Hacktually activism?

This week I would like to talk about online civil disobedience and "Hacktivism".

According to dictionary.reference.com, civil disobedience is,

"the refusal to comply with certain laws or to pay taxes and fines, as a peaceful form of political protest."

Recently people have started using online means such as twitter to exercise civil disobedience.

A good example of online civil disobedience is Grey tuesday. In 2004, music company EMI put a ban on the release of Danger Mouse’s Jay-Z Black Album/The Beatles White Album hybrid, known as The Grey Album. In Protest a group of websites agreed to either make the album available for download or to turn grey in protest on Tuesday 24th of February. EMI issued minimal punishment to the websites, a letter of cease and desist being the height of it.




So what about "Hacktivism"? . . .According to Oxforddictionaries.com, a hacktivist is "a person who gains unauthorised access to computer files or networks in order to further social or political ends". The best examples of this are from groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec.




Anonymous are a network of appropriately named anonymous hackers. According to their website they focus on " promoting access to information, free speech, and transparency". Anonymous are known for campaigns such as project Chanology. The campaign began in 2008 when the group released the "message to scientology" video stating Anonymous' intent to remove the church of scientology's online presence. In this case, Anonymous believed that the leaders of the Scientologist church were censoring material and releasing propaganda videos online. They state in the video below that because of this "Anonymous has therefore decided that your organisation should be destroyed for the good of your followers, for the good of mankind and for our own enjoyment".












The campaign has included making scientology.org unavailable to its intended users, this is known as denial of service attacks. Anonymous also attack scientology centres with a vast range of prank calls and black faxes.




Anonymous criticised the medias reporting of the campaign and released another video asking people to google Lisa McPherson, suggesting Scientology had an involvement in her death. The group have also organised various protests against scientology. The church of scientology attempted to get an injunction ordered on Anonymous claiming that a number of death threats stemmed from the groups campaign against the church. The FBI dismissed the claims stating there was no evidence to link Anonymous to the threats.




Another computer hacking group Lulzsec have claimed to be responsible for several high profile attacks such as the leaking of personal information from sony accounts on the ps3 network. This resulted in Sony locking down PSN (Playstation-Network) accounts in light of the attacks for fear of further hacking. Lulzec reportedly used sql data to hack the PSN accounts.




Hacks from groups like Anonymous and lulzsec can be seen as non violent protests. They believe the organisations they attack are corrupt and therefore hack them. The groups never use violence to campaign against the alleged corrupt organisations. Some people may argue that the threats they issue can be seen as provoking but all protests generally are offensive or provoking to one side of the debate. From my research I get the impression that these hacktivist organisations often exaggerate the facts. Lulzsec claimed 1000,000 PSN accounts were at risk during the attacks on the Sony PSN. However, Sony claimed the figure to be in the region of 37,000. I'd imagine the figure was probably somewhere in between.




I personally don't see anything wrong with what they are doing. Although it may be illegal in some cases, a lot of the hackers seem to come from within the industries they are hacking so maybe they know what they are talking about. Although Anonymous often state they hack "for our own enjoyment" they usually show creditable evidence to justify their attacks, an example being Leah McPherson in the Chanology campaign.




If anything Lulzsec's attacks on the PSN network showed how carless Sony were with the privacy settings surrounding user accounts. I thought maybe it was wrong to jepordise user information in the way Lulzsec did. However, when I recall the time it happend, My friends didn't appreciate the PSN attacks as they couldn't play 'Call Of Duty" for a while. None of them ever complained about their accounts being at risk. Most people took it with a pinch of salt. My opinion is possibly biased however as I am a bit of a 'Nerd' when it comes to technology. From basic programming and hacks that I have learned throughout my degree I find this sort of stuff fascinating.







Finally I am going to talk about Political campaigns that target social media. More and more Political campaigns are targeting social network sites for votes. This is mainly because such social networking sites are where the youth 'hang out'. Obama had a strong online campaign in the 2008 presidential elections. This example below being my favourite example of it. You can still experience this video on the original website here.









In general the youths don't have the same, if any, interest in politics as older generations do. There is therefore an opportunity through targeted social media to make politics seem 'cool'. I say this because when I saw the above video I tweeted about it and posted it on facebook to all of my friends. My friends thought it was cool and they posted about it too. If I was an american and saw this video, I would consider voting for Obama. I was 18 at the time of the election and my knowledge of politics then isn't what it is now so I may have voted on something based on watching a video such as this.




In the past, I have watched some of the political debates on TV in the build up to an election. Often I found them hard to follow because of the 'grown up' language they use. So I can understand why political campaigns are targeting social media as videos such as the above are something I can relate to. In the video there is a simple message, don't waste your vote. It is easy to follow and told in a humorous way. Fine Gael had a mario style video game on their website in the build up to the last general election. Young people will hear about things like this on sites such as twitter. They will google it and they will want to play it. It gives young people a link to a party despite not knowing anything about it. If a young person goes to vote and sees a ballot full of faces and names they have never heard of, they are possibly likely to vote for Finé Gael based on the Mario game they played.




Personally I developed an interest in politics from studying irish history in school. It was my favourite subject and learning about the men and women who fought for irelands independence inspired me to want learn more about how our country is governed . There is still a lot about politics I don't know, I am young after all. I am not tied to any party but I would never vote for sinn Féin based on their links to the IRA. It doesn't matter how good their targeted social media could be, I would just never give them my vote. For any other party however, I would perhaps consider giving somebody a vote based on a good social media campaign. It almost feels like the party or person in question has made more of an effort for people such as myself who spend a lot of time on social media sites.




However, giving somebody a vote based on a good social media campaign is about the height of it. It could never sway me to go and actively campaign for somebody. Young people such as myself only care about one thing, getting a job after college and making money. Unless a social media campaign for a political party was offering me a job relevant to my qualifications and a decent wage, I would never become politically active in the form of canvasing for parties. If somebody asked me to make a video for a campaign however, then perhaps I would. Targeting social media would definitely make me more aware of politics as sites such as twitter make me more aware of everything else going on in the world via trends and links.




Thats enough culturing about for this semester.




P.S




Lets Hope I remember something for my exam.