Hacking with Hacktivism - Essay Example

Running Head: Hacking with Hacktivism Hacking with Hacktivism 1The phenomenon of hacktivism reveals the extent of the challenge of translating democratic discussion to the Internet. Hacktivism is, as the name proposes, the marriage of computer hacking and political activism. Hacktivism is the emergence of popular political action, of the self activity of groups of people, in a cyberspace. It is a combination of grassroots political protest with computer hacking. Hacktivists operate within the fabric of a cyberspace, struggling over what is technologically possible in virtual lives, and reaches out of cyberspace utilizing virtual powers to mould offline life. Social movements and popular protest are integral parts of twenty-first-century societies. Hacktivism is activism gone electronic (Tim Jordan, Paul A. Taylor, 2004). Hacking is typically ethical issue. The popular theory of ethics is ethical relativism that suggests the need of universal moral rights and wrongs allow hacking to be taken place. The basic philosophy is "everyone ought to act to cause the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people" (Johnson, 1994, p. 24). According Utilitarianism, many people would perhaps consider themselves to operate according to a certain set of rules, whether stipulated by a cultural frame of reference or according to what they believe to be rational laws or instructions. To make more simply, utilitarianism considers intended actions as a means to an end (the maximization of basic good), but the approach known as deontological ethics. The difference between a deontological ethics, the duty to obey a definite imperative that we believe must be collective, and a utilitarian ethic, that seeks to evaluate and amplify the amount of good in the world. The idea of a hacker ethic stem back to the activities of the original hackers at MIT and Stanford in the 1950s and 1960s, and its main points may be summarized from Levy (1984) as follows: 1 Access to computers should be unlimited and total. 2 All information should be free. 3 Authority should be mistrusted and decentralization promoted. 4 Hackers should be judged solely by their skills at hacking, rather than by race, class, age, gender or position. 5 Computers can be used to create art and beauty. 6 Computers can change your life for the better. (STEWART BRAND, 1995 http://members.aye.net/hippie/hippie/special_.htm ) The hacker ethic, then, accomplishes three main functions: central to it is the idea of individual activity over any form of corporate authority or system of ideals; it also supports a completely free-market approach to the trade of information and admittance; lastly, it promotes the notion that computers can have a beneficial indeed, life-changing effect. Documents based on this hacker ethic have been socializing the Internet since eighties. As it is perhaps going too far to suggest that the hacker ethic be a precise formulation yet that it would welcome such a claim, it in any case clearly aspires to a deontological to a certain extent than utilitarian and relativism position: aphorisms such as 'all information must be free' (or, more commonly, 'all information wants to be free') are offered as universal maxims. The hacker ethic is a permissive and individualist code, a particular brand of anarchy that, at its best, does some promises made by corporate capitalist meritocracy that are rarely achieved outside a cyberspace. A hacker ethic shows that cyberspace is a contested territory, and that the discussion of free-market economics and moderate democracy that has offered the foundation for much online activity is taken more critically than corporate oligarchies that pay lip-service to an open market that they look to monopolize: information wants to be free. Hackers are not the only means of thinking through an ethics of a cyberspace, but they possibly symbolize the most considerable contribution made by cyberspace and new technologies to our daily lives and practices. The adage that information needs to be free, and the libertarianism that it represents, has often found itself at odds with and holding of, at other times the capitalist libertarianism that has driven a further cyberspace since the end of the twentieth century. Karl Marx argued that the idea of philosophy is not to comprehend the world, but to transform it. Couched in the philosophy of hacking is a distinct tension between the decisive goal of the complete perceptive of abstract systems that occur technologically instantiated, and the distinguishing practical prospective there are to form real-world effects from the manipulation of the hardware of such systems. With Hacktivism, hackers have revived the original culture of hacking to resist currently the prevalent system of them all: global capitalism. The first extensively recognized an example was a 1998 virtual protest against the Mexican government, in commonality with the Zapatista rebels. The protest consisted of a simple script that contributors could use to direct their Web browsers continually to reload the government's main Web page, overloading the site with traffic in the hope that it would slow or crash. A New York-based group of activists formed this incident, dubbed Floodnet, who called themselves the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT).In the years since the EDT's Floodnet, the term Hacktivism has been applied to a wider variety of transgressive, network-enabled types of activism. Wray claims that more than 8,000 participants conducted the action. The EDT also attacked Pentagon Web sites, the stated reason being that the US Government has been a supporter of the Mexican Government, which is oppressive in its treatment of Mexico's indigenous populations. Other hacktivist actions have included attacks on Sri Lankan embassies and consulates in several countries, the US Department of Energy, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, the City of London, and India's Atomic Research Center. (Calabrese, Andrew 2004), The hacktivist persona that Wray describes as a blend of "the computerized activist and the politicized hacker" is a curious one, in that few of the two groups whose identities are involved - progressive activists and computer hackers endorse such an image or practice. For the legitimacy of the "hacker ethic" is threatened by the association made by law enforcement and the press between civil disobedients and the criminalized image of the "black hat" hacker. (Calabrese, Andrew 2004) Thus this Political cracking consists of hacktions intended at public or policy influence, commenced by hackers. This includes the vast majority of Hacktivism activity to date and spans a broad range of issues and nations (Paul A. Taylor 2005). It also includes a wide range of strategy, with site defacements, redirects, denial-of-service attacks, information theft, and sabotage below which I will define. Calling these activities "political cracking" draws on many members of the hacker community sustain a feature that. Among early computer devotees, a "hack" was a technical "feat . . . imbued with innovation, style, and technical virtuosity," and people "called themselves 'hackers' with great pride" (Levy 1984:23). Many younger hackers also use the peculiarity between hacking and cracking to divide criminal activity from exploration. Yet political cracking is the thread of Hacktivism that relics closest to its hacker roots. Certainly, political cracking can be seen consequently of the informal "hacker ethic" that has conducted many first and second-generation hackers. Most discussions of the hacker ethic refer to the six tenets summarized by Levy: - Access to computers-and anything which might teach you something about the way the world work-should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On imperative! - All information should be free. - Mistrust authority-promote decentralization. - Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. - You can create art and beauty on a computer. - Computers can change your life for the better. (Levy 1984:39-49). Levy 1984 http://www.campusactivism.org/html-resource/hackers/section4.html The hacker ethic equally drives and rationalizes much of the activity of political crackers-and of political coders, too. Many issues that hacktivists have clinched are direct results of this hacker ethic. Problems such as Internet censorship, privacy, security, they all purely link access to encryption, and intellectual property rights to the beliefs that information must be free and authority distrusted. These are the issues that have stimulated much of the action of political crackers, mainly in the early days before the term Hacktivism was even in play. The reality that the activities of political crackers are usually illegal does not mean they are essentially destructive. Certainly, the "hacker ethic" is extensively seen as preventing destructive activity. It is against hacker ethics to amend any data besides the logs that are desirable to clean their tracks. They have no requirement or desire to obliterate data as the malicious crackers. They are there to investigate the system and learn more. Distinct forms of Hacktivism, engaging in any form of political cracking needs at least a least understanding of code and hacking techniques, which is still almost unheard of outside the hacker community. Political cracking is thus approximately entirely confined to hacktivists who come from hacker backgrounds or who have spent enough time on hacker sites to obtain the needed skills. These crackers can work alone or in small groups (at times called hacker gangs) in undertaking their diverse hacktions. The sphere of Hacktivism now comprises: Site defacement that is hacking into a Web server and reinstating the home page with a political message, typically a condemnation of the organization that they have hacked, or of several other root or organization with which it is linked Sites redirect that hacking into a Web server and varying its addressing so that would-be visitors to the site are instead conveyed to a substitute site, typically one that is decisive of the hacked site. Information theft that is hacking into a secretive network and thieving information. The hack is shown to upset the organization with the slackness of its information security, not dispensing the stolen information. Information theft and distribution that hacking into a private network, pilfering information, and bringing out that information online. Site parodies that are forming parody sites that satire a target organization, frequently by emulating the manifestation of its Web site, and by situating the spoof at a URL (Web address) that is probable to be confused with the address of the original spoofed site. Virtual sabotage that online actions intended to damage the information technologies of the mark Viruses that forming self-executing software programs that proliferate and dispense messages or incapacitate Software development that is forming software tools that provide explicit political purposes, typically created and distributed as open-source software A virtual sit-in that is creating code that permits protesters rapidly to reload Web pages on beleaguered servers, overloading them with traffic waiting, they crash. Thus, Hacking has been greatly indistinct by the effects of the media and the diverse social actors who have enthusiastically sought to support negative ethical understandings of the activity. Most considerably, appreciation of the hackers' original ethical agenda known as the hacker ethic was subordinated to the much more negative moral decisions used by social groups such as the computer security industry. Such groups required concurrently to distance themselves from hackers and strengthen their own group commonality through a procedure of stigmatization. This process implicated the thriving media demonization of hackers and an associated failure to understand the traits of the computer secretive that permit it to be represented as an identifiable culture in its own right. Besides, such internally oriented hacker friendly accounts of hacking advocated that the original hacker ethic could still be recognized within the stigmatized hacking community. As Hacktivism combines both political activism and hacking methods. Hacktivism is depicted as a modern refashioning of the original hacker ethic. Access to computers - and anything which might teach you something about the way the world work - should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative! All information should be free Mistrust Authority - Promote Decentralisation Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position You can create art and beauty on a computer Computers can change your life for the better (Levy, 1984:40-5) The above proposal represents Levy's summary of the hacker ethic. Though their action is now synonymous with malevolent interruption into other people's computer systems, this declaration of the hacker ethic symbolized the first generation's alleged moral code and political values. Though, Levy's proposal fails to distinguish that the phrase hacking has a wider appliance than just to the computing society. Within contradict cultural circles it portrays an inspired and resourceful attitude held, not just to computers, but toward diverse technologies. The presently more partial and devastatingly negative involvement of hacking with malevolent computer intrusion is a moderately current development. From the mid eighties onwards, the ethical conditions of hacking endure a steady decline, both because of social stigmatization by contrasting groups, and as hackers began to center completely upon the technological means of their computing action to the elimination of any broader political or theoretical ends (Adam 2001). The subsequent schema, despite the instinctive classificatory difficulties linked with trying to illustrate the transient environment of computer culture, traces the diverse generations of hackers to give a framework for the emergence of Hacktivism and the claim that it symbolizes a re-emergence of the original hacker ethic. Levy (1984) identified the following three main hacker generations: - "True" hackers: these were the pioneering computer aficionados of the earliest days of computing who experimented with the capabilities of the large mainframe computers at such US universities as MIT during the 1950s and 1960s. - Hardware hackers: these were the computer innovators who, beginning in the 1970s, played a key role in the personal computing revolution which Served widely to distribute and dramatically decentralize computing hardware. - Game hackers: in the 1980s these were the creators of popular gaming software applications for the hardware developed by the previous generation. As Hacktivism uses' computer techniques used from the pre-existing hacker community, recognizing where hacking ends and Hacktivism begins is complex definitively. The biased motivations of hacking were restricted to varying extents in the earlier generations, but leaned by the more instantaneous and imperative concerns hackers had with attaining access to systems with a complication adequate with their technical knowledge. In an age of what Roszak calls "electronic populism," hackers were equally instrumental and inspiring figures. The politicized features of the early forms of hacking to exemplify how, in spite of the transitory loss of the hacker ethic, the activity's intrinsic values have contributed to the rise of Hacktivism. For the first and second generations, both the desire to hack and the effort to make technology more independent and therefore accessible were harmonizing facets of the hacker agenda. The Hacker Ethic's emphasis on play and fun create the basis for opposition to top-down management of their work, and for the positive alternative of self-organization and overall operational autonomy (Adam, 2004). In May 1971, Abbie Hoffman played a foremost role in the establishment of a subversive newsletter entitled the Youth International Party Line (YIPL), which exemplified this conflation of the technical and the political. Its first issue vigorously opposed the US Government's decision to heaved extra revenue for the Vietnam conflict through the taxing of telephone bills, and it restricted a form be filled and sent to the company that stated: "Because of the atrocious and destructive war the United States is conducting against Vietnam, the sum of federal excise tax has been removed from this bill. Paying the tax means assisting to pay for outright atrocities, for the assassination of innocent women and children." In September 1973, YIPL transformed its name to the Technological American Party (TAP). Its new bulletin provided a raft of comprehensive technical information mainly about how to "phone-phreak" obtain free telephone calls through the technical exploitation of the telephone system but also integrated a range of artifacts comprising burglar alarms, lock-picking, pirate radio and how illegitimately to vary gas and electric meters. During early eighties, TAP ceased publication, but its shroud was taken up in the same year with the instigate of the phone-phreak/hacker magazine 2600, whose the editor's choice of the pseudonym Emmanuel Goldstein instantly specified anti-Big Brother government bent. Some years back a German hacker group called the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) was acknowledged which directly addressed the political insinuations of the original hacker ethic "All information wants to be free," with the following statement of its aims: A development into an "information society" requires a new Human Right of worldwide free communication. The Chaos Clubclaims a border-ignoring freedom of information that deals with the effects of technologies on human society and individuals. It supports the creation of knowledge and information in this respect. (Bowcott and Hamilton, 1990:53) In the consequences of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the CCC was active in the propagation of alternative information concerning the severity of the incident, and worked with the German Green Party in a joint assessment of the German Federal parliament's prologue of new computer systems. Anti-corporatist ethics sustained from the earliest hackers and was also an essential constituent of the second generation, as designated by the names of some early start-up companies such as the Itty-Bitty Machine Company (a parody of the name IBM) and Kentucky Fried Computers (Bowcott and Hamilton, 1990:142). This courage was not to last, though, and the preliminary socially liberating prospectively of such computers as the Apple II ultimately given ways to their status as mere commodities: "all the bright potentials seem so distressingly attuned with corporate control and commercial use" (Bowcott and Hamilton, 1990:155). The commodification of information followed swiftly, with the third generation's involvement to the huge growth in the computer gaming industry. The contradict cultural hopes pinned upon the computer as vehicle for anti-establishment values stayed disgruntled as the spirit of Thomas Paine gave way to the electronic hunger of PacMan. The fourth generation revealed hesitant political credentials. The early hackers need to encourage free access to computers and information for improving a professed democratic deficit within society providing way in time to more self-centered concerns concerning access to computing for its own sake. Antiauthoritarian approaches within hacking have been seen less as a kind of youthful uprising and more as a sign of a provoked aspiration to consume computing resources (Taylor, 1999:53-6), so that "teenage hackers look like an estranged shopping culture deprived of purchasing opportunities more than a terrorist network" (Ross, 1991:90). Such a distrustful appraisal is vibrantly developed in Douglas Coupland's "factional" account of the hacker-type ways of life of the young programmers working at Microsoft's headquarters in Seattle. Microserfs identify "the first full-scale integration of the corporate realm into the private" (Microserfs, 1993), with the supplying of shower facilities for workers who required jogging throughout their lunch break being pursued by much more considerable developments: In the 1980s [when] corporate integration punctured the next realm of a corporate life invasion at "campuses" like Microsoft and Apple - with the next level of intrusion being that borderline between work and life blurred to the point of unrecognisability. Give us your entire life or we will not allow you to work on cool projects. In the 1990s, corporations do not even hire people anymore. People become their own corporations. It was inevitable. (Coupland, 1995:211) The recognition of microserfs as the fifth generation of hackers thus marks the depths of the original hacker ethic. Coupland portrays the degree to which Microsoft's co-option of hacker culture has been so thriving that through such corporate friendly distinctiveness as "high output, maverick forms of creative work energy, and an obsessive identification with on-line endurance (and endorphin highs)", it now merely serves to valorize "the entrepreneurial codes of silicon futurism" (Ross, 1991:90). The key implication of Hacktivism is the way in which it marks a retreat from such a persistent intrusion of commodities values into communal life and an associated reassertion of, but more contradict cultural values. Hacktivism raises an integer of challenges for visions of online civic consideration. In the broadest terms, it draws consideration to the fact that compactly structured participatory opportunities might not efficiently contain the Internet's political impact. Nevertheless, it too raises more finicky challenges to most the detailed issues posed by deliberative democratic system. The emergence of extensive hacking produced vivid expressions in the media of the feeling that society was susceptible to contravene in the smooth running of its new expertise (Taylor, 1999). The damage a successful super virus could do is almost incalculable. "It would be as if the Millennium Bug has actually done everything it was feared it could do," said one London-based computer security expert last week. One source close to British intelligence services says MI5 believes both the Basque separatist group ETA and the Kurdish terror organizations have drawn up plans aimed at crashing air traffic control systems through the use of hacking or viruses. Irish Republican terrorists are also thought to have considered similar methods. "The super-virus is going to happen soon," the source said. "There are people out there with that intention. They may coincide their actions with protests against the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, just to muddy the water". Many organizations connected with anarchist violence in London number hackers in their ranks. ("Coming to a screen near you", Observer, 7 May 2000:19 http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,218226,00.html) Conclusion A fundamental constituent of hacking that has reemerged within Hacktivism is the omnipresent targeting of technological resourcefulness and snooping. There are two key features of this approach. First, a main element of the hacker artistic is technological re-appropriation: hackers seek to use a technological artifact for rationales not foreseen by its unique designers. Second, the omnipresent nature of the hacker ethos supports a propensity to look beyond the detailed qualities of individual technologies and in its place to treat all technology as fraction of a broader system with which can be played. Farther, the keenness of hacktivists to merge customary forms of off-line political protest with new on-line forms shows a familiarity and alleviate with shifting between the practical and the physical that may be lacking in more conformist establishment structures. Hacking is now almost wholly associated with computers because, more than any other artifact, they exemplify the abstract, universal qualities in which hackers seek to plunge themselves. The rise of Hacktivism symbolizes a successful added re-appropriation of this recent close involvement with computer technology and its recombination with the broader perspective of the unique, atavistic inquisitiveness hackers' hold toward not just computers but technical systems overall. Hacktivists, though, have sought to expunge the way in which hackers leaned to privilege admittance to technological means, or the hands-on imperative, over the really social ends that such an imperative could help to achieve. They do remain devoted to the hacker ethic; in as far as they use the communication and media channels of the concern against itself: to a certain extent than just railing against "the system," hacktivists treat it as somewhat to be influenced and re-engineered for substitute purposes. We have seen how a key aspect of the original definition of a hack was the manner an artifact or system was used in a way unexpected by its original designers either, or, more than this, in a way completely opposed to its original purpose. In as far as the computer code upon which the Internet is based is but a technological instantiation of a broader, less accurate capitalist code, hacktivists request to use that instantiation against this broader political agenda. I believe that it is hacktivists' ingenious re-engineering of the technological code controlled within the Internet that in fact eases them to engage more effectively with the more conceptual capitalist code that absurdly has most effect upon the purported "real world." References: Hacking History http://www.campusactivism.org/html-resource/hackers/section4.html Coupland, D. (1995) Microserfs, New York: Flamingo. Available at: http://textfiles.poboxes.info/russian/cyberlib.narod.ru/lib/cin/coupla01.html Taylor, P. (1999) Hackers: crime in the digital sublime, London: Routledge:53-6 Bowcott, O. and Hamilton, S. (1990) Beating the System, London: Bloomsbury:155 Levy, S. 1984. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York: Penguin Books. Adam, A. (2004). Hacking into hacking: Gender and the hacker phenomenon. Computers and Society Vol. 32(7). Paul A. Taylor (2005), From hackers to hacktivists: speed bumps on the global superhighway, New Media and Society 7(5):625-646 Alison Adam (2001), Computer ethics in a different voice, Information and Organization 11, p.235-261 Alison Adam (2005), Gender, Ethics and information technology, Palgrave Macmillan, p.128-146, Chapter 7: Hacking into Hacking: Gender and the Hacker Phenomenon Calabrese, Andrew (2004), Virtual non-violence Civil disobedience and political violence in the information age, info 6(5) pp.326-338 Also available at: http://spot.colorado.edu/calabres/Calabrese%20(civl%20dis).pdf Tim Jordan, Paul A. Taylor; Hacktivism and Cyberwars: Rebels with a Cause Routledge, 2004 Andrew Ross, HACKING AWAY AT THE COUNTERCULTURE by ANDREW ROSS Princeton University Copyright, Postmodern Culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (Sep. 1990). Also available at: http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.990/ross-1.990 STEWART BRAND, WE OWE IT ALL TO THE HIPPIES Forget antiwar protests, Woodstock, even long hair; The real legacy of the sixties generation is the computer revolution, TIME Magazine Domestic, SPECIAL ISSUE, Spring 1995 Volume 145, No. 12 Johnson DG, Computer Ethics, 2nd ed., Prentice-Hall (1994) Also Available at: http://members.aye.net/hippie/hippie/special_.htm Read More