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

MLK and friends went to jail as well

[alen]

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.

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:MLK and friends went to jail as well

[Obfuscant]

The only way to break insane IP "rules" ... is to crash the system.

Well yes, "crashing the system" is "breaking the rules."

What you want is to CHANGE the rules, and crashing the system is the last thing you want to do to accomplish that goal. If you "crash the system" then you are, in the legal and legislative system, part of the problem that the system must be reinforced to protect against. You are not going to be seen as part of the solution.

It's like protesting the 65MPH speed limit on the interstate highway by driving 90MPH. The legislature isn't going to say "this shows that we need to increase the speed limit", they are going to increase the budget for the state police so there are more cops to give out more tickets. Or protesting TSA rules about screening procedures by trying to sneak your way past all the screeners with a pocket knife, or smuggling in a prohibited item through the vendor access system. That just proves that there are dangerous people that TSA needs to protect us against, not that they are a failure that needs to be eliminated.

Information just wants to be free.

Information isn't a sentient thing, and thus has no "want" associated with it. YOU want information to be free, even information that other people spent money creating. That's an entirely different thing.

Re:MLK and friends went to jail as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, just because you were also arrested doesn't evangelize your cause to the same level as civil rights

Or conversely, just because you were also arrested doesn't demonize your cause to the same level as beating your wife. In other words, legality is neither an argument for or against whether an act is just or wrong.

Re:MLK and friends went to jail as well

[Hatta]

Well yes, "crashing the system" is "breaking the rules."

Unless you're a banker.

Information isn't a sentient thing, and thus has no "want" associated with it.

Information tends towards freedom. Like water tends to assume the shape of its container. Saying "wants" is a cute anthropomorphism that is irrelevant to the point.

Re:MLK and friends went to jail as well

[Bureaucromancer]

Moreover, by definition Civil Disobedience involves breaking the law.

Re:MLK and friends went to jail as well

[sjames]

When you demand that banks ignore all the risk indicators when making home loans,

Sounds nice but it's a DAMNED LIE

Nobody ordered the banks to make bad loans on McMansions. They were ordered to stop a number of discriminatory practices like redlining and to find a way to make mortgage loans to first time buyers without requiring as large of a down payment. Those loans should have been modest in size, sufficient for a starter home, not for a McMansion. They most certainly were not ordered to build time bombs into those loans and offer bad advice as to the risks involved.

Most assuredly nobody ordered them to make a bunch of huge hot-potato loans and fraudulantly re-package them as AAA rated investments.

But the bankers who did all of that sure appreciate your gullibility.

Real world equivalents

[tokencode]

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.

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:Real world equivalents

[Penguinisto]

Point of order:

Most cities/townships actually try to notify the businesses at least 3 months beforehand, and go out of their way (in most cases) to accommodate the businesses affected.

There's also the demonstrable need to do road maintenance, else the entrance to your business eventually winds up a potholed obstacle course.

False Dichotomy

[Palestrina]

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.

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.

Civil Disobedience

[Millennium]

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?

Re:active vs. passive?

[dkleinsc]

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.