• WikiLeaks and Hacktivist Culture
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[img]http://www.thenation.com/sites/thenation.com/themes/thenation/images/logo-main.gif[/img] [url=http://www.thenation.com/article/154780/wikileaks-and-hacktivist-culture]Source[/url] [release]In recent months there has been considerable discussion about the WikiLeaks phenomenon, and understandably so, given the volume and sensitivity of the documents the website has released. What this discussion has revealed, however, is that the media and government agencies believe there is a single protagonist to be concerned with—something of a James Bond villain, if you will—when in fact the protagonist is something altogether different: an informal network of revolutionary individuals bound by a shared ethic and culture. According to conventional wisdom, the alleged protagonist is, of course, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and the discussion of him has ranged from Raffi Khatchadourian's June portrait in The New Yorker, which makes Assange sound like a master spy in a John le Carré novel, to Tunku Varadarajan's epic ad hominem bloviation in The Daily Beast: "With his bloodless, sallow face, his lank hair drained of all color, his languorous, very un-Australian limbs, and his aura of blinding pallor that appears to admit no nuance, Assange looks every inch the amoral, uber-nerd villain." Some have called for putting Assange "out of business" (even if we must violate international law to do it), while others, ranging from Daniel Ellsberg to Assange himself, think he is (in Ellsberg's words) "in some danger." I don't doubt that Assange is in danger, but even if he is put out of business by arrest, assassination or character impeachment with charges of sexual misconduct, it would not stanch the flow of secret documents into the public domain. To think otherwise is an error that reflects a colossal misunderstanding of the nature of WikiLeaks and the subculture from which it emerged. WikiLeaks is not the one-off creation of a solitary genius; it is the product of decades of collaborative work by people engaged in applying computer hacking to political causes, in particular, to the principle that information-hoarding is evil—and, as Stewart Brand said in 1984, "Information wants to be free." Today there is a broad spectrum of people engaged in this cause, so that were Assange to be eliminated today, WikiLeaks would doubtless continue, and even if WikiLeaks were somehow to be eliminated, new sites would emerge to replace it. Let's begin by considering whether it is possible to take WikiLeaks offline, as called for in the Washington Post by former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen, who added that "taking [Assange] off the streets is not enough; we must also recover the documents he unlawfully possesses and disable the system he has built to illegally disseminate classified information." Consider the demand that we "recover the documents." Even the documents that have not been made public by WikiLeaks are widely distributed all over the Internet. WikiLeaks has released an encrypted 1.4 gigabyte file called "insurance.aes256." If something happens to Assange, the password to the encrypted file will be released (presumably via a single Twitter tweet). What's in the file? We don't know, but at 1.4 gigabytes, it is nineteen times the size of the Afghan war log that was recently distributed to major newspapers. Legendary hacker Kevin Poulsen speculates that the file "is doubtless in the hands of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of netizens already." It's also a bit difficult to "disable the system," since WikiLeaks did not need to create a new network; the group simply relied on existing electronic communications networks (e.g., the Internet) and the fact that there are tens of thousands of like-minded people all over the world. Where did all those like-minded people come from? Are they all under the spell of Assange? To the contrary, they were active long before Assange sat down to hack his first computer. It has long been an ethical principle of hackers that ideas and information are not to be hoarded but are to be shared.In 1984, when Assange turned 13, Steven Levy described this attitude in his book Hackers. After interviewing a number of hackers, he distilled a "hacker ethic," which included, among others, the following two maxims: (1) all information should be free; (2) mistrust authority and promote decentralization. These sentiments were poetically expressed by a hacker named The Mentor, in an essay titled "The Conscience of a Hacker." It was written shortly after his arrest, and appeared in the important hacker publication Phrack in 1986. [quote] We explore…and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge…and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias…and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all.[/quote] Indeed, you can't stop them all. One year after The Mentor's manifesto was published, Assange acquired a modem and entered cyberspace for the first time. In the quarter-century since, that basic hacker philosophy has not been abandoned, and indeed has evolved into a broad cultural movement. Hacker conferences with thousands of attendees have sprung up in places ranging from Amsterdam and New York to Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi, and small weekly hacker meetups are routine in every major city in the world. For many hackers, this activity has taken a decidedly political turn—into what is sometimes called hacktivism. Hacktivism is the application of information technologies (and the hacking of them) to political action. This has ranged from simple website defacings and attempts to unbottle secret information to efforts to ensure the privacy of ordinary citizens by providing them military-grade encryption (a successful mission of the infamous Cypherpunks). Hacktivism has been extended to political action against all manner of power structures. One of the earliest examples is the Hong Kong Blondes—a group that disrupted computer networks in China in the 1990s so people could get access to blocked websites. The Hong Kong Blondes were in turn assisted by a Texas-based hacker group called the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), which helped them with advanced encryption technology. In 2006 the cDc subsequently waged a PR campaign against Google (calling it Goolag) when Google caved in to Chinese censorship demands. Their slogan: "Goolag: Exporting censorship, one search at a time." Examples of hacktivism by other groups have included denizens of the rowdy, transgressive and scatological 4Chan website, operating under the name Anonymous, in its assault on attempted censorship by the Church of Scientology, using a series of denial-of-service attacks against Scientology websites. Anonymous also moved against the Iranian government during the 2009 elections, when it established a website that shared information from inside Iran and provided advice to Iranian activists on how to encrypt and safely transmit communications. Another notable example is a group of Portuguese hackers called Urban Ka0s, which protested the Indonesian government's treatment of East Timor by hacking Indonesian government websites in the 1990s and posting alternative pages that protested the government's policies. The political compass of these hacktivist groups has never pointed true right or true left—at least by our typical way of charting the political landscape. They have been consistently unified in their adherence to the basic hacker principles as outlined by Levy and The Mentor in the 1980s: information should not be hoarded by powerful constituencies—it needs to be placed in the hands of the general public. This principle is followed even to the point of threatening to become a "foolish consistency"—as in the recent document dump from WikiLeaks, which drew the rebuke of five human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, because, they felt, civilian sources were not adequately protected. As described in Khatchadourian's New Yorker profile, Assange's philosophy blends in seamlessly with the hacktivist tradition: it can't be characterized in terms of left versus right so much as individual versus institution. In particular, Assange holds that truth, creativity, etc. are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, or what he calls "patronage networks," and that much of illegitimate power is perpetuated by the hoarding of information. Meanwhile, in a profile of Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, the man accused of leaking documents to WikiLeaks, the New York Times considered many explanations for what Manning did. He was troubled because "classmates made fun of him for being gay"; he was "ignored" by his superiors; he was "self-medicating." Curiously elided was what Manning actually said his motivation was. In a May 25 conversation, the hacker Adrian Lamo asked Manning why he gave the information to WikiLeaks when he could have sold it to Russia or China and "made bank." Manning replied in true hacktivist fashion, "Because it's public data...it belongs in the public domain...information should be free...if it's out in the open...it should [do the] public good." The traditional media, governments and their security organizations just cannot get unglued from the idea that there must be a single mastermind behind an operation like WikiLeaks. While this model works great in fictional dramas, it does not track what is really happening. This is not a one-man or even one-group operation. It is a network of thousands motivated by a shared hacktivist culture and ethic. And with or without Assange, it is not going away.[/release]
Hooray !
I do love internet politics. It's so wonderfully collective.
Hacktivist is a funny word
[QUOTE=alienmartian23;24943361]Hacktivist is a funny word[/QUOTE] so is netzien
Assange is a criminal, who has put many people in danger and must be removed from the world. Unless my research is wrong, he resides in Australia and America has extradition treaties. We need to use those. /thread
[QUOTE=rosar0980;24947923]Assange is a criminal, who has put many people in danger and must be removed from the world. Unless my research is wrong, he resides in Australia and America has extradition treaties. We need to use those. /thread[/QUOTE] Okay, I know I'm gonna seriously sound like a stereotypical anarchist here, but quit listening to the government. The US government wants Wikileaks down because, like it or not, a LOT of shady shit goes down behind closed doors and Wikileaks has the potential to shove all that out into the open. It has nothing to do whatsoever with putting people in danger, which is something that Wikileaks has actually tried to prevent, by the way. And your use of the euphemism "removed from the world" is interesting. Please be more specific.
This hacktivism stuff sounds like a lot of fun.
[QUOTE=WickedIcon;24948032]Okay, I know I'm gonna seriously sound like a stereotypical anarchist here, but quit listening to the government. The US government wants Wikileaks down because, like it or not, a LOT of shady shit goes down behind closed doors and Wikileaks has the potential to shove all that out into the open. It has nothing to do whatsoever with putting people in danger, which is something that Wikileaks has actually tried to prevent, by the way. And your use of the euphemism "removed from the world" is interesting. Please be more specific.[/QUOTE] I get that shady shit goes on with the government, and that's to be expected. I just think that he should be stopped becuase releasing these documents has put many people on a Taliban/al-Quieda/etc. hit list. Likely people with FAMILIES! They want it done, it will be. And when I say removed from the world I mean drawn, quartered, and his entrails burned.
Is it weird that some people believe a sourceless conspiracy theory website over the government? Not saying Wikileaks is that, just asking a question
[QUOTE=rosar0980;24948106]I get that shady shit goes on with the government, and that's to be expected. I just think that he should be stopped becuase releasing these documents has put many people on a Taliban/al-Quieda/etc. hit list. Likely people with FAMILIES! They want it done, it will be. And when I say removed from the world I mean drawn, quartered, and his entrails burned.[/QUOTE] Did you miss the whole part about how Wikileaks is actively trying to prevent that?
[QUOTE=WickedIcon;24948196]Did you miss the whole part about how Wikileaks is actively trying to prevent that?[/QUOTE] Day late, dollar short on that one. It's already been done, and they can't fix it.
I like how imadaman is posting everything that's related to Wikileaks. I'm very interested in the matter, but I'm too lazy to go look for news mself every day.
[QUOTE=WickedIcon;24948032]The US government wants Wikileaks down because, like it or not, a LOT of shady shit goes down behind closed doors and Wikileaks has the potential to shove all that out into the open.[/QUOTE] True, but do they have to give away our troops' tactics too? Or did that one actually happen?
[QUOTE=WickedIcon;24948196]Did you miss the whole part about how Wikileaks is actively trying to prevent that?[/QUOTE] From his reply, I'm going to asnwer "Yes, very much so".
[QUOTE=rosar0980;24948335]Day late, dollar short on that one. It's already been done, and they can't fix it.[/QUOTE] You do realize they did censor names in 90% of the documents, and the number of uncensored names is far less than the government would lead you to believe, right? While it is very unfortunate that there will be some deaths from Wikileaks, really, if it helps bring end to a war that will kill thousands more, will it be worth it? In my opinion yes. If it bring forward truth about some horrible disaster, incident, massacre or some other terrifying act done by the US or soldier under it, will it be worth it? Likely. Freedom of information, transparency, are two major things that need to be respected that the US government is notorious for ignoring.
[QUOTE=Detective P;24950568]You do realize they did censor names in 90% of the documents, and the number of uncensored names is far less than the government would lead you to believe, right? While it is very unfortunate that there will be some deaths from Wikileaks, really, if it helps bring end to a war that will kill thousands more, will it be worth it? In my opinion yes. If it bring forward truth about some horrible disaster, incident, massacre or some other terrifying act done by the US or soldier under it, will it be worth it? Likely. Freedom of information, transparency, are two major things that need to be respected that the US government is notorious for ignoring.[/QUOTE] This. Plus, the U.S. Government has no backing or evidence besides just saying that Wikileaks has caused the death of many, many people and that it's a "threat to troops". None of the documents give terrorists any advantage whatsoever besides exposing the truth, despite how hard the U.S. government tries to say that Wikileaks is evil. I also find it ironic how U.S. government tried to alert "human right organizations" of the matter. The U.S. army has recklessly killed countless innocent civilians, causing much more harm than good.
Go Anti-establishment :toot:
Anyone who's opposed to the idea of transparency and wikileaks in general, ask yourself this - Is there any information you'd be [I]worse[/I] off knowing?
You mean [b]if[/b] there will be deaths because of the leak. No one has been killed yet. [editline]09:38AM[/editline] [QUOTE=rosar0980;24947923]Assange is a criminal, who has put many people in danger and must be removed from the world. Unless my research is wrong, he resides in Australia and America has extradition treaties. We need to use those. /thread[/QUOTE] No.
[QUOTE=Oneperson;24952051] Is there any information you'd be [I]worse[/I] off knowing?[/QUOTE] Nope.
[QUOTE=rosar0980;24947923]Assange is a criminal, who has put many people in danger and must be removed from the world. Unless my research is wrong, he resides in Australia and America has extradition treaties. We need to use those. /thread[/QUOTE] Please can you just leave In The News? I don't want the reincarnation of Glaber here.
[QUOTE=Oneperson;24952051]Anyone who's opposed to the idea of transparency and wikileaks in general, ask yourself this - Is there any information you'd be [I]worse[/I] off knowing?[/QUOTE] I fucked your mom.
[QUOTE=WickedIcon;24948032]The US government wants Wikileaks down because, like it or not, a LOT of shady shit goes down behind closed doors and Wikileaks has the potential to shove all that out into the open. It has nothing to do whatsoever with putting people in danger, which is something that Wikileaks has actually tried to prevent, by the way.[/QUOTE] Then they didn't do a very good job when they released all those uncensored documents, did they? It's pretty sad to see the internets (and liberals in general) tripping over themselves to praise Assange for sticking it to the man at the expense of afghani civilians, conveniently forgetting all that rhetoric about how brown people's lives are worth just as much as ours etc etc. I guess the human rights organizations were an alliance of convenience. I totally support the idea of transparency in military operations and whatnot but the incompetence and rashness with which Wikileaks treated the initial batches makes me think they're not up to the challenge of handling this kind of information. They're doing an important job but I wish someone else were doing it, in other words. I'm not big on the livelihoods of people in 3rd world countries being in the hands of arrogant libertarian nerds.
[QUOTE=Leaf Runner;24950719]This. Plus, the U.S. Government has no backing or evidence besides just saying that Wikileaks has caused the death of many, many people and that it's a "threat to troops". None of the documents give terrorists any advantage whatsoever besides exposing the truth, despite how hard the U.S. government tries to say that Wikileaks is evil. I also find it ironic how U.S. government tried to alert "human right organizations" of the matter. The U.S. army has recklessly killed countless innocent civilians, causing much more harm than good.[/QUOTE] The U.S Army =/= The U.S Government, for starters. Secondly, I've never been to war myself, but I'm assuming it's not a cake-walk. War is not nice and pleasant. It's fucked up. That's war. You're acting as if the U.S Army is the only military force in all of the world and history that has done fucked up shit. Damn, I'm sure we pale in comparison to some other countries and time periods.
[QUOTE=looneyxl;24956784]Secondly, I've never been to war myself, but I'm assuming it's not a cake-walk. War is not nice and pleasant. It's fucked up. That's war. You're acting as if the U.S Army is the only military force in all of the world and history that has done fucked up shit. Damn, I'm sure we pale in comparison to some other countries and time periods.[/QUOTE] What's your point? That it's okay to do bad shit since some other guy is bound to have done something worse one time?
[QUOTE=TH89;24956803]What's your point? That it's okay to do bad shit since some other guy is bound to have done something worse one time?[/QUOTE] No (no where did I say it was OK). He says the U.S Army has "recklessly" killed innocent people and such, which I'm sure is true. My point is that that is to be expected in war. So pointing fingers at the military for being bad guys is pointless.
[QUOTE=looneyxl;24956853]No (no where did I say it was OK). He says the U.S Army has "recklessly" killed innocent people and such, which I'm sure is true. My point is that that is to be expected in war. So pointing fingers at the military for being bad guys is pointless.[/QUOTE] Well hey, burglary and murder is to be expected in big cities. I guess we should stop pointing fingers and enforcing the law, right? After all, it's pointless!
We can make exaggerated comparisons all day if you'd like.
[QUOTE=looneyxl;24956893]We can make exaggerated comparisons all day if you'd like.[/QUOTE] It's not an exaggeration at all, you're just making a sublimely stupid claim here. We as a nation have agreed to the Geneva Conventions, which dictate certain standards of behavior in combat situations. We also have numerous rules of conduct within the military itself, rules like "don't behead civilians for fun." You are arguing that since we are in a war, we should not expect the military to enforce [i]its own standards of behavior[/i]. Never mind the fact that cruel and brutal treatment of civilians erodes local support and damages both the mission and America's image, never mind the potential danger posed by a military that has no problem concealing its doings from its own government, never mind that it's [i]wrong[/i], you are arguing that the military should [i]stop following its own rules[/i]. And the only justification you can give is that it's war and bad stuff happens in war. Can't you see how stupendously dumb that is? My comparison was perfectly valid.
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