Information wants to be free

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free 

"Information wants to be free" is an expression that means all people should be able to access information freely. It is often used by technology activists to criticize laws that limit transparency and general access to information. People who criticize intellectual property law say the system of such government granted monopolies conflicts with the development of a public domain of information. The expression is often credited to Stewart Brand, who was recorded saying it at a hackers conference in 1984.

History

The iconic phrase is attributed to Stewart Brand, who, in the late 1960s, founded the Whole Earth Catalog and argued that technology could be liberating rather than oppressing [DJS -- Could be?]. The earliest recorded occurrence of the expression was at the first Hackers Conference in 1984. Brand told Steve Wozniak:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Brand's conference remarks are transcribed in the Whole Earth Review (May 1985, p. 49) and a later form appears in his The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT:

Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away.

According to historian Adrian Johns, the slogan expresses a view that had already been articulated in the mid-20th century by Norbert Wiener, Michael Polanyi and Arnold Plant, who advocated for the free communication of scientific knowledge, and specifically criticized the patent system.

Gratis versus Libre

The various forms of the original statement are ambiguous: the slogan can be used to argue the benefits of propertied information, of liberated, free, and open information, or of both. It can be taken amorally as an expression of a fact of information-science: once information has passed to a new location outside of the source's control there is no way of ensuring it is not propagated further, and therefore will naturally tend towards a state where that information is widely distributed. Much of its force is due to the anthropomorphic metaphor that imputes desire to information. In 1990 Richard Stallman restated the concept normatively, without the anthropomorphization:

I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By 'free' I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one's own uses... When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.

Stallman's reformulation incorporates a political stance into Brand's value-neutral observation of social trends.

Cyberpunks

Brand's attribution of will to an abstract human construct (information) has been adopted within a branch of the cyberpunk movement, whose members espouse a particular political viewpoint (anarchism). The construction of the statement takes its meaning beyond the simple judgmental observation, "Information should be free", by acknowledging that the internal force or entelechy of information and knowledge makes it essentially incompatible with notions of proprietary software, copyrights, patents, subscription services, etc. They believe that information is dynamic, ever-growing and evolving and cannot be contained within (any) ideological structure.

According to this philosophy, hackers, crackers, and phreakers are liberators of information which is being held hostage by agents demanding money for its release. Other participants in this network include cypherpunks who educate people to use public-key cryptography to protect the privacy of their messages from corporate or governmental snooping and programmers who write free software and open source code. Still others create Free-Nets allowing users to gain access to computer resources for which they would otherwise need an account. They might also break copyright law by swapping music, movies, or other copyrighted materials over the Internet.

Chelsea Manning is alleged to have said "Information should be free" to Adrian Lamo when explaining a rationale for US government documents to be released to WikiLeaks. The narrative goes on with Manning wondering if she is a "'hacker', 'cracker', 'hacktivist', 'leaker' or what".

Literary usage

In the "Fall Revolution" series of science-fiction books, author Ken Macleod riffs and puns on the expression by writing about entities composed of information actually "wanting", as in desiring, freedom and the machinations of several human characters with differing political and ideological agendas, to facilitate or disrupt these entities' quest for freedom.

In the cyberpunk world of post-singularity transhuman culture described by Charles Stross in his books like Accelerando and Singularity Sky, the wish of information to be free is a law of nature.

Culture vs. Copyright

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_vs._Copyright 

 

Culture vs. Copyright

Author	Anatoly Volynets
Illustrator	Sasha Willins
Cover artist	Olga Gessen
Country	USA
Language	English
Subjects	Philosophy, culture, humanity, creativity, intellectual property
Genre	Philosophical diary
Published	2014 (Total Knowledge)
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	142
ISBN	978-0-9889557-0-7
OCLC	865802929

Culture vs. Copyright: A Diary of a Naïve Philosopher is a philosophical diary by the Ukrainian American scholar Anatoly G. Volynets, published in 2014. It is Volynets' first book, consisting of dialogues among five first graders alternated with the thoughts of their teacher – the Naïve Philosopher of the subtitle – thoughts written in Volynets' own voice. The dialogues explore philosophical, psychological, economical and other aspects of Intellectual property in its relations with culture and civilization.

In general, the author is opposed to copyright, and also opposes all kinds of intellectual property, including but not limited to patents, trade marks, trade secrets, among others. Volynets' theory is they all do not serve the purpose they claim but do just the opposite, that is, they strip incentives from creators and inhibit "progress of Science and Useful rights", as specified in the United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, often called the "Copyright Clause".

Summary

The Naïve Philosopher is a teacher of The School of the Dialogue of Cultures. The teacher discusses many issues pertaining to philosophy of culture versus intellectual property with five first graders. The diary presents records of discussions alternating with the teacher's thoughts in his own voice.

Structure

Acknowledgements

There are several concepts presented in the book's Acknowledgements. These are not involved directly later in the book but serve as logical premises for the further argument. One is about dialogue in education and, specifically, in a form of The School of the Dialogue of Cultures (SDC). The reason it is brought in is that the discussions among first graders, at the level they are presented, might be conducted within the practices of the SDC. Furthermore, the idea of culture as the dialogue of cultures is, first, the basis of SDC and, forms, second, the logical foundation for the author's standpoint. Another concept presented is a specific interpretation of paradox as the logic of transmutation of ideas. Culture as dialogue of cultures is an example of the paradox logic. The philosophical concepts presented were introduced by the author's teacher, philosopher Vladimir Bibler.

"First Graders on the Magic Planet"

The chapter initially presents several major ideas that are developed more systematically later on in the book. It introduces the group of first graders that carry the discussion and sets the tone for the content that follows. A conversation revolves around the problem who and how gets paid if the artists and publishers do not restrict sharing the work by the public. That, besides the content developed, also demonstrates a teaching tool, a model of student centered discussion. In terms of ideas the preliminary findings by students are that both authors and publishers get paid for selling their product, not any rights, while unrestricted sharing provides exposure for the works and thus promotes sales.

"On the Nature of Arts"

Here the teacher conducts a mind experiment trying to clarify what qualifies as a work of art, how art works on humans, etc. For example, a work of art constitutes an entire new world in a way more real than the physical one. A work of art furthermore is interpreted as a message, the dialogue of its author with oneself, etc. All of the ideas when combined, bring up the subject of art as representative of culture and the fundamental law it undergoes: Freedom. Art in particular and culture in general cause civilization to develop. Although they are at odds as opposing realities, they react with each other to cause growth of both. Society must accept the cultural phenomena in order to develop. In this chapter, the author also comes back to the idea presented earlier about who owes whom: A creator to humanity or otherwise or both – one to another. In general, the chapter explores specifics of the cultural phenomena and the world of culture as it represented by the arts.

"Arts and Personality"

This chapter presents a recorded discussion. It is started by a teacher's question but all the research is done by students. Students are making the connections of "why do we read?" and are also learning skills, such as debating and summarizing. The teacher's intervention is moving away from directing students but letting them develop and apply skills. A batch of new ideas are brought up to demonstrate three major points. First, works of art as such, and particularly heroes thereof input hugely in human psyche. Second, works of art and their heroes largely determine in-between human relations. Third, we treat works of art essentially more like humans than like unanimated objects. Altogether these general ideas imply that in creating a law to govern culture we must not go after analogies in real estate but after those in human-to-human relations.

"Culture Beyond Arts"

Here ideas of the previous chapters expand on culture in general as it presented by creativity in different human activities but arts. The conversation starts with the question "when do people create?" Students use different cases in order to investigate the topic. They start with the question "can you be creative on a test if not prepared?" Another idea was to compare creativity to solving a crime. When discussing creating new content, few more ideas are brought forth, such as the concept of trial and error or using prior knowledge, and replication to generate new ideas. Specifically, students come up with the unique scheme that any new content is an old one combined and put in a new form.

"Discrepancies between Two Worlds"

This chapter is to put the world of culture vs. world of civilization side by side. It starts with a teacher's presentation attempting to do the comparison. But in here too major developments happen in the discussion among first graders that follows. The students contemplate the ideas that knowledge cannot be lost when shared and spread while material things are gone when change hands, that physical needs must be filled while cultural needs must be developed, that cultural satisfaction increases desire while filling physical needs ends desire. Additionally, work of royalties and attribution (for creative works) are discussed and students develop their skill of arguing and exploring both sides of points of view.

The final three chapters

These are written in the teacher's voice. In "Three Models," three ways to govern cultural affairs are put side by side in detail: One with no formal rules at all, the current and one called "Authoright," corresponding to the nature of culture as it is developed in the previous chapters. It is concluded that copyright and Intellectual Property (IP) in general is a harmful way of governing culture. IP effectively inhibits creativity and promotes plagiarism and forfeit. It appears to be a hindrance of culture and culture based economy. One particular point is that IP effectively strips creators from incentives which is exactly the opposite to the claim. Removing restrictions for dissemination of cultural phenomena, on the other hand, promotes exposure of works of art and creativity in general which pertains to the economy of culture. In short, a brilliant work of culture in open access develops its market and thus provides a market share for the creator.

The seventh chapter, "On Licensing in Cultural Affairs," and the addendum, "Authoright," present possibilities to apply all the philosophy developed to practical matters.

Outlook

There are several dozen ideas contemplated in the book altogether. They gravitate toward two main foci: First, all types of intellectual property treat cultural, or spiritual, for that matter, phenomena as material things, which, according to the author, is nonsense in principle. Second, the analysis of how IP works shows that it actually does exactly the opposite to what it supposed to do. It suppresses creativity. Thus one of the practical conclusions of the book is that IP is to be abolished once and for all.

Criticism of copyright

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_copyright 

The symbol of Kopimi, an anti-copyright initiative developed by the Piratbyrå, a Swedish organisation actively opposing modern copyright law and practices, and the previous operators of BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay, before it was spun off as an independent organisation.

Criticism of copyright, perhaps outright anti-copyright sentiment, is a dissenting view of the current state of copyright law or copyright as a concept. Critical groups often discuss philosophical, economical, or social rationales of such laws and the laws' implementations, the benefits of which they claim do not justify the policy's costs to society. They advocate for changing the current system, though different groups have different ideas of what that change should be. Some call for remission of the policies to a previous state—copyright once covered few categories of things and had shorter term limits—or they may seek to expand concepts like Fair Use that allow permissionless copying. Others seek the abolition of copyright itself.

Opposition to copyright is often a portion of platforms advocating for broader social reform. For example, Lawrence Lessig, a free-culture movement speaker, advocates for loosening copyright law as a means of making sharing information easier or addressing the orphan works issue and the Swedish Pirate Party has advocated for limiting copyright to five year terms in order to legalize the majority of its members' downloading of modern works.

Organisations and scholars

Groups advocating the abolition of copyright

Demonstration in Sweden in support of file sharing, 2006.

Pirate Cinema and groups like The League of Noble Peers advance more radical arguments, opposing copyright per se. A number of anti-copyright groups have recently emerged in the argument over peer-to-peer file sharing, digital freedom, and freedom of information; these include the Association des Audionautes and the Kopimism Church of New Zealand.

In 2003, Eben Moglen, a professor of Law at Columbia University, published The dotCommunist Manifesto, which re-interpreted the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx in the light of the development of computer technology and the internet; much of the re-interpreted content discussed copyright law and privilege in Marxist terms.

Recent developments related to BitTorrent and peer-to-peer file sharing have been termed by media commentators as "copyright wars", with The Pirate Bay being referred to as "the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright—or pro-piracy—movement". One well-publicised instance of electronic civil disobedience (ECD) in the form of large scale intentional copyright infringement occurred on February 24, 2004, in an event called Grey Tuesday. Activists intentionally violated EMI's copyright of The White Album by distributing MP3 files of a mashup album called The Grey Album, in an attempt to draw public attention to copyright reform issues and anti-copyright ideals. Reportedly over 400 sites participated including 170 that hosted the album with some protesters stating that The Grey Album illustrates a need for revisions in copyright law to allow sampling under fair use of copyrighted material, or proposing a system of fair compensation to allow for sampling.

Groups advocating changes to copyright law

French group Association des audionautes is not anti-copyright per se, but proposes a reformed system for copyright enforcement and compensation. Aziz Ridouan, co-founder of the group, proposes for France to legalise peer-to-peer file sharing and to compensate artists through a surcharge on Internet service provider fees (i.e. an alternative compensation system). Wired magazine reported that major music companies have equated Ridouan's proposal with legitimising piracy. In January 2008, seven Swedish members of parliament from the Moderate Party (part of the governing coalition), authored a piece in a Swedish tabloid calling for the complete decriminalisation of file sharing; they wrote that "Decriminalising all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It's the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet."

In June 2015 a WIPO article named "Remix culture and Amateur Creativity: A Copyright Dilemma" acknowledged the "age of remixing" and the need for a copyright reform while referring to recent law interpretations in Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. and Canada's Copyright Modernization Act.

Groups advocating using existing copyright law

Groups that argue for using existing copyright legal framework with special licences to achieve their goals, include the copyleft movement and Creative Commons. Creative Commons is not anti-copyright per se, but argues for use of more flexible and open copyright licences within existing copyright law. Creative Commons takes the position that there is an unmet demand for flexibility that allows the copyright owner to release work with only "some rights reserved" or even "no rights reserved." According to Creative Commons many people do not regard default copyright as helping them in gaining the exposure and widespread distribution they want. Creative Commons argue that their licences allow entrepreneurs and artists to employ innovative business models rather than all-out copyright to secure a return on their creative investment.

Scholars and commentators

Scholars and commentators in this field include Lawrence Liang, Jorge Cortell, Rasmus Fleischer, Stephan Kinsella, and Siva Vaidhyanathan.

Traditional anarchists, such as Leo Tolstoy, expressed their refusal to accept copyright.

Economic arguments against copyright

Non-scarcity

Play media

Copying is Not Theft by Nina Paley

There is an argument that copyright is invalid because, unlike physical property, intellectual property is not scarce and is a legal fiction created by the state. The argument claims that, infringing on copyright, unlike theft, does not deprive the victim of the original item.

Historical comparison

It is unclear that copyright laws are economically stimulating for most authors, and it is uncommon for copyright laws to be evaluated based on empirical studies of their impacts.

Information technology related concerns

One of the founders of Piratbyrån, Rasmus Fleischer, argues that copyright law simply seems unable to cope with the Internet, and hence is obsolete. He argues that the Internet, and particularly Web 2.0 have brought about the uncertain status of the very idea of "stealing" itself. He argues that in an attempt to rein in Web 2.0, copyright law in the 21st century is increasingly concerned with criminalising entire technologies, leading to recent attacks on different kinds of search engines, solely because they provide links to files which may be copyrighted. Fleischer points out that Google, while still largely uncontested, operates in a gray zone of copyright (e.g. the business model of Google Books is to display millions of pages of copyrighted and uncopyrighted books as part of a business plan drawing its revenue from advertising). In contrast, others have pointed out that Google Books blocks-out large sections of those same books, and they say that does not harm the legitimate interests of rightsholders.

Fleischer's central argument is that copyright has become obsolete with regards to the Internet, that the cost of trying to enforce it is unreasonable, and that instead business models need to adapt to the reality of the Darknet.

Cultural arguments

Freedom of knowledge

"Free Beer" demonstrator supporting the "freedom of knowledge" idea: "Copyright is preventing access to knowledge" (2007).

Groups such as Hipatia advance anti-copyright arguments in the name of "freedom of knowledge" and argue that knowledge should be "shared in solidarity". Such groups may perceive "freedom of knowledge" as a right, and/or as fundamental in realising the right to education, which is an internationally recognised human right, as well as the right to a free culture and the right to free communication. They argue that current copyright law hinders the realisation of these rights in today's knowledge societies relying on new technological means of communication and see copyright law as preventing or slowing human progress.

Authorship and creativity

Lawrence Liang, founder of the Alternative Law Forum, argues that current copyright is based on a too narrow definition of "author", which is assumed to be clear and undisputed. Liang observes that the concept of "the author" is assumed to make universal sense across cultures and across time. Instead, Liang argues that the notion of the author as a unique and transcendent being, possessing originality of spirit, was constructed in Europe after the Industrial Revolution, to distinguish the personality of the author from the expanding realm of mass-produced goods. Hence works created by "authors" were deemed original, and merges with the doctrine of property prevalent at the time.

Liang argues that the concept of "author" is tied to the notion of copyright and emerged to define a new social relationship – the way society perceives the ownership of knowledge. The concept of "author" thus naturalised a particular process of knowledge production where the emphasis on individual contribution and individual ownership takes precedence over the concept of "community knowledge". Relying on the concept of the author, copyright is based on the assumption that without an intellectual property rights regime, authors would have no incentive to further create, and that artists cannot produce new works without an economic incentive. Liang challenges this logic, arguing that "many authors who have little hope of ever finding a market for their publications, and whose copyright is, as a result, virtually worthless, have in the past, and even in the present, continued to write." Liang points out that people produce works purely for personal satisfaction, or even for respect and recognition from peers. Liang argues that the 19th Century saw the prolific authorship of literary works in the absence of meaningful copyright that benefited the author. In fact, Liang argues, copyright protection usually benefited the publisher, and rarely the author.

Ethical issues

The institution of copyright brings up several ethical issues. Selmer Bringsjord argues that all forms of copying are morally permissible (without commercial use), because some forms of copying are permissible and there is not a logical distinction between various forms of copying.

Edwin Hettinger argues that natural rights arguments for intellectual property are weak and the philosophical tradition justifying property can not guide us in thinking about intellectual property.

Shelly Warwick believes that copyright law as currently constituted does not appear to have a consistent ethical basis.

Electronic civil disobedience

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_civil_disobedience 

Electronic civil disobedience (ECD; also known as cyber civil disobedience or cyber disobedience) can refer to any type of civil disobedience in which the participants use information technology to carry out their actions. Electronic civil disobedience often involves computers and the Internet and may also be known as hacktivism. The term "electronic civil disobedience" was coined in the critical writings of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a collective of tactical media artists and practitioners, in their seminal 1996 text, Electronic Civil Disobedience: And Other Unpopular Ideas. Electronic civil disobedience seeks to continue the practices of nonviolent-yet-disruptive protest originally pioneered by American poet Henry David Thoreau, who in 1848 published Civil Disobedience.

A common form of ECD is coordination DDoS against a specific target, also known as a virtual sit-in. Such virtual sit-ins may be announced on the internet by hacktivist groups like the Electronic Disturbance Theatre and the borderlands Hacklab.

Computerized activism exists at the intersections of politico-social movements and computer-mediated communication. Stefan Wray writes about ECD:

"As hackers become politicized and as activists become computerized, we are going to see an increase in the number of cyber-activists who engage in what will become more widely known as Electronic Civil Disobedience. The same principals of traditional civil disobedience, like trespass and blockage, will still be applied, but more and more these acts will take place in electronic or digital form. The primary site for Electronic Civil Disobedience will be in cyberspace.

Jeff Shantz and Jordon Tomblin write that ECD or cyber disobedience merges activism with organization and movement building through online participatory engagement:

Cyber disobedience emphasizes direct action, rather than protest, appeals to authority, or simply registering dissent, which directly impedes the capacities of economic and political elites to plan, pursue, or carry out activities that would harm non-elites or restrict the freedoms of people in non-elite communities. Cyber disobedience, unlike much of conventional activism or even civil disobedience, does not restrict actions on the basis of state or corporate acceptance or legitimacy or in terms of legality (which cyber disobedient view largely as biased, corrupt, mechanisms of elites rule). In many cases recently, people and groups involved in online activism or cyber disobedience are also involving themselves in real world actions and organizing. In other cases people and groups who have only been involved in real world efforts are now moving their activism and organizing online as well.

History

The origins of computerized activism extend back in pre-Web history to the mid-1980s. Examples include PeaceNet (1986), a newsgroup service, which allowed political activists to communicate across international borders with relative ease and speed using Bulletin Board Systems and email lists. The term "electronic civil disobedience" was first coined by the Critical Art Ensemble in the context of nomadic conceptions of capital and resistance, an idea that can be traced back to Hakim Bey’s (1991) "T. A. Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone: Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism" and Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s (1987) "A Thousand Plateaus". ECF uses temporary - and nomadic -"autonomous zones" as the launch pads from where electronic civil disobedience is activated (for example, temporary websites that announce the ECD action).

Before 1998, ECD remained largely theoretical musings, or was badly articulated, such as the Zippies 1994 call for an "Internet Invasion" which deployed the metaphor of war albeit within the logic of civil disobedience and information activism. Some commentators pinpointing the 1997 Acteal Massacre in Chiapas, Mexico, as a turning point towards the internet infrastructure being viewed not only as means for communication but also a site for direct action. In reaction to the Acteal Massacre a group called Electronic Disturbance Theatre (not associated with Autonomedia) created a software called FloodNet, which improved upon early experiments with virtual sit-ins. The Electronic Disruption Theatre exhibited its SWARM project21 at the Ars Electronic Festival on Information Warfare, where it launched a three-pronged FloodNet disturbance against web sites of the Mexican presidency, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and the Pentagon, in solidarity with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, against the Mexican government, against the U.S. military, and against a symbol of international capital. The Acteal Massacre also prompted another group, called the Anonymous Digital Coalition, to post messages calling for cyber attacks against five Mexico City based financial institution’s web sites, the plan being for thousands of people around the world to simultaneously load these web sites on to their Internet browsers. Electrohippies flooded the World Trade Organization site during the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 1999 protest activity.

Hacktivism

The term electronic civil disobedience and hacktivism may be used synonymously, although some commentators maintain that the difference is that ECD actors don’t hide their names, while most hacktivists wish to remain anonymous. Some commentators maintain that ECD uses only legal means, as opposed to illegal actions used by hacktivists. It is also maintained that hacktivism is done by individuals rather than by specific groups. In reality the distinction between ECD and hacktivism is not clear.

Ricardo Dominguez of the Electronic Disturbance Theater has been incorrectly referred to by many as a founder of ECD and hacktivism. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California of San Diego and teaches classes on Electronic Civil Disobedience and Performance Art. His recent project the Transborder Immigrant Tool is a hacktivist gesture which has received wide media attention and criticism from anti-immigration groups.

Examples

ECD is often open-source, non-structured, moves horizontally and non-linearly. For example, virtual sit-ins may be announced on the internet and participants may have no formal connection with each other, not knowing each other's identity. ECD actors can participate from home, from work, from the university, or from other points of access to the Net.

Electronic civil disobedience generally involves large numbers of people and may use legal and illegal techniques. For example, a single person reloading a website repeatedly is not illegal, but if enough people do it at the same time it can render the website inaccessible. Another type of electronic civil disobedience is the use of the Internet for publicized and deliberate violations of a law that the protesters take issue with, such as copyright law.

Blatant disregard of copyright law by millions of Internet users every day on file sharing networks might also be considered a form of constant ECD, as the people doing it have decided to simply ignore a law that they disagree with.

Intervasion of the UK

In order to draw attention to John Major's Criminal Justice Bill, a group of cyber-activists staged an event in which they "kidnapped" 60s counter-cultural hero Timothy Leary at a book launch for Chaos & Cyberculture held on Guy Fawkes Day 1994, and then proceeded to "force him to DDoS government websites". Leary called the event an "Intervasion". The Intervasion was preceded by mass email-bombing and denial of service attacks against government servers with some success. Although ignored by the mainstream media, the event was reported on Free Radio Berkeley.

Grey Tuesday

On February 24, 2004, large scale intentional copyright infringement occurred in an event called Grey Tuesday, "a day of coordinated civil disobedience". Activists intentionally violated EMI's copyright of The White Album by distributing MP3 files of The Grey Album, a mashup of The White Album with The Black Album, in an attempt to draw public attention to copyright reform issues and anti-copyright ideals. Reportedly over 400 sites participated including 170 that hosted the album. Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School, comments that "As a matter of pure legal doctrine, the Grey Tuesday protest is breaking the law, end of story. But copyright law was written with a particular form of industry in mind. The flourishing of information technology gives amateurs and homerecording artists powerful tools to build and share interesting, transformative, and socially valuable art drawn from pieces of popular cultures. There's no place to plug such an important cultural sea change into the current legal regime."

Border Haunt

On July 15, 2011, 667 people from 28 different countries participated in the online collective act of electronic civil disobedience called “Border Haunt” that targeted the policing of the U.S.-Mexico border. Participants collected entries from a database maintained by the Arizona Daily Star that holds the names and descriptions of migrants that died trying to cross the border territory and then sent those entries into a database run by the company BlueServo which is used to surveil and police the border. As a result, the border was conceptually and symbolically haunted for the duration of the one-day action as the border policing structure received over 1,000 reports of deceased migrants attempting to cross the border. The Border Haunt action was organized by Ian Alan Paul, a California-based new media artist and was reported on by Al Jazeera English and the Bay Citizen.

E-Graffiti: Texts in Mourning and Action

In response to the political assassination of Zapatista teacher Jose Luis Solís López (alias Galeano), in Chiapas, Mexico, Ian Alan Paul and Ricardo Dominguez developed a new form of Electronic Civil Disobedience that was used as part of a distributed online performance on May 24, 2014 as part of the week of action and day of remembrance in solidarity with the Zapatista communities.

When users logged on to the project website, their web browsers sent mass amounts of page requests to the server of the Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, filling their error logs with lines of text drawn from Don Quixote, communiques from the Zapatista Communities, as well as from texts authored by the Critical Art Ensemble. As a kind of E-Graffiti and form of Electronic Civil Disobedience, floods of HTTP traffic were sent from around the world as the books and communiques were written onto the error logs of their servers several thousand times by different users.

Hacktivism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacktivism 

In Internet activism, hacktivism, or hactivism (a portmanteau of hack and activism), is the use of computer-based techniques such as hacking as a form of civil disobedience to promote a political agenda or social change. With roots in hacker culture and hacker ethics, its ends are often related to free speech, human rights, or freedom of information movements.

Writer Jason Sack first used the term hacktivism in a 1995 article in conceptualizing New Media artist Shu Lea Cheang's film Fresh Kill. However, term is frequently attributed to the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) member "Omega," who used it in a 1996 e-mail to the group. Due to the variety of meanings of its root words, the definition of hacktivism is nebulous and there exists significant disagreement over the kinds of activities and purposes it encompasses. Some definitions include acts of cyberterrorism while others simply reaffirm the use of technological hacking to effect social change.

Overview

Hacktivist activities span many political ideals and issues. Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication, is a prime example of translating political thought (anybody should be able to speak freely) into code. Hacking as a form of activism can be carried out through a network of activists, such as Anonymous and WikiLeaks, or through a singular activist, working in collaboration toward a common goals without an overarching authority figure.

"Hacktivism" is a controversial term with several meanings. The word was coined to characterize electronic direct action as working toward social change by combining programming skills with critical thinking. But just as hack can sometimes mean cyber crime, hacktivism can be used to mean activism that is malicious, destructive, and undermining the security of the Internet as a technical, economic, and political platform.

Forms and methods

Self-proclaimed "hactivists" often work anonymously, sometimes operating in groups while other times operating as a lone-wolf with several cyber-personas all corresponding to one activist within the cyberactivism umbrella that has been gaining public interest and power in pop-culture. Hactivists generally operate under apolitical ideals and express uninhibited ideas or abuse without being scrutinized by society while representing or defending them publicly under an anonymous identity giving them a sense of power in the cyberactivism community.

In order to carry out their operations, hacktivists might create new tools; or integrate or use a variety of software tools readily available on the Internet. One class of hacktivist activities includes increasing the accessibility of others to take politically motivated action online.

1. Code: Software and websites can achieve political purposes. For example, the encryption software PGP can be used to secure communications; PGP's author, Phil Zimmermann said he distributed it first to the peace movement. Jim Warren suggests PGP's wide dissemination was in response to Senate Bill 266, authored by Senators Biden and DeConcini, which demanded that "...communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications...". WikiLeaks is an example of a politically motivated website: it seeks to "keep governments open".
2. Website Mirroring: is used as a circumvention tool to bypass censorship blocks on websites. It is a technique that copies the content of a censored website and posts it to other domains and sub-domains that are not censored.
3. Geo-bombing: a technique in which netizens add a geo-tag while editing YouTube videos so that the location of the video can be displayed in Google Earth.
4. Anonymous blogging: a method of speaking out to a wide audience about human rights issues, government oppression, etc. that utilizes various web tools such as free and/or disposable email accounts, IP masking, and blogging software to preserve a high level of anonymity.
5. RECAP is software that was written to 'liberate US case law' and make it freely available online. The software project takes the form of distributed document collection and archival.
6. Leaking:Information leakage from an insider source who acts in the interest of the public to reveal sensitive and otherwise protected information about a given organization that implicates them in wrongdoing or malicious practices.
7. Doxing: The practice in which private and/or confidential documents and records are hacked into and made public. Hactivists view this as a form of assured transparency, experts claim it is harassment.
8. Denial-of-service attacks: These attacks, commonly referred to as DoS attacks, use large arrays of personal and public computers that hackers take control of via malware executable files usually transmitted through email attachments or website links. After taking control, these computers act like a herd of zombies, redirecting their network traffic to one website, with the intention of overloading servers and taking a website offline.
9. Website defacements: Hacker(s) infiltrate a web server to replace a specific web page with one of their own, usually to convey a specific message.
10. Website redirects: Similar to website mirroring, this method involves changing the address of a website within the server so would-be visitors of the site are redirected to a site created by the perpetrator, typically to denounce the original site.
11. Virtual sit-ins: Large numbers of protesters visit a targeted website and rapidly load pages to overwhelm the site with network traffic to slow the site or take it offline.

Controversy

Depending on who is using the term, hacktivism can be a politically motivated technology hack, a constructive form of anarchic civil disobedience, or an undefined anti-systemic gesture. It can signal anticapitalist or political protest; it can denote anti-spam activists, security experts, or open source advocates.

Some people describing themselves as hacktivists have taken to defacing websites for political reasons, such as attacking and defacing government websites as well as web sites of groups who oppose their ideology. Others, such as Oxblood Ruffin (the "foreign affairs minister" of Cult of the Dead Cow and Hacktivismo), have argued forcefully against definitions of hacktivism that include web defacements or denial-of-service attacks.

Hactivism is often seen as shadowy due to its anonymity, commonly attributed to the work of fringe groups and outlying members of society. The lack of responsible parties to be held accountable for the social-media attacks performed by hactivists has created implications in corporate and federal security measures both on and offline.

While some self-described hacktivists have engaged in DoS attacks, critics suggest that DoS attacks are an attack on free speech and that they have unintended consequences. DoS attacks waste resources and they can lead to a "DoS war" that nobody will win. In 2006, Blue Security attempted to automate a DoS attack against spammers; this led to a massive DoS attack against Blue Security which knocked them, their old ISP and their DNS provider off the Internet, destroying their business.

Following denial-of-service attacks by Anonymous on multiple sites, in reprisal for the apparent suppression of WikiLeaks, John Perry Barlow, a founding member of the EFF, said "I support freedom of expression, no matter whose, so I oppose DDoS attacks regardless of their target... they're the poison gas of cyberspace...". On the other hand, Jay Leiderman, an attorney for many hacktivists, argues that DDoS can be a legitimate form of protest speech in situations that are reasonably limited in time, place and manner.

Notable hacktivist events

The earliest known instance of hacktivism as documented by Julian Assange is as follows: "Hacktivism is at least as old as October 1989 when DOE, HEPNET and SPAN (NASA) connected VMS machines world wide were penetrated by the anti-nuclear WANK worm."

• In 1990, the Hong Kong Blondes helped Chinese citizens get access to blocked websites by targeting the Chinese computer networks. The group identified holes in the Chinese internet system, particularly in the area of satellite communications. The leader of the group, Blondie Wong, also described plans to attack American businesses that were partnering with China.
• In 1996, the title of the United States Department of Justice's homepage was changed to "Department of Injustice". Pornographic images were also added to the homepage to protest the Communications Decency Act.
• In 1998, members of the Electronic Disturbance Theater created FloodNet, a web tool that allowed users to participate in DDoS attacks (or what they called electronic civil disobedience) in support of Zapatista rebels in Chiapas.
• In December 1998, a hacktivist group from the US called Legions of the Underground emerged. They declared a cyberwar against Iraq and China and planned on disabling internet access in retaliation for the countries' human rights abuses. Opposing hackers criticized this move by Legions of the Underground, saying that by shutting down internet systems, the hacktivist group would have no impact on providing free access to information.
• In July 2001, Hacktivismo, a sect of the Cult of the Dead Cow, issued the "Hacktivismo Declaration". This served as a code of conduct for those participating in hacktivism, and declared the hacker community's goals of stopping "state-sponsored censorship of the Internet" as well as affirming the rights of those therein to "freedom of opinion and expression".
• During the 2009 Iranian election protests, Anonymous played a role in disseminating information to and from Iran by setting up the website Anonymous Iran; they also released a video manifesto to the Iranian government.
• Google worked with engineers from SayNow and Twitter to provide communications for the Egyptian people in response to the government sanctioned Internet blackout during the 2011 protests. The result, Speak To Tweet, was a service in which voicemail left by phone was then tweeted via Twitter with a link to the voice message on Google's SayNow.
• On Saturday 29 May 2010 a hacker calling himself ‘Kaka Argentine’ hacked into the Ugandan State House website and posted a conspicuous picture of Adolf Hitler with the swastika, a Nazi Party symbol.
• During the Egyptian Internet black out, January 28 – February 2, 2011, Telecomix provided dial up services, and technical support for the Egyptian people Telecomix released a video stating their support of the Egyptian people, describing their efforts to provide dial-up connections, and offering methods to avoid internet filters and government surveillance. The hacktivist group also announced that they were closely tracking radio frequencies in the event that someone was sending out important messages.
• Project Chanology, also known as "Operation Chanology", was a hacktivist protest against the Church of Scientology to punish the church for participating in Internet censorship relating to the removal of material from a 2008 interview with Church of Scientology member Tom Cruise. Hacker group Anonymous attempted to "expel the church from the Internet" via DDoS attacks. In February 2008 the movement shifted toward legal methods of nonviolent protesting. Several protests were held as part of Project Chanology, beginning in 2008 and ending in 2009.
• On June 3, 2011, LulzSec took down a website of the FBI. This was the first time they had targeted a website that was not part of the private sector. That week, the FBI was able to track the leader of LulzSec, Hector Xavier Monsegur.
• On June 20, 2011 LulzSec targeted the Serious Organised Crime Agency of the United Kingdom, causing UK authorities to take down the website.
• In August 2011 a member of Anonymous working under the name "Oliver Tucket" took control of the Syrian Defense Ministry website and added an Israeli government web portal in addition to changing the mail server for the website to one belonging to the Chinese navy.
• Anonymous and New World Hackers claimed responsibility for the 2016 Dyn cyberattack in retaliation for Ecuador's rescinding Internet access to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at their embassy in London. WikiLeaks alluded to the attack. Subsequently, FlashPoint stated that the attack was most likely done by script kiddies.
• In 2013, as an online component to the Million Mask March, Anonymous in the Philippines crashed 30 government websites and posted a YouTube video to congregate people in front of the parliament house on November 5 to demonstrate their disdain toward the Filipino government.
• In 2014, Sony Pictures Entertainment was hacked by a group by the name of Guardians Of Peace (GOP) who obtained over 100 Terabytes of data including unreleased films, employee salary, social security data, passwords, and account information. GOP hacked various social media accounts and hijacked them by changing their passwords to diespe123 (die sony pictures entertainment) and posting threats on the pages.
• British hacker Kane Gamble, who was sentenced to 2 years in youth detention, posed as John Brennan, the then director of the CIA, and Mark F. Giuliano, a former deputy director of the FBI, to access highly sensitive information. The judge said Gamble engaged in "politically motivated cyber-terrorism."

Notable hacktivist peoples/groups

DkD[||

DkD[||, a French cyberhacktivist, was known, amongst others, to be the "defacer" of navy.mil (US Navy website) and defensivethinking.com (the Company of the famous hacker Kevin Mitnick) among other 2000 websites.

He has been arrested by the OCLCTIC (office central de lutte contre la criminalité liée aux technologies de l’information et de la communication), in March 2003.

DkD[|| defaced more than 2000 pages, many were governments and US military sites.

Eric Voulleminot of the Regional Service of Judicial Police in Lille classified the young hacker as "the most wanted hacktivist in france" 

DkD[|| was a very known defacer in the underground for his political view, in fact he did all his defacements for political reasons. When the news of his arrest was coming around the underground, a crew, called The Ghost Boys have defaced a lot of .navy.mil sites using the “Free DkD[||!!” Slogan which recalls what happened after Mitnick's arrest.

Anonymous

Perhaps the most prolific and well known hacktivist group, Anonymous has been prominent and prevalent in many major online hacks over the past decade. Anonymous originated on the forums of 4chan during 2003, but didn't rise to prominence until 2008 when they directly attacked the Church of Scientology in a massive DoS attack. Since then, Anonymous has participated in a great number of online projects such as Operation: Payback and Operation: Safe Winter. However, while a great number of their projects have been for a charitable cause, they have still gained notoriety from the media due to the nature of their work mostly consisting of illegal hacking.

Following the Paris terror attacks in 2015, Anonymous posted a video declaring war on ISIS, the terror group that claimed responsibility for the attacks. Since declaring war on ISIS, Anonymous since identified several Twitter accounts associated with the movement in order to stop the distribution of ISIS propaganda. However, Anonymous fell under heavy criticism when Twitter issued a statement calling the lists Anonymous had compiled "wildly inaccurate," as it contained accounts of journalists and academics rather than members of ISIS.

Anonymous has also been involved with the Black Lives Matter movement. Early in July 2015, there was a rumor circulating that Anonymous was calling for a Day of Rage protests in retaliation for the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, which would entail violent protests and riots. This rumor was based on a video that was not posted with the official Anonymous YouTube account. None of the Twitter accounts associated with Anonymous had tweeted anything in relation to a Day of Rage, and the rumors were identical to past rumors that had circulated in 2014 following the death of Mike Brown. Instead, on July 15, a Twitter account associated with Anonymous posted a series of tweets calling for a day of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. The Twitter account used the hashtag "#FridayofSolidarity" to coordinate protests across the nation, and emphasized the fact that the Friday of Solidarity was intended for peaceful protests. The account also stated that the group was unaware of any Day of Rage plans.

In February 2017 the group took down more than 10,000 sites on the Dark web related to child porn.

WikiLeaks

Play media

The video released by WikiLeaks, showing the slaying of Reuters employee Namir Noor-Eldeen and a dozen other civilians by a U.S. helicopter.

WikiLeaks was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange as a "multi-national media organization and associated library." WikiLeaks operated under the principle of "principled leaking," in order to fight societal corruption. The not-for-profit functions as a whistleblowing organization that serves as an archive of classified documents. Originally, WikiLeaks was operated with the principles of a wiki site, meaning that users could post documents, edit others' documents, and help decide which materials were posted.

The first notable release of documents by WikiLeaks was the release of Afghanistan War logs. In July 2010, WikiLeaks published over 90,000 documents regarding the war in Afghanistan. Prior to the leak, WikiLeaks gave access to the documents to three newspapers. Though WikiLeaks did not identify a source for the documents, it was speculated that the leak came from Chelsea Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst arrested in May 2010 and accused of leaking classified information. The war logs revealed 144 incidents of formerly unreported civilian casualties by the U.S. military. The leak of the Afghanistan war logs was the greatest military leak in United States history.

WikiLeaks is also notable for its leak of over 20,000 confidential emails and 8,000 file attachments from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), on July 22, 2016. The emails are specifically from the inboxes of seven prominent staffers of the DNC, and they were leaked as a searchable database. The emails leaked showed instances of key DNC staffers working to undermine Senator Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign prior to primary elections, which was directly against the DNC's stated neutrality in primary elections. Examples of targeting Senator Bernie Sanders included targeting his religion, hoping for his dropping out of the race, constructing negative narratives about his campaign and more. Other emails revealed criticism of President Barack Obama for not helping more in fundraising. Following the leak, DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced she would be stepping down from her position in the DNC. On July 25, 2016, the Democratic National Convention opened without Wasserman Schultz. The DNC issued an apology to Sanders the same day the Democratic National Convention opened.

LulzSec

In May 2011, five members of Anonymous formed the hacktivist group Lulz Security, otherwise known as LulzSec. LulzSec's name originated from the conjunction of the internet slang term "lulz", meaning laughs, and "sec", meaning security. The group members used specific handles to identify themselves on Internet Relay Channels, the most notable being: "Sabu," "Kayla," "T-Flow," "Topiary," "AVUnit," and "Pwnsauce." Though the members of LulzSec would spend up to 20 hours a day in communication, they did not know one another personally, nor did they share personal information. For example, once the members' identities were revealed, "T-Flow" was revealed to be 15 years old. Other members, on the basis of his advanced coding ability, thought he was around 30 years old.

One of the first notable targets that LulzSec pursued was HBGary, which was performed in response to a claim made by the technology security company that it had identified members of Anonymous. Following this, the members of LulzSec targeted an array of companies and entities, including but not limited to: Fox Television, Tribune Company, PBS, Sony, Nintendo, and the Senate.gov website. The targeting of these entities typically involved gaining access to and downloading confidential user information, or defacing the website at hand. Though the attacks carried out by LulzSec were not as strongly political as those typical of WikiLeaks or Anonymous, they shared similar sentiments for the freedom of information. One of their distinctly politically driven attacks involved targeting the Arizona State Police in response to new immigration laws.

The group's first attack that garnered significant government attention was in 2011, when they collectively took down a website of the FBI. Following the incident, the leader of LulzSec, "Sabu," was identified as Hector Xavier Monsegur by the FBI, and he was the first of the group to be arrested. Immediately following his arrest, Monsegur admitted to criminal activity. He then began his cooperation with the US government, helping FBI authorities to arrest 8 of his co-conspirators, prevent 300 potential cyber attacks, and helped to identify vulnerabilities in existing computer systems. In August 2011, Monsegur pleaded guilty to "computer hacking conspiracy, computer hacking, computer hacking in furtherance of fraud, conspiracy to commit access device fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft pursuant to a cooperation agreement with the government." He served a total of one year and seven months and was charged a $1,200 fine.

Related practices

Culture jamming

Culture jamming is the practice of subverting and criticizing political messages as well as media culture with the aim of challenging the status quo. It is often targeted toward subliminal thought processes taking place in the viewers with the goal of raising awareness as well as causing a paradigm shift. Culture jamming takes many forms including billboard hacking, broadcast signal intrusion, ad hoc art performances, memes, and artivism.

The term "culture jamming" was first coined in 1984 by American musician Donald Joyce of the band Negativland. However, some speculation remains as to when the practice of culture jamming first began. Social researcher Vince Carducci believes culture jamming can be traced back to the 1950s with European social activist group Situationist International. Author and cultural critic Mark Dery believes medieval carnival is the earliest form of culture jamming as a way to subvert the social hierarchy at the time.

Culture jamming is sometimes confused with acts of vandalism. However, unlike culture jamming, the main goal of vandalism is to cause destruction with any political themes being of lesser importance. Artivism usually has the most questionable nature as a form of culture jamming because defacement of property is usually involved.

Media hacking

Media hacking refers to the usage of various electronic media in an innovative or otherwise abnormal fashion for the purpose of conveying a message to as large a number of people as possible, primarily achieved via the World Wide Web. A popular and effective means of media hacking is posting on a blog, as one is usually controlled by one or more independent individuals, uninfluenced by outside parties. The concept of social bookmarking, as well as Web-based Internet forums, may cause such a message to be seen by users of other sites as well, increasing its total reach.

Media hacking is commonly employed for political purposes, by both political parties and political dissidents. A good example of this is the 2008 US Election, in which both the Democratic and Republican parties used a wide variety of different media in order to convey relevant messages to an increasingly Internet-oriented audience. At the same time, political dissidents used blogs and other social media like Twitter in order to reply on an individual basis to the presidential candidates. In particular, sites like Twitter are proving important means in gauging popular support for the candidates, though the site is often used for dissident purposes rather than a show of positive support.

Mobile technology has also become subject to media hacking for political purposes. SMS has been widely used by political dissidents as a means of quickly and effectively organising smart mobs for political action. This has been most effective in the Philippines, where SMS media hacking has twice had a significant impact on whether or not the country's Presidents are elected or removed from office.

Reality hacking

Reality hacking is any phenomenon that emerges from the nonviolent use of illegal or legally ambiguous digital tools in pursuit of politically, socially, or culturally subversive ends. These tools include website defacements, URL redirections, denial-of-service attacks, information theft, web-site parodies, virtual sit-ins, and virtual sabotage.

Art movements such as Fluxus and Happenings in the 1970s created a climate of receptibility in regard to loose-knit organizations and group activities where spontaneity, a return to primitivist behavior, and an ethics where activities and socially engaged art practices became tantamount to aesthetic concerns.

The conflation of these two histories in the mid-to-late 1990s resulted in cross-overs between virtual sit-ins, electronic civil disobedience, denial-of-service attacks, as well as mass protests in relation to groups like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The rise of collectives, net.art groups, and those concerned with the fluid interchange of technology and real life (often from an environmental concern) gave birth to the practice of "reality hacking".

Reality hacking relies on tweaking the everyday communications most easily available to individuals with the purpose of awakening the political and community conscience of the larger population. The term first came into use among New York and San Francisco artists, but has since been adopted by a school of political activists centered around culture jamming.

In fiction

The 1999 science fiction-action film The Matrix, among others, popularized the simulation hypothesis — the suggestion that reality is in fact a simulation of which those affected by the simulants are generally unaware. In this context, "reality hacking" is reading and understanding the code which represents the activity of the simulated reality environment (such as Matrix digital rain) and also modifying it in order to bend the laws of physics or otherwise modify the simulated reality.

Reality hacking as a mystical practice is explored in the Gothic-Punk aesthetics-inspired White Wolf urban fantasy role-playing game Mage: The Ascension. In this game, the Reality Coders (also known as Reality Hackers or Reality Crackers) are a faction within the Virtual Adepts, a secret society of mages whose magick revolves around digital technology. They are dedicated to bringing the benefits of cyberspace to real space. To do this, they had to identify, for lack of a better term, the "source code" that allows our Universe to function. And that is what they have been doing ever since. Coders infiltrated a number of levels of society in order to gather the greatest compilation of knowledge ever seen. One of the Coders' more overt agendas is to acclimate the masses to the world that is to come. They spread Virtual Adept ideas through video games and a whole spate of "reality shows" that mimic virtual reality far more than "real" reality. The Reality Coders consider themselves the future of the Virtual Adepts, creating a world in the image of visionaries like Grant Morrison or Terence McKenna.

In a location-based game (also known as a pervasive game), reality hacking refers to tapping into phenomena that exist in the real world, and tying them into the game story universe.

Academic interpretations

There have been various academic approaches to deal with hacktivism and urban hacking. In 2010, Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner and Thomas Ballhausen published an entire reader dedicated to the subject. They state: "Urban spaces became battlefields, signifiers have been invaded, new structures have been established: Netculture replaced counterculture in most parts and also focused on the everchanging environments of the modern city. Important questions have been brought up to date and reasked, taking current positions and discourses into account. The major question still remains, namely how to create culturally based resistance under the influence of capitalistic pressure and conservative politics."