are -
Electronic
Disturbance Theatre (EDT)
RTMark
The
Hacktivist
Cult of the Dead Cow (CoDC)
Electrohippies Collective (eHippies)
Ethical Hackers Against Porn (EHAP)
Hacker
News Network (HNN)
aims to be a hacker version of CNN, with an emphasis on
the code rather than the agitation.
Indymedia
In 1995 Nicholas Negroponte, spruiking the digital
zeitgeist, proclaimed the imminent death of 'old media'
- dinosaurs on the information highway ...
The
leverage of owning printing plants will disappear. Even
having a dedicated staff of reporters worldwide will
lose some of its significance as talented free-lance
writers discover an electronic venue directly into your
home.
That
has been echoed in claims that blogs
would be the "pirate radio stations" of the web - with
people using the net "to make their own, radically
different new media" and
taking
back technology that promises to stir the sleeping giant.
Soon, the soul of the Internet will sprout up through
the cracks and ripen under the gaze of eager netizens
as
"an antidote to mass media".
In practice that information revolution has not arrived,
a failure acknowledged by launch in November 2004 of Wikinews.
Having a keyboard and modem is not equivalent to having
something worth saying, the skills to express those thoughts
or the capacity to gain the attention of readers in an
environment where thousands of other writers (or dogs,
cats and other animals) are busy self-publishing. The
'Truth' might be out there, but how do you find it ...
and will it sound just like the self-congratulation of
the righteous?
Fortier notes an observation that
information is for the most part already available,
and if power remains centralized, it is because information
itself is never enough.
Claims
about the inevitable victory of Indymedia - an 'alternative
media' that embraces every political belief from gay aryan
skinheads to soyachino vegetarian trotskyites at Melbourne
University - are thus open to question.
We have suggested on the Ketupa.net
media site that old media has so far proved quite resilient
and is often distinguished by notions of impartiality,
fact-checking and concern for issues such as defamation.
(Some problems of both old and indy publishers, journos
and audiences are highlighted here.)
The poltical impact of Indymedia is uncertain. Is it persuading
the unconverted to political action, reinforcing the certainties
of particular communities or merely occupying time/energy
that might otherwise be spent in face-to-face meetings
... keeping activists at the keyboards and off the streets,
isolated in an electronic ghetto?
portals and other sites
Some Indymedia sites are
indymedia.org
- the largest independent media portal, pointing to
sites across the globe, and promoted as "a democratic
media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate,
and passionate tellings of truth. We work out of a love
and inspiration for people who continue to work for
a better world, despite corporate media's distortions
and unwillingness to cover the efforts to free humanity"
its affiliates in New
Zealand, Melbourne,
Adelaide
and Sydney.
mediachannel.org
- a staider alternative news provider whose parent boasts
a client list embracing "NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox,
The United Nations, The World Bank, Time Magazine, Reebok,
Polygram, The Body Shop, Sierra Club, Universal Pictures,
Amnesty International, Sony, Marie Claire Magazine,
Turner Broadcasting, MTV, Nippon Television"
alternet.org -
the tabloid-flavoured indymedia for those who think
mediachannel's too staid or merely too close to the
guys in black helicopters ("a coalition of right
wingers, conservatives and pro-capitalists, working
together to divide and conquer the effectiveness of
indymedia through disinformation and psychological warfare")
undercurrents.org
- praised by one observer as "a respectable spokesperson
for independent media" and distinguished by an
emphasis on video
piratetv.net -
music-oriented webcaster with some alternative news
content
Do or Die
- a self-consciously way hip zine "by activists
for activists"
next page (tool
kits)
|
Ketupa