<div dir="ltr"><div><div>I found both of these articles to be interesting as we search for effective means of communication. I have pasted the full NYT article below because some might find access to be difficult.<br><br><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/what-is-a-hacktivist/?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20130114">http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/what-is-a-hacktivist/?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20130114</a><br>
<br></div>The Techdirt article speaks to DDOS as a form of protest... and the interesting technique of asking that DDOS be recognized as a valid form of protest.<br><br><a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130111/08053821642/anonymous-launches-white-house-petition-saying-ddos-should-be-recognized-as-valid-form-protest.shtml">http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130111/08053821642/anonymous-launches-white-house-petition-saying-ddos-should-be-recognized-as-valid-form-protest.shtml</a><br>
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<div class=""> </div></div><div id="opinionator"><div align="left"><span class="" title="2013-01-13T20:30:36+00:00">January 13, 2013, <span>8:30 pm</span></span><h3 class="">What is a ‘Hacktivist’?</h3><address class="">By <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/peter-ludlow/" class="" title="See all posts by PETER LUDLOW">PETER LUDLOW</a></address><div class="">
<p>The
untimely death of the young Internet activist Aaron Swartz, apparently
by suicide, has prompted an outpouring of reaction in the digital world.
Foremost among the debates being reheated - one which had already grown
in the wake of larger and more daring data breaches in the past few
years - is whether Swartz's activities as a "hacktivist" were being
unfairly defined as malicious or criminal. In particular, critics (as
well as Swartz's family in a <a href="http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/aaron-swartzs-memorial-servi.html">formal statement</a>)
have focused on the federal government's indictment of Swartz for
downloading millions of documents from the scholarly database JSTOR, an
action which JSTOR itself had declined to prosecute.</p><p>I believe the
debate itself is far broader than the specifics of this unhappy case,
for if there was prosecutorial overreach it raises the question of
whether we as a society created the enabling condition for this sort of
overreach by letting the demonization of hacktivists go unanswered.
Prosecutors do not work in a vacuum, after all; they are more apt to
pursue cases where public discourse supports their actions. The debate
thus raises an issue that, as philosopher of language, I have spent time
considering: the impact of how words and terms are defined in the
public sphere.</p><p>"Lexical Warfare" is a phrase that I like to use
for battles over how a term is to be understood. Our political
discourse is full of such battles; it is pretty routine to find
discussions of who gets to be called "Republican" (as opposed to RINO -
Republican in Name Only), what "freedom" should mean, what legitimately
gets to be called "rape" -and the list goes on.</p><p>Lexical warfare is
important because it can be a device to marginalize individuals within
their self-identified political affiliation (for example, branding
RINO's defines them as something other than true Republicans), or it can
beguile us into ignoring true threats to freedom (focusing on threats
from government while being blind to threats from corporations, religion
and custom), and in cases in which the word in question is "rape," the
definition can have far reaching consequences for the rights of women
and social policy.<br><br>Lexical warfare is not exclusively concerned
with changing the definitions of words and terms - it can also work to
attach either a negative or positive affect to a term. Ronald Reagan and
other conservatives successfully loaded the word "liberal" with
negative connotations, while enhancing the positive aura of terms like
"patriot" (few today would reject the label "patriotic," but rather
argue for why they are entitled to it).</p><p>Over the past few years
we've watched a lexical warfare battle slowly unfold in the treatment of
the term "hacktivism." There has been an effort to redefine what the
word means and what kinds of activities it describes; at the same time
there has been an effort to tarnish the hacktivist label so that anyone
who chooses to label themselves as such does so at their peril.</p><p>In
the simplest and broadest sense, a hacktivist is someone who uses
technology hacking to effect social change. The conflict now is between
those who want to change the meaning of the word to denote immoral,
sinister activities and those who want to defend the broader, more
inclusive understanding of hacktivist. Let's start with those who are
trying to change the meaning so that it denotes sinister activities.</p><p>Over the past year several newspapers and blogs have cited <a href="http://www.verizonbusiness.com/resources/reports/rp_data-breach-investigations-report-2012_en_xg.pdf">Verizon's 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report</a>,
which claimed that 58 percent of all data leaked in 2011 was owing to
the actions of "ideologically motivated hacktivists." An example of the
concern was an <a href="http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/blog/2012/6/7/hacktivism-shades-of-gray-/559.aspx">article</a> in Infosecurity Magazine:</p><blockquote><p>The
year 2011 is renowned for being the year that hacktivists out-stole
cybercriminals to take top honors according to the Verizon data breach
report. Of the 174 million stolen records it tracked in 2011, 100
million were taken by hacktivist groups.</p><p>Suddenly, things are
looking black and white again. Regardless of political motivation or
intent, if there are victims of the attacks they perpetrate, then
hacktivism has crossed the line. Not OK.</p></blockquote><p>Meanwhile <a href="http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/verizon-hacktivists-steal-most-data-2011-032112">an article</a> in ThreatPost proclaimed "Anonymous: Hacktivists Steal Most Data in 2011."</p>
<p>The
first thing to note is that both of these media sources are written by
and for members of the information security business - it is in their
interest to manufacture a threat, for the simple reason that threats
mean business for these groups. But is it fair to say that the threat
is being "manufactured"? What of the Verizon report that they cite?</p><p>The
problem is that the headlines and articles, designed to tar hacktivists
and make us fear them, did not reflect what the Verizon report actually
said. According to page 19 of the report only 3 percent of the data
breaches in the survey were by hacktivists - the bulk of them were by
routine cybercriminals, disgruntled employees and nation states (83
percent were by organized criminals).</p><p>The "most data" claim, while
accurate, gives a skewed picture. According to Chris Novak, the
Managing Principal of Investigative Response on Verizon's RISK Team,
interviewed in ThreatPost, 2 percent of the 90 actions analyzed in the
report accounted for 58 percent of the data released. The interview
with Novak suggests that this data loss came from precisely two
hacktivist actions - both by spin-offs of the well-known hacktivist
group Anonymous - and that these large data dumps stemmed from the
actions against the security firm HB Gary Federal, which had publicly
announced their efforts to expose Anonymous, and a computer security
firm called Stratfor). That means that in 2011 if you were worried
about an intrusion into your system it was 33 times more likely that the
perpetrator would be a criminal, nation state or disgruntled employee
than a hacktivist. If you weren't picking fights with Anonymous the
chances would have dropped to zero - at least according to the cases
analyzed in the report.</p><p>In effect, these infosecurity media
outlets cited two actions by Anonymous spin-offs, implicated that
actions like this were a principle project of hacktivism, and thereby
implicated a larger, imminent threat of hacktivism. Meanwhile, the
meaning of hacktivist was being narrowed from people who use technology
in support of social causes to meaning individuals principally concerned
with infiltrating and releasing the data of almost anyone.</p><p>Now
let's turn to an attempt to maintain the broader understanding of
hacktivism. Several months ago I attended a birthday party in Germany
for Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who was turning 34. As it happened,
Domscheit-Berg had also been the spokesperson for Wikileaks and, after
Julian Assange, the group's most visible person. He had left the
organization in 2010, and now he had a new venture, OpenLeaks. The party
was also meant to be a coming out party for OpenLeaks.</p><p>The party
was to be held in the new headquarters and training center for OpenLeaks
- a large house in a small town about an hour outside of Berlin. I
was half-expecting to find a bunker full of hackers probing Web sites
with SQL injections and sifting through State Department cables, but
what I found was something else altogether.</p><p>When I arrived at the
house the first thing I noticed was a large vegetable garden outside.
The second thing I noticed was that a tree out front had been fitted out
with a colorful knit wool sweater. This was the effort of Daniel's
wife Anke - "knit hacking," she called it. And around the small town I
saw evidence of her guerilla knit hacking. The steel poles of nearby
street signs had also been fitted with woolen sweaters. Most
impressively, though, a World War II tank, sitting outside a nearby
former Nazi concentration camp for women had also been knit-hacked; the
entire barrel of the tank's gun had been fit with a tight colorful wool
sweater and adorned with some woolen flowers for good measure. I
interpreted these knit-hackings as counteractions to the attempts to
define hacktivist as something sinister; they serve as ostensive
definitions of what hacktivism is and what hacktivists do.</p><p>Of
course the birthday party had elements of hackerdom understood more
narrowly. There were some members of the Chaos Computer Club (a
legendary hacker group), and there was a healthy supply of Club Mate -
the energy drink of choice of European hackers, but the main message
being delivered was something else: a do-it-yourself aesthetic -
planting your own garden, knitting your own sweaters, foraging for
mushrooms and counting on a local friend to bag you some venison. What
part of this lifestyle was the hacktivism part? Daniel and his friends
would like to say that all of it is.</p><p>The intention here was clear:
an attempt to defend the traditional, less sinister understanding of
hacktivism and perhaps broaden it a bit, adding some positive affect to
boot; more specifically, that hacking is fundamentally about refusing to
be intimidated or cowed into submission by any technology, about
understanding the technology and acquiring the power to repurpose it to
our individual needs, and for the good of the many. Moreover, they were
saying that a true hacktivist doesn't favor new technology over old -
what is critical is that the technologies be in our hands rather than
out of our control. This ideal, theoretically, should extend to beyond
computer use, to technologies for food production, shelter and clothing,
and of course, to all the means we use to communicate with one another.
It would also, of course, extend to access to knowledge more generally
- a value that was inherent in Aaron Swartz's hacking of the JSTOR data
base.</p><p>Our responsibility in this particular episode of lexical
warfare is to be critical and aware of the public uses of language, and
to be alert to what is at stake - whether the claims made by the
infosecurity industry or the government, or the gestures by the
hacktivists, are genuine, misleading or correct. We are not passive
observers in this dispute. The meaning of words is determined by those
of us who use language, and it has consequences. Whether or not Aaron
Swartz suffered because of the manipulation of the public discourse
surrounding hacking, his case is a reminder that it is important that we
be attuned to attempts to change the meanings of words in consequential
ways. It is important because we are the ones who will decide who
will win.<br></p><p><em>Peter Ludlow is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. His most recent book is "<a href="http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/?view=usa&ci=9780199674473">The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics</a>." </em></p>
</div></div></div><br><br clear="all"><div><div><div>Ginger (Virginia) Paque<br><br><div><a href="mailto:VirginiaP@diplomacy.edu" target="_blank">VirginiaP@diplomacy.edu</a><br><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:small">Diplo Foundation<br>
Internet Governance Capacity Building Programme<br><a href="http://www.diplomacy.edu/ig" target="_blank">www.diplomacy.edu/ig</a><span style="padding-right:16px;width:16px;height:16px"></span><br><span style="padding-right:16px;width:16px;height:16px"></span><span style="padding-right:16px;width:16px;height:16px"></span><span style="padding-right:16px;width:16px;height:16px"></span><div>
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