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On Hacktivism
z84976 writes "Oxblood Ruffin, of cDc fame, has produced a nice article discussing various aspects of hactivism and some of the approaches used by their own Hacktivismo group in supporting freedom (of thought, mainly) on the internet. Check it out over at The Register when you get a chance."
To quote cDc at DefCon a couple of years ago.
Personally I think 'hacktivism' is a grossly overused excuse for vandalism. Hacking sites as a 'service' to the operators is passe... now the kiddies have to act like they've got some sort of noble political agenda.
No need. Just email a valid, encrypted file to somebody in the UK. They can go to prison for 2 years if they fail on request by the police to decrypt it.
The legal burden is on the owner of an encrypted file to prove that they never had the key, and anyone using encryption is guilty until proven innocent, on the basis that anyone using encryption must be a snuff-child-porn baron
Back in 1995 I had some arguments... that is um... discussions (in Cannes at Milia) with Nicholas Negroponte and John Perry Barlow. Both Negroponte and Barlow believed that the Internet was an unstoppable force that would inevitably make countries like China become free.
My argument was that the Chinese and other repressive governments would be sure to set up national proxies with filtering that blocked out sites the government didn't want people to see and kept track of what people were accessing.
Both Negroponte and Barlow told me that was impossible and would never happen. They also pointed out that the TCP/IP is designed to route around obstacles.
Well, I've been proven right (so why am I not running Media Lab or flying around the world giving speeches?). China and other countries (Singapore, etc.) have in fact put in national proxies and are blocking thousands of sites, tracking people's usage, and putting people in jail.
On the other hand, I think that there is a hope that Barlow and Negroponte will eventually turn out to be right in the end, as hackers and other renegades put in alternative links via satellite and other means, which bypass these government blockades.
If enough of that happens, the blockades will come down, since they won't be useful any longer.
But I think there will be a long hard struggle befoe that happens.
The only problem with mainstream versus independant media sources is that the majority of US citizens tend to believe that anything that hasn't been reported by a major media outlet isn't verfiable. It's kind of funny actually, considering mainstream media rarely reports anything other than common knowledge and murders in Hollywood(check out CNN's front page)...it's also a little sad, because this seems to be all society wants to hear.
So, in my mind, hacking a web page can never really be justified--no matter what the cause is. On the other hand, refusing to obey government censorship (in places like China) by hacking through their censors is, in my mind, is a very noble thing.
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