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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.
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.
How can you get a permit to do an illegal thing? - Dr. McCoy. Star Trek III.
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?
The sit-in protesters actually didn't just expect to be arrested. They fully expected to be beaten senseless, and then arrested and jailed, then abused in jail for a while, then lose in court, then go back to jail for a while, then lose whatever college scholarships they had (many of them were students), then be saddled with a criminal record the rest of their life.
That might give you an idea of how ridiculously brave those people were. Just a thought for the upcoming Martin Luther King holiday.
I am officially gone from
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."