Christine Lee's List: Annotated Sources

• • 3.
    This information relates with my argument that "modern" (and I mean Anonymous and those that stand with it) hackivists are not efficient because they are so widespread. This could be used as both supporting evidence for my argument or counter-argument. If used for my argument, it could be used to say that because it is so widespread and there is no central to Anonymous, it makes it weak at the core because there is no unity in their actions and gives space for other tangent groups to use their name and do more harmful attacks that maybe the "real" Anonymous wouldn't have. If for my counter argument (or a concession), I could say that this was a good defense for such groups that want to stay anonymous but they would still crumble under the very weak building blocks they were built on.
• • 2.
    I am mainly using this source for information on Anonymous and the various acts they have done in the past few years but after reading the article I am also planning to use the quotes by various professors on the inability to target Anonymous as a group because they are too widespread.
• • 1.
    Luann Lasalle, a reporter for the Montreal Gazette, reported on hacktivism is now considered one of the three main groups of online attacks according to security software company Websense. This was reported as of March 2013 and gives more light into the rise of Anonymous and its counterparts. Lasalle reports that Anonymous has been the instigator of various hacks in companies and government systems due to various reasons. The article also outlines how Anonymous is one huge network of people and that the mere reaches of Anonymous as a target makes them impossible targets to those who want to shut them down. The article also sheds light on the Wikileaks issue as the security director was interviewed on the topic. The purpose of the article was mainly to inform but also showed us that hacktivism in company's eyes are becoming a threat.
• now considered one of the three main groups of attackers online, says security software company Websense
• Anonymous has taken credit for such acts as releasing the personal information of more than 4,000 bank executives on a U.S. government website
• It also reposted personal and professional information of members of the American Westboro Baptist Church after they tweeted they would be picketing the funerals of the 20 children who were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
• “On the Internet, you can make it a lot harder for authorities to track down who you are.”

• Carleton University associate professor Anil Somayaji said different groups of people at different times have used the name “Anonymous.”

  “There’s no organization that you can call up and say, ‘Let me talk to Anonymous,”’ said Somayaji, who teaches at Carleton’s School of Computer Science in Ottawa.

• “That’s what makes large organizations nervous because there’s no well defined way to stop it. There’s no one to target.

  “The Internet gives small groups of people leverage in various ways.”
• Canada’s spy agency has said Anonymous isn’t just a thorn in the side of the powerful, but the new model for digital hacktivism.
• he doesn’t consider WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a hacktivist because to the “best of our knowledge he isn’t the guy who hacks into anything;” information is sent to him from hackers. WikiLeaks published some 250,000 secret U.S. State Department cables in December 2010.
• “They will talk about it. You don’t do a protest in silence because what’s the point.”

10 more annotations...

• • 3.
    The opinions and information in this article will help show the stark contrast between what "real" hacktivists are like and what they aim for and what the misguided hacktivists are doing today. The idea of this article is to not judge hacktivsts by the others that they are surrounded by. Sometimes not all hacktivsts are for the same cause and tackle the problem the way another would. However, most of them stick to a clear moral guideline followed by most sensible hacktivists who have had experience in such culture before. Yet we see today the misguided youths and budding hackers that do not really understand what it means to be a hacktivist and what their true message is. Through the information in this article, I want to address that though and those notions by quoting Ludlow and his philosophical input on the hacktivist social social. 
• • 1.
    Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, wrote another article on hacktivist culture but instead looked at it from a more lexical and contemplative point of view. This article was written in retrospect of the suicide of Aaron Swartz in late 2012 and early 2013, an internet activist who was facing charges for downloading millions of documents from a scholarly database JSTOR. Ludlow writes to show the people, those who will ultimately determine whether or not hacktivism is something immoral or not, that we must be careful of the changing meaning of words and the context that they have. He cautions his audience to be skeptical of the language different facilities use to explain themselves as they could be misleading or untrue. To explain this, he gives an anecdotal experience about going to an opening party to a website by a Wikileak's spokesperson. He showed his audience that hackers aren't really the evil pent-up diabolical geniuses we always think of them to be.
• • 2.
    I am using this source because it gives a more human and realistic side to the hacktivist cause and I will use this in my essay by quoting or integrating some of the diluted and filtered information that Ludlow presented in his article as well as his own opinions on the subject.
• is whether Swartz’s activities as a “hacktivist” were being unfairly defined as malicious or crimina
• focused on the federal government’s indictment of Swartz for downloading millions of documents from the scholarly database JSTOR, an action which JSTOR itself had declined to prosecute
• “Lexical Warfare” is a phrase that I like to use for battles over how a term is to be understood
• There has been an effort to redefine what the word means and what kinds of activities it describes; at the same time there has been an effort to tarnish the hacktivist label so that anyone who chooses to label themselves as such does so at their peril.
• The conflict now is between those who want to change the meaning of the word to denote immoral, sinister activities and those who want to defend the broader, more inclusive understanding of hacktivist.

• An example of the concern was an article in Infosecurity Magazine:

   

  The year 2011 is renowned for being the year that hacktivists out-stole cybercriminals to take top honors according to the Verizon data breach report. Of the 174 million stolen records it tracked in 2011, 100 million were taken by hacktivist groups.

   

  Suddenly, things are looking black and white again. Regardless of political motivation or intent, if there are victims of the attacks they perpetrate, then hacktivism has crossed the line. Not OK.
• designed to tar hacktivists and make us fear them, did not reflect what the Verizon report actually said. According to page 19 of the report only 3 percent of the data breaches in the survey were by hacktivists
• That means that in 2011 if you were worried about an intrusion into your system it was 33 times more likely that the perpetrator would be a criminal, nation state or disgruntled employee than a hacktivist
• I interpreted these knit-hackings as counteractions to the attempts to define hacktivist as something sinister; they serve as ostensive definitions of what hacktivism is and what hacktivists do.
• that hacking is fundamentally about refusing to be intimidated or cowed into submission by any technology, about understanding the technology and acquiring the power to repurpose it to our individual needs, and for the good of the many.
• It would also, of course, extend to access to knowledge more generally — a value that was inherent in Aaron Swartz’s hacking of the JSTOR data base.
• It is important because we are the ones who will decide who will win.

13 more annotations...

• • 3.
    A lot of the highlighted material connects to my argument because hacktivist groups these days (mostly Anonymous and LulzSec) have lost their core motive as to why they are hacking into government systems and drawing private information from people. Hackers try and give information to the public because they believe that holding and containing information to one private facility is morally wrong. Anonymous has done no such thing to try and organize itself into a more harmonious group and have repeatedly shown that sometimes their actions can hurt the people instead of help. 
• • 2.
    I am using this source because it gives great insight into why hackers hack, their beliefs, background and I shall be using this source mainly for its exploration of hacker culture and dogma (this will support my thesis in that Anonymous and recent hacker groups have lost that core belief).
• • 1.
    Peter Ludlow, a reporter for the Nation, sheds light upon hacker culture and hacktivism's growth after the Wikileaks incident in 2010 in this article. He tries to educate the masses on exactly how the mindset of a hacker/hacktivist works and why they believe in such beliefs. Ludlow describes hacktivism since its early beginnings in the 1990s and slowly moves forward into recent years with the reveal of Anonymous and their varied effort to make information public. By bringing in the opinions from different magazines such as The New Yorker and The Daily Beast, he creates a colorful picture as to how hackers/hacktivism is being viewed as and warns that hacker culture cannot be eradicated by just focusing on one man. This source is useful because it gives both adequate background information as well as great insight into the drive that hackers have to do the things they do.
• here 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.
• Assange looks every inch the amoral, uber-nerd villai
• 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.
• 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
• Stewart Brand said in 1984, "Information wants to be free."
• 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."
• 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.

• 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.

   

   
• that basic hacker philosophy has not been abandoned, and indeed has evolved into a broad cultural movement.
• Hacktivism is the application of information technologies (and the hacking of them) to political action
• 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.
• transgressive and scatological 4Chan website, operating under the name Anonymous,
• 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.
• 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.
• it can't be characterized in terms of left versus right so much as individual versus institution.
• 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."

17 more annotations...

• • 1.
    Elinor Mills, a reporter for Cnet, interviewed the founders and co-founders of older, more experienced hacktivist groups, long before the emergence of teams like Anonymous or LulzSec. This article probably came out of the attention that Anonymous had garnered due to their various attacks and protests. This article was meant to blend new and old and have the older hacktivists shed light on the new ones. The audience should be familiar with most of the groups as Cnet is a technology magazine. In their interviews, many of the founders were on both spectrums when asked whether or not they agreed to how Anonymous has been handling their virtual activism. Ruffin disagreed to some of their tactics saying that by limiting free speech themselves, Anonymous is not doing their job properly as hacktivists. He also disagreed with the stealing of personal information and DDoS attacks. Mills also gives the opinions of other groups like EDT which gives the article a more objective and insightful outlook to it. The additional history of different groups will also help me enormously when I am looking for context and more examples of incidents that support my argument. 
• • 2.
    I am using this source because most of the criticisms that the older hacktivist groups are giving Anonymous support my argument and the context and quotes that Mills gives me in the article are of value to me and my argument.
• • 3.
    This article is a treasure chest full of supporting evidence for my argument. First off, the fact that many of the pioneers of the hacktivist movement disagree with Anonymous yet also find their ways beneficial reflects the stance that I took when determining my thesis for this research paper. The quotes by Ruffin and Ron Deibeit on the actions taken by Anonymous support my argument in that they think that Anonymous' actions are not reflective of true hacktivist nature. They contradict themselves because they are too big and what they do is ironically what they are against. This all stems from the lack of leadership seen in Anonymous and their inability to organize into one large mass instead of just a name. Of course, they have made substantial successes since their emergence but these have been stained by various unsuccessful attempts and morally dubious motives. Thus, I find this article extremely intriguing and resourceful.
• We - the undersigned - strongly oppose any attempt to use the power of hacking to threaten to destroy the information infrastructure of a country, for any reason," the statement said. "One cannot legitimately hope to improve a nation's free access to information by working to disable its data networks."
• The group, because of its lack of leadership and organization, also finds itself calling for seemingly contradictory operations including both
• Anonymous is fighting for free speech on the Internet, but it's hard to support that when you're DoS-ing and not allowing people to talk. How is that consistent?" Oxblood Ruffin said in an interview this week with CNET. "They remind me of awkward teenagers. I think they're trying to do the right thing, but they're stumbling around and doing some really stupid sh**."
• In 1999 the cDc created an offshoot group called "Hactivismo" that included hackers, lawyers and activists. The hackers developed, contributed to and distributed tools designed to help dissidents in repressive regimes avoid censorship and surveillance.
• The Hacktivismo Declaration was released in 2001 and it stated that "full respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms includes the liberty of fair and reasonable access to information, whether by shortwave radio, air mail, simple telephony, the global Internet, or other media."

• "In my opinion and in the UN Declaration on Human Rights access to information, access to speech, access to privacy are all guaranteed human rights," Oxblood Ruffin said this week. "So, you either believe in free speech, or you don't. You either believe in privacy, or you don't."

• "Things like DDoSing, defacements, data theft, in broad strokes I don't subscribe to at all in liberal democracies. I don't agree with their tactics when they involve those things, but like many people I share their broader concerns," he said, referring to Anonymous' criticism of corporate control over the U.S. political and financial system, as well as support for the Arab Spring and uprisings in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere.

• However, Oxblood Ruffin praised one operation that involved shutting down a Web site -- Operation Iran, in which hackers took down Web sites the regime was using to publish hit lists of protesters' photos for government supporters to target. "If you are saving life, then I don't have an issue with data theft or DDoS," he said.
• supports the use of social media such as Twitter and YouTube to promote human rights, a technique Anonymous has certainly mastered to positive effect. "That's a classic example of hacktivism," he said of Anonymous helping protesters organize and get around attempts at government censorship.
• there are times when defacements and DDoS attacks are appropriate acts of electronic civil disobedience.
• "The history of civil disobedience, with Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Henry David Thoreau, is one of blockage or trespass ... that disrupts the everyday flow of power," Dominguez said in an interview. "As a community, do we value information to such a degree that brief moments of disturbance" can not be tolerated even though they are designed for protest and to help right moral wrongs?
• Supporters have taken to the streets in protests against the Church of Scientology as part of Project Chanology in 2008 and in Occupy Wall Street demonstrations around the country last year. "I think Anonymous has been very effective, both as a network and as the emergence of a type of civil society and one that is extremely intimate with Net culture," Dominguez said.
• "With a physical sit-in, people are putting their lives on the line standing in front of a building. It's limited in scope and requires a physical commitment," he said. "Today, anyone with a $200 laptop can bring about a blockage, essentially silence a Web site into oblivion. There is no real physical risk to that, so it can be kind of frivolous. I think there's a qualitative difference between the two because of that."
• Deibert worries that stretching the definition of civil disobedience in this manner is prompting police and prosecutors to make criminals out of youngsters who don't understand the consequences of their actions. And he is concerned that the movement will ultimately lead to greater authoritarian control over the Internet and a diminishment of freedoms.
• Hacktivism is a civic ethic that I think is integral to a liberal democratic society today, but with one caveat. I don't condone breaking the law.

16 more annotations...

• • 3.
    Many of the passages in this article reflect the idea that hacktivists think that they're the good guys when all they've done is hinder the daily operatives of different companies. I feel like this links to my argument because that is the motive of most not-so-serious hacktivist groups. They do not understand the power and potential that they have and instead use it to make it look like hacktivism is some great big joke. The "for the lulz" factor will definitely be used in my argument to show that hackvitism today is becoming more and more irresolute and ineffective and needs to be honed in somehow so that technological social change is something that we can look forward to joining in the future if we ever find ourselves unable to voice our opinions properly.
• • 1.
    Taylor Armerding, a correspondent on PC Advisor UK, wrote an article on why people think hacktivism is only a mechanism to get attention in a time where the media is practically feeding hacktivists the limelight. The article states from multiple quotes by security companies (MAD and Hacker Academy) that hacktivists don't do much damage and many companies just wait it out until they find a solution to combat the attacks made by hacktivists. Especially for companies, there hasn't been any real change since maybe the Iranian Elections in 2009 where multiple hacktivist groups got together to help protest against the vote rigging in Iran. Armerding also touches on the fact that many hacktivists aren't taken seriously because they hack "for the lulz," which ultimately means that they hack for fun. Overall, this article was basically telling the audience that hacktivism is something that nobody should be worried about.
• • 2.
    This article is going to be used maybe in my conclusion that will somehow tackle the idea that hacktivism is not something futile but rather, needs to be directed in a different direction by the right motives.
• This latest break-in is yet another example of hacktivists viewing themselves as the good guys. They have regularly described themselves as freedom fighters who strike blows in behalf of the common people against the evils of corporations and governments.
• they generally have little more long-term impact than other, more traditional, activist movements like the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street (which did have a major online element).Ã'Â Hacktivists gain a measure of short-term publicity and influence, but are now essentially irrelevant.
• "When they start breaking the law, no, they don't really change things. How many times did Sony get hacked -- 49 or so? -- and they never changed their minds about anything," Wisniewski said.Ã'Â "Stratfor (an Austin, Texas-based international intelligence broker) is not going to back down from what they do because they got hacked. Most of those types of actions are really misguided."
• Anonymous, together with The Pirate Bay and various Iranian hackers, launched an Iranian Green Party Support site called Anonymous Iran. The site has drawn over 22,000 supporters worldwide and allows for information exchange between the world and Iran, despite attempts by the Iranian government to censor news about the riots on the Internet," the report said
• But, Murray and Wisniewski agree that most of the time, the public does not buy the claim that "hacktivists are not criminals."
• that their exploits are "for the lulz," which generally means for personal enjoyment, but is also seen as craving attention.

7 more annotations...