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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.'"
a lot of you kids seem to forget that. they went to jail, they walked for miles rather than take the bus and they were beat up by rednecks.
You don't necessarily have to a hacker to be viewed as one under federal law...But hacking into private computers, or even spreading the information from a hack, could lead to charges under the CFAA.
So you do have to hack in order to be a hacker? Or release hacked information? Is there a legal definition of "hacker" and is it as horrible as the one in the mind of whoever wrote this inane summary?
Things in the virtual world should be treated as their real-world equivalents. DDOS is the same as preventing access to a business, this is illegal in the physical world. You can picket, but you cannot impeded customers' access to the facility. For Doxing, if you steal the information, you are liable. This should be no different in the virtual world. If the info was publically accessible, go for it. If it was obtained illegally, then you have to pay the consequences.
This is a false dichotomy. Something can be both cyber crime and civil disobedience. In fact, that is exactly what civil disobedience is supposed to be. It is not being loud, or annoying, or marching or protesting. Those things are basic 1st Amendment rights.
Civil disobedience, on the other hand, is intentionally breaking a law that is considered unjust or immoral, in order to draw attention to the injustice. Think of Thoreau, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr, etc. But note that none of them would break the law and then complain about being charged with the crime. In fact, that was the whole point, being caught, and getting attention.
It's not really civil disobedience unless what you're doing is a crime.
I always thought Civil Disobedience was about passively breaking the law, not actively breaking in, so hacktivism doesn't really count as C.D.
I'm open to being clued-in here....
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Hacktivism: Civil Disobedience Or Cyber Crime?
Yes.
Why is it news, we've always known hacking was frowned upon and prosecuted. What's the big hairy deal here?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Civil disobedience by definition is crime. If it's not a crime, then it's no longer disobedience. It's being a citizen or websurfer consumer or whatever you want to call yourself.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Civil disobedience is about making a statement that a law is unjust. Therefore, it has to be done in the open, and you have to take responsibility for your actions. If you are hiding what you are doing, then you're just breaking the law.
The "civil disobedience or cybercrime" dichotomy demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of what "civil disobedience" means.
How can you get a permit to do an illegal thing? - Dr. McCoy. Star Trek III.
Yes, poor name, but the BBC recently put together a decent documentary about Hacktivists amongst other cyber security topics called The Hackers. Nothing in it may be news to you but it may be a useful resource for someone you know who doesn't understand the point or how it is done. True to the documentary form, they spent most of it on interviews with the people involved.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Yes.
Cybercrime: what rational people refer to as crime.
-Turkey
Of course, there are gray areas there, but generally speaking, if what you do costs the target money? You're probably committing a crime.
I just wish they would leave out when writing the summary. It makes it so to understand.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
The real protest in civil disobedience starts when you pay the price, not when you do the deed. This is what gets the dialogue started, this is how you draw sympathy to your cause. The activists of decades past understood this. When exactly did we as a culture forget?
Just because TF accidentally a word doesn't mean you have to be so. You I'm sayin?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The Slashdot headline is the title of TFA, so its not the Slashdot submitter -- or not just the submitter, at any rate, unless they also happen to be the author of the headline of TFA -- that has the problem with the definition of "civil disobedience".
How about publication of information publicly available on computer servers... say a list of registered hand gun owners in a certain region? Or do the laws only work when its convenient for the people with power?
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
That is quite the unfair comparison, and Aaron Swartz is no Bradley Manning. Aaron Swartz downloaded academic materials that that were otherwise available to the public and hardly secret. Bradley Manning is a traitor that sought to embarrass his country by exposing as many secrets en mass as he could. Manning did significant harm to international diplomatic relations and endangered countless lives. It's a bit like saying a protestor holding a sign is the same as the saboteur derailing a train, it's intellectually dishonest at best.
Here's the thing: You can claim justice for hacktivism all you like, but when someone takes down your site or disrupts your system, you will not approve. Just like a thief has no moral conscience when taking things, will still call the police when someone breaks into his house. The question isn't whether it's laudable (not all civil disobedience qualifies as acts of heroism) it's about whether you want this done to you. The government has an interest in keeping social order and so it makes sense to categorize hacktivism as a crime.
If you break the law you are committing a crime, this includes hiding Jews in Nazi Germany or smuggling slaves out of the Antebellum South via the Underground Railway. Yes, breaking bad laws still make you a criminal. I've read commentary saying Aaron Swartz was no Robin Hood, but Robin Hood was considered an extremely vile criminal by law enforcement in his day, if the legend is to be believed.
Civil Disobedience is one way of disobeying unjust laws. It's where you show open, public contempt for a bad law in the hope that people will see how bad it is. However, it's not the only form of legitimate resistance to unjust laws. In a police state, resisting bad laws anonymously might be the only viable way to protest them. Sometimes that can be civil disobedience too (see "'Repent Harlequin' said the Tick-Tock Man," for a fictional example or some of the plots against Hitler for real life examples).
Sometimes the purpose of disobeying an unjust law isn't a political protest, but to reduce the harm caused by the law. People who hid Jews under Nazi regimes had no illusions that Der Fuehrer was going to change his mind, they just wanted those particular Jews to be able to avoid being murdered by the State.
So, some forms of "Hactivism" are public disobedience, some are Anonymous, and some are based on the concept of harm reduction. I'm not sure which version Aaron Swartz was going for, but I don't think it was public disobedience. Some of the rationale I've read from him suggests it was more in the "harm reduction" category, allowing scholars who were being discriminated against in 3rd world countries access to 1st world research.
I don't think it was worth dying over, though his public suicide does seem to have ended up as a particularly effective form of public disobedience. (Still, it's not going to have much impact on hiding research behind pay-walls. More likely it will end up working against our current draconian computer crime laws, if anything, which was not the actual issue Aaron Swartz was originally trying to address. This is what people are missing, he didn't "win" on the original political issue he was trying to fight though it does seem like JSTOR has given him a partial victory. Rather, the prosecution was so harsh and out of proportion is opened up a whole new set of civil liberty issues related to the case.)
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
It's not that simple. These attacks go after information in the private sector. The basic idea is, no one -- self-styled activist or not -- has the right to mess with other people's property. If you do such a thing, it's a perfectly justified response if you get punched in the mouth, dragged off to jail, or otherwise fucked with in return.
Do not fuck with other people's shit. Break that rule, and you've lost the argument and all your moral and ethical cover, all at once.
Stay on the high road. It's the only one that dependably leads anywhere.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Under your definition most cyber crime isn't civil disobediance. Laws against DDOS, vandalism, and breaking into secure websites are not unjust. I would say removing DRM is good example of civil disobediance. So is sharing the secret info that wistleblowers release.
But not everything that is illegal is a crime.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Hacktivism: Civil Disobedience Or Cyber Crime?
Yes.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
> But not everything that is illegal is a crime.
Most of that which is illegal is not a crime.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This, however, ignores the time variable of costing. Information degrades in cost as a function of time.
You can see this in data storage. I remember when the first 10 kb drives came out. Kilobytes. Not Megabytes. Not Gigabytes. Not Terabytes.
They cost a lot more than 2 TB drives do now.
Ignoring time and the effect of time on pricing and value, perceived or otherwise, is foolish.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Many people argue that if you break the law on principle and don't accept the punishment you're doing it wrong. This is incorrect. There are, as you so nicely illustrate, other approaches. Indeed, the reason for acquiescing to punishment is precisely to highlight the law's abuse! Arguing that protest is unethical if it does not accept punishment is a neat trick. In effect, it is often little different from arguing that the law is right because it is the law.
The problem is that the American civil rights movement has been taken a standard for protest. But it was an unusual case. The protesters knew that they were in fact acting in accordance with their legal rights, and could appeal to the federal government for support. This is hardly a universal illustration of how to defy the law.
The other standard for civil disobedience is Gandhi. But like the civil rights movement, he used it because it was an effective tactic:
The underground railroad is an example that makes clear that the ideal of submitting to punishment can be antithetical to principled, legitimate defiance of the law. On the Volokh Conspiracy, a commenter named Mark Nelson makes the point:
The idea that one cannot legitimately protest the law without suffering for it is an oddly puritanical myth that needs to be debunked.
crime.
A little bit offtopic:
How do I prove my incapability as a 'hacker'?
I like to read anything that I'm not supposed to know. I like to learn how to do things I'm not supposed to know how to do. I do only light activism very rarely, nothing 'the man' should be worried about.
I cannot program anything and my technical abilities are pretty much none by slashdot standards..
yet I feel all of the above are more than enough to frame me as a criminal mastermind.
How can I preempt and prove my ineptitude?
A blog I run for the wealth
This is a stupid question. An act doesn't stop being criminal if it is done as civil disobedience. Saying an act is civil disobedience isn't a defense and isn't a "get out of jail free" card. If you commit a crime as an act of civil disobedience you should be ready to serve the time.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
So the eeeeevil government forced the bankers to commit fraud? Suuuuuuuurre it did.Go do your homework and come back when you have learned that calling someone an idiot in the subject line followed by an army of strawmen is no way to have a discussion.
> but hacking into private computers, or even spreading the information from a hack, could lead to charges under the CFAA.'
You forgot to add "unless you are a government employee."
Get rid of those oxymorons and the problem goes away. I would expect idiots to think, that if they were as rich as God and had both law, public opinion, and the constitution on there side, would natural attack someone who proved there property power influence and popularity to be entirely fictional. They would not be idiots if they just adjusted their expectations to reality, as those of us who have not the world's lawyers and armies at our calk are accustomed to doing.
Anything input into a computer is in the public domain, by definition, it will be abundantly evident one of these days. If it has to be put in a computer, then it is no longer owned nor private, simple as that. Might as well get used to it. And why is that a problem? If it's supposed to stay owned or private, don't let a computer find out about it, or at least don't tell one yourself. Give up the convenience and profit, maybe keep the ownership and property. I mean I don't buy a printed book, rip out the pages, scan them, digitally convert the content, and put it up as a torrent. Too much trouble for too little gain. Though I suppose that may change.
I'm a barbarian you see, I work when I please as I please. I'm a Lutheran, Hier stehe Ich. Ich kann nicht anders. And ya'll are headed for my world, the world without laws and property and money, the world with gossip and barter and community.
Framing the question this way misses the point. Civil disobedience is "disobedience" precisely because people choose to violate the law to make a point and are willing to accept the consequences.
It's that readiness to put themselves at legal risk that makes civil disobedience a potent tool for change.
You can't disobey if it isn't illegal. People engaging in civil "obedience" are indistinguishable from everyone else.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Civil disobedience (as opposed to demonstraion or petition) is an act of breaking a law that is intended to bring attention to the seriousness of injustice that is being protested. Usually the fact that civil disobedience is considered acceptable for a large number of people means that the act is either supposed to be lawful, or is not a serious crime, however at the moment when it is performed it is illegal, and people who perform it accept the consequences of it.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Anti-Govt != Anti-National
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