Electronic civil disobedience

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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. [1] [2] 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 . [1]

Contents

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. [3]

Computerized activism exists at the intersections of politico-social movements and computer-mediated communication. [4] 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. [1]

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. [5]

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. [4] 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). [1]

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. [1] [4] 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. [1] Electrohippies flooded the World Trade Organization site during the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 1999 protest activity. [6]

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. [4] 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. [4]

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.

Blockchain technology has been leveraged by EDC groups to help make them more decentralized, anonymous, and secure. [7]

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. [8]

Grey Tuesday

On February 24, 2004, large scale intentional copyright infringement occurred in an event called Grey Tuesday, "a day of coordinated civil disobedience".[ citation needed ] 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. [9] [10] 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." [11]

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" [12] 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 [13] 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 [14] and the Bay Citizen. [15]

E-Graffiti: Texts in Mourning and Action

In response to the political assassination of Zapatista teacher Jose Luis Solís López (alias Galeano), [16] 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. [17]

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.

Öppna skolplattformen

In 2020 a Swedish citizen initiative to build an app for accessing the data from the City of Stockholm’s official school system began. [18] The background is that the City of Stockholm had developed an official school system in-house. The result was a very expensive system (more than $117 million [18] ). The mobile application for parents and employees to use left user frustrated and complaining about complexity and horrible usability[ citation needed ]. As a result of this some parents decided to build an open source version mobile alternative using the API of the school platform. On February 12, 2021 the app was released and all of its code was published under an open source license on GitHub. [19] Following this the city began to work against the new alternative citizen made frontend and tried blocking it by obfuscating the official webbapplications API-calls[ citation needed ], reporting key people in the citizen project to the police[ citation needed ], calling them out in the press as unlawful[ citation needed ], etc.

During most of 2021 the city counsel and staff upheld their opposition but saw their costs rising and that there was an overwhelming support of the new frontend[ citation needed ]. The politicians in charge finally chose to step in in the fall of 2021 and open up a collaboration with the parents building the frontend[ citation needed ].

Thai Censorship

When the government of Thailand proposed a system to reform their country's network in 2015. They stated that changes were imperative "to control the inappropriate websites and control the inflow of information." [20] Their proposed reform would allow the government to monitor and censor the circulation of their network. A couple of months before this news, the Thai government underwent a coup which also resulted in the new government taking over major media and banning political gatherings. [21] These serious events concerned the people of Thailand which caused them to organize and act.

Rather than participating in a DDOS attack against the government which is usually associated with criminal activity, they decided to take to Facebook to gather internet users from around the world. These users all occupied Thai government websites in order to overflow their bandwidth and called it a "Virtual sit-in." The daily average users increased by almost 100,000 people which then prompted the government to announce that they would not use their reform proposal to censor but to study the youth. [20]

See also

Related Research Articles

Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders or commands of a government. By some definitions, civil disobedience has to be nonviolent to be called "civil". Hence, civil disobedience is sometimes equated with peaceful protests or nonviolent resistance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Acteal massacre</span> 1997 terror attack in Mexico

The Acteal massacre was a massacre of 45 people attending a prayer meeting of Catholic indigenous townspeople, including a number of children and pregnant women, who were members of the pacifist group Las Abejas, in the small village of Acteal in the municipality of Chenalhó, in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Right-wing paramilitary group Máscara Roja murdered the victims on December 22, 1997, while the Government of Mexico first admitted responsibility for the massacre in September 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hacktivism</span> Computer-based activities as a means of protest

Internet activism, hacktivism, or hactivism, 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.

Cyberterrorism is the use of the Internet to conduct violent acts that result in, or threaten, the loss of life or significant bodily harm, in order to achieve political or ideological gains through threat or intimidation. Acts of deliberate, large-scale disruption of computer networks, especially of personal computers attached to the Internet by means of tools such as computer viruses, computer worms, phishing, malicious software, hardware methods, programming scripts can all be forms of internet terrorism. Cyberterrorism is a controversial term. Some authors opt for a very narrow definition, relating to deployment by known terrorist organizations of disruption attacks against information systems for the primary purpose of creating alarm, panic, or physical disruption. Other authors prefer a broader definition, which includes cybercrime. Participating in a cyberattack affects the terror threat perception, even if it isn't done with a violent approach. By some definitions, it might be difficult to distinguish which instances of online activities are cyberterrorism or cybercrime.

A virtual sit-in is a form of electronic civil disobedience deriving its name from the sit-ins popular during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The virtual sit-in attempts to recreate that same action digitally using a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS). During a virtual sit-in, hundreds of activists attempt to access a target website simultaneously and repetitively. If performed correctly, this will cause the target website to run slowly or even collapse entirely, preventing anyone from accessing it.

Internet vigilantism is the act of carrying out vigilante activities through the Internet. The term encompasses vigilantism against alleged scams, crimes, and non-Internet-related behavior.

The Electrohippies Collective (Ehippies) is an international group of internet activists based in Oxfordshire, England, whose purpose is to express disapproval of governmental policies of mass media censorship and control of the Internet "in order to provide a 'safe environment' for corporations to do their deals."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anonymous (hacker group)</span> Decentralized hacktivist group

Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations and the Church of Scientology.

Information technology law(IT law) or information, communication and technology law (ICT law) (also called cyberlaw) concerns the juridical regulation of information technology, its possibilities and the consequences of its use, including computing, software coding, artificial intelligence, the internet and virtual worlds. The ICT field of law comprises elements of various branches of law, originating under various acts or statutes of parliaments, the common and continental law and international law. Some important areas it covers are information and data, communication, and information technology, both software and hardware and technical communications technology, including coding and protocols.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chiapas conflict</span> Conflict in southern Mexico between the Mexican government and various left-wing militias

The Chiapas conflict comprised the 1994 Zapatista uprising, the 1995 Zapatista crisis and ensued tension between the Mexican state and the indigenous peoples and subsistence farmers of Chiapas from the 1990s to the 2010s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic Disturbance Theater</span>

The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), established in 1997 by performance artist and writer Ricardo Dominguez, is an electronic company of cyber activists, critical theorists, and performance artists who engage in the development of both the theory and practice of non-violent acts of defiance across and between digital and non-digital spaces.

The Intervasion of the UK was a 1994 electronic civil disobedience and collective action against John Major's Criminal Justice Bill which sought to outlaw outdoor dance festivals and "music with a repetitive beat". Launched by a group called The Zippies from San Francisco's 181 Club on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, 1994, it resulted in government websites going down for at least a week. It utilised a form of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) known as the Email bomb in order to overload servers as a form of online protest and Internet activism. It was the first such use of the Internet and technology as a weapon of struggle and/or civil disobedience, and preceded the 1995 Italian NetStrike.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ricardo Dominguez (professor)</span>

Ricardo Dominguez is an American artist and associate professor of visual arts at UC San Diego. He has been the subject of controversy over a number of acts of electronic civil disobedience on his own and with the Electronic Disturbance Theater, which he co-founded.

Anonymous is a decentralized virtual community. They are commonly referred to as an internet-based collective of hacktivists whose goals, like its organization, are decentralized. Anonymous seeks mass awareness and revolution against what the organization perceives as corrupt entities, while attempting to maintain anonymity. Anonymous has had a hacktivist impact. This is a timeline of activities reported to be carried out by the group.

<i>We Are Legion</i> 2012 American film

We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists is a 2012 documentary film about the workings and beliefs of the self-described "hacktivist" collective, Anonymous.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Activism</span> Efforts to make change in society toward a perceived greater good

Activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in social, political, economic or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society toward a perceived greater good. Forms of activism range from mandate building in a community, petitioning elected officials, running or contributing to a political campaign, preferential patronage of businesses, and demonstrative forms of activism like rallies, street marches, strikes, sit-ins, or hunger strikes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CyberBerkut</span> Group of pro-Russian hackers

CyberBerkut is a modern organized group of pro-Russian hacktivists. The group became locally known for a series of publicity stunts and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Ukrainian government, and western or Ukrainian corporate websites. By 2018, this group was accused by western intelligence agencies, such as National Cyber Security Centre of being linked to the GRU, providing plausible deniability.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Million Mask March</span> Protest associated with the hacktivist group Anonymous

The Million Mask March, also known as "Operation Vendetta", is a worldwide, annual protest associated with the hacktivist group Anonymous occurring annually on Guy Fawkes Day, 5 November. The motive for the March varies, but includes some consistent themes prevalent in the Anonymous movement, including: corruption in politics, demilitarization, police violence, and self-governance. The marches are set in motion to allow ordinary citizens to collaborate in order to create societal change through alterations to their governments. They are coordinated through a host of channels with most prevalent being word of mouth and social media. Hundreds of Facebook events and dedicated Twitter accounts are used to advertise the protest around the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cyber Partisans</span> Belarusian hacktivist group

Cyber Partisans is a Belarusian decentralized anonymous activist/hacktivist collective emerged in September 2020, known for its various cyber attacks against the authoritarian Belarusian government. The group is part of the broader Belarusian opposition movement.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 On Electronic Civil Disobedience By Stefan Wray
  2. ↑ Electronic Civil Disobedience
  3. ↑ 5 Years of War! Stop the Nanotech and Biotech War Profiteers! Archived 2008-06-30 at the Wayback Machine
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Electronic Civil Disobedience and the World Wide Web of Hacktivism: Archived 2008-05-10 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ↑ Shantz, Jeff; Tomblin, Jordon (2014-11-28). Cyber Disobedience: Re://Presenting Online Anarchy. John Hunt Publishing. ISBN   9781782795551.
  6. ↑ Jeffrey S. Juris (2005), "The New Digital Media and Activist Networking within Anti-Corporate Globalization Movements", Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 597 (Cultural Production in a Digital Age): 189–208, doi:10.1177/0002716204270338, JSTOR   25046069, S2CID   145327747
  7. ↑ Krishnan, Armin (2020). "Blockchain Empowers Social Resistance and Terrorism Through Decentralized Autonomous Organizations". Journal of Strategic Security. 13 (1): 41–58. doi: 10.5038/1944-0472.13.1.1743 . ISSN   1944-0464. JSTOR   26907412.
  8. ↑ "Medialternatives » Wikileaks Infowar not the first online protest action". Archived from the original on 2011-08-21. Retrieved 2010-12-28.
  9. ↑ Tech Law Advisor :: DJ Danger Mouse and the Grey Album Archived 2008-07-04 at the Wayback Machine
  10. ↑ Werde, Bill (February 25, 2004). "Defiant Downloads Rise From Underground". The New York Times. Retrieved May 1, 2010.
  11. ↑ Rimmer, Matthew (2007). Digital Copyright and the Consumer revolution. Edward Elgar Publishing. p. 134. ISBN   9781845429485.
  12. ↑ "Haunt the Border". www.borderhaunt.com. Archived from the original on 5 November 2011. Retrieved 12 January 2022.
  13. ↑ http://azstarnet.com/online/databases/border-deaths-database/html_c104ad38-3877-11df-aa1a-001cc4c002e0.html [ permanent dead link ]
  14. ↑ Deadly conditions for Mexico-US Migrants Deadly conditions for Mexico-US migrants http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/07/2011713131631159182.html
  15. ↑ Interactive Art Project Lets Users Investigate Anonymous Border Deaths "Interactive Art Project Lets Users Investigate Anonymous Border Deaths - Culture Feed - the Bay Citizen". Archived from the original on 2011-07-17. Retrieved 2012-03-03.
  16. ↑ Teacher dies defending Zapatista school. "Teacher dies defending Zapatista school; read his words. | Schools for Chiapas". Archived from the original on 2014-07-28. Retrieved 2014-07-26.
  17. ↑ Justice for Galeano; Stop the war against the Zapatista communities'
  18. 1 2 Burgess, Matt. "These Parents Built a School App. Then the City Called the Cops". Wired. ISSN   1059-1028 . Retrieved 2021-11-09.
  19. ↑ "Öppna skolplattformen". GitHub. Skolplattformen.org. 14 November 2021. Retrieved 14 November 2021.
  20. 1 2 "Global Voices Advox - Thai Netizens Stage 'Virtual Sit-in' Against Single Internet Gateway Plan". Global Voices Advox. 2015-10-02. Retrieved 2023-03-07.
  21. ↑ "Thailand's New Security Law 'Annihilates Freedom of Expression'". Global Voices. 2015-04-05. Retrieved 2023-03-07.
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