Hacktivism: Civil Disobedience Or Cyber Crime?

An anonymous reader writes "You don't necessarily have to a hacker to be viewed as one under federal law. ProPublica breaks down acts of 'hacktivism' to see what is considered criminal under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It points out that both Aaron Swartz and Bradley Manning were charged under the CFAA. Quoting: 'A DDoS attack can be charged as a crime under the CFAA, as it “causes damage” and can violate a web site’s terms of service. The owner of the site could also file a civil suit citing the CFAA, if they can prove a temporary server overload resulted in monetary losses. ... The charges for doxing depend on how the information was accessed, and the nature of published information. Simply publishing publicly available information, such as phone numbers found in a Google search, would probably not be charged under the CFAA. But hacking into private computers, or even spreading the information from a hack, could lead to charges under the CFAA.'"

Comments

Re:Real world equivalents

[lattyware]

I hate how hard this concept appears to be for so many people - it's so damn obvious, why does the fact it's online make a damn bit of difference? Likewise, if I send a communication to someone, the government shouldn't be able to start looking at it. It's true for post, so why do so many governments keep trying to pretend it shouldn't be so for email?

Re:MLK and friends went to jail as well

[Hatta]

Oh, we remember. It's the authorities who need to remember that sometimes they are on the wrong side of history.

Re:False Dichotomy

[dkleinsc]

Well, actually Thoreau's idea when he coined the term "civil disobedience" was to simply disobey such a law. It was Gandhi who noticed the publicity value of disobeying unjust laws and watching the authorities dish out beat-downs to enforce it.

What's also particularly interesting is that many acts widely seen as civil disobedience were acts that weren't legitimately against the law in the first place. For instance, Martin Luther King's crime in Birmingham was that he walked down a sidewalk in the front of a group of people singing songs (specifically protected by the First Amendment), following traffic laws, towards City Hall. He was arrested only because the local police chief had gotten a court order that said that Martin Luther King wasn't allowed to lead or participate in any act of protest in Birmingham, which wasn't a legitimate order for the court to give but gave the police the excuse they needed.

Also notable is that not all law-breaking that various political groups engage in is (in my view) civil disobedience. Some left-wing groups, for instance, like to commit crimes like trespassing in order to try to draw attention to a completely unrelated injustice. It usually doesn't work, because (a) the authorities don't do anything stupid like beat them up, (b) they pick targets that don't match what they're trying to protest, (c) their criminal acts don't do anything that would right the injustice, and (d) they don't do it in a way that attracts media attention.

Also relevant is that completely illegitimate and illegal use of force towards protesters now gets significant support from people who really should know better. For instance, the various cases of police pepper-spraying Occupy Wall Street protesters for the heinous crime of walking down a sidewalk holding signs actually had a lot of people saying how glad they were that the cops were doing that.