Looking into the Positive and Negative Aspects of Hacktivism

Karagiannopoulos, Vasileios

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-71758-6_3

Looking into the Positive and Negative Aspects of Hacktivism

Vasileios Karagiannopoulos⁴

Chapter
First Online: 06 March 2018

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1 Citations

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Cybercrime and Cybersecurity ((PSCYBER))

Abstract

This chapter moves the analysis into more depth by assessing the links of hacktivism to freedom of expression and civil disobedience. This is done with the aim of highlighting the main concerns behind hacktivist practices as a form of expressive law-breaking, but also in order to discuss the positive elements it entails as a novel political practice. It first reviews the links between symbolic law-breaking and free speech/freedom of expression and finds similarities and differences between hacktivist practices and protected speech conceptually and legally. Finding that a link between the two would be hard to establish in most cases, the analysis then moves on to review the links between hacktivist practices and civil disobedience, since hacktivism has been often characterised as electronic civil disobedience. The chapter discusses the value of civil disobedience and the moral and practical criteria that reinforce its positive elements whilst mitigating its negative consequences. The chapter closes by analogising hacktivist tactics and practices to civil disobedience and translates the arguments regarding the positive and negative elements of civil disobedience into cyberspace situations.

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Notes

1.
Robert Hall, ‘Legal Toleration of Civil Disobedience’ (1971) 81 Ethics 128, 132; Mead equates peaceful speech with symbolic expressive acts, even if incidentally or inevitably obstructive/disruptive with a requirement that protests do not entail disproportionate disruption that could seriously impair the functionality of the protesters’ targets. He considers such activities to be legitimate civic responses that should be considered lawful, unless there is contradicting evidence. David Mead, The New Law of Peaceful Protest: Rights and Regulation in the Human Rights Act Era (Hart Publishing, Oxford 2010) 11–12.
2.
Barbara J. Katz, ‘Civil Disobedience and the First Amendment’ (1985) 32 UCLA Law Review 904, 906–907.
3.
Mead (n 1) 26; Noah Hampson, ‘Hacktivism: A New Breed of Protest in a Networked World’ (2012) 35 Boston College International & Comparative Law Review 511, 526–527.
4.
Susan Tiefenbrun, ‘Civil Disobedience and the US Constitution’ (2003) 32 Southwestern University Law Review 677, 697. Criminal libel was only abolished for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland in 2010 with the Coroners and Justice Act of 2009 , Ch 3, section 73.
5.
J.L. Legrande, ‘Nonviolent Civil Disobedience and Police Enforcement Policy’ (1967) 58 The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 393, 395–396.
6.
Hampson (n 3) 527; Mead (n 1) 100.
7.
Council of Europe, ‘The European Convention on Human Rights’ (Rome, 1950) art 10.2: ‘The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions, or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity, or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.’
8.
Ward v Rock Against Racism 491 U.S. 781 (1989) .
9.
The picketing against a company operating within a shopping mall was considered protected speech. The two crucial elements justifying this decision were, first, that the protest was strictly related to the space where it was taking place and, second, there were no public space alternatives close by due to the nature of the area where the shopping mall was located. Food Employees v. Logan Valley Plaza, Inc 391 U.S. 308 (1968) (Logan Valley) . However, this case has been superseded by. Lloyd v Tanner. In this case, the denial to leave the mall’s premises at the request of the owner, when leafleting against the war in Vietnam, was considered a violation of the mall owners’ right of private property. The court concluded that the cause of the protest was unrelated to the place of protest (the mall), as there were also adequate alternative places for expression that were publicly accessible, such as pavements, adjacent to the shopping mall. Lloyd Corp. v Tanner, 407 U.S. 551 (1972) (Tanner) . See also Hudgens v NLRB 424 U.S. 507, 96 S. Ct. 1029, 47 L. Ed. 2d 196, 1976 U.S.
A similar conclusion was reached by the European Court of Human Rights in Appleby v UK . In Appleby, the rights of property of the mall-owning company Postel were considered superior to the right of free expression (art.10 ECHR) and assembly (art.11 ECHR) of three protesters who were petitioning inside one of its malls. (2003) 37 EHRR 38 (Appleby). Similarly, in the UK, an example would be the case of City of London v Samede & Ors [2012] EWHC 34 QB (Samede) . Here, protesters were prevented from protesting within the privately owned Canary Wharf area, even though the cause of their protest, the economic crisis allegedly exacerbated by the policies of the banks hosted in Canary Wharf, was very relevant to the space the protesters had chosen.
10.
For example, the court in CyberPromotions, Inc. v America Online, Inc. 948 F. Supp. 436 (E.D. Pa. 1996) (CyberPromotions) found that, if non-Internet alternatives exist that would allow expression to reach the desired public, then private actors, such as America Online (AOL), could not be forced to accept speech on their private online network web pages in order for speech to reach its subscribers. The court argued that AOL’s service did not have the character of a public forum and, thus, was under no obligation to allow speech as a private space. See Dawn C. Nunziato, ‘The Death of the Public Forum in Cyberspace,’ (2005) 20 Berkeley Technology Law Journal 1115, 1136.
11.
In Sutliffe v. Epping Sch. Dist., 584 F.3d 314, 333–34 (1st Cir. 2009) the court found that a town’s website could not be considered a public forum. See also Hogan v. Twp. of Haddon, 278 F. App’x 98, 102 (3d Cir. 2008) and Vargas v. City of Salinas, 205 P. 3d 207, 215 n.8 (Cal. 2009) regarding whether websites of government organisations could be considered public forums. A more extensive analysis can be found in Xiang Li, ‘Hacktivism and the First Amendment: Drawing the Line between Cyber Protests and Crime’ (2013) 27 Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 301.
12.
US v. American Library Association, 539 U.S. 194 (2003) (Library Association) the US Supreme court argued that public library Internet access did not constitute a public forum and, therefore, filtering restrictions on patrons’ access to information were considered constitutional.
13.
Mark A. Lemley, ‘Place and Cyberspace’ (2003) 91 California Law Review 521, 536–537. http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/californialawreview/vol91/iss2/5.
14.
The court respected the private property right and the desire of the owners of the mall to prevent protests that could cause disruption or annoy any of the patrons.
15.
US v Fullmer 584 F.3d 132 (3d Cir. 2009) (Fullmer) .
16.
See the Lufthansa virtual sit-in case: OberlandesGericht Frankfurt am Main v Thomas Vogel (No. 1 Ss 319/05) case available in German: http://www.libertad.de/service/downloads/pdf/olg220506.pdf.
See also commentary in English in European Digital Rights, ‘Frankfurt Appellate Court says Online Demonstration Is Not Coercion’ (European Digital Rights, 07 June 2006) https://edri.org/edrigramnumber4-11demonstration/.
17.
Ricardo Dominguez, ‘Electronic Disobedience Post-9/11’ (2008) 22 Third Text 661.
18.
Federico Biancuzzi, ‘Achtung! New German Laws on Cybercrime’ (Security Focus, 10 July 2007) http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/448.
19.
Mark E. DeForrest, ‘Civil Disobedience: Its Nature and Role in the American Legal Landscape’ (1998) 33 Gonzaga Law Review 653, 654.
20.
John Rawls, The Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1999) 339; Juergen Habermas and Martha Calhoun, ‘Right and Violence: A German Trauma’ (1985) 1 Cultural Critique 125, 137; Robert Hall, ‘Legal Toleration of Civil Disobedience’ (1971) 81 Ethics 128, 132–133.
21.
John Rawls, The Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1999) 320.
22.
Juergen Habermas, ‘Civil Disobedience: Litmus Test for the Democratic Constitutional State’ (1985) 30 Berkeley Journal of Sociology 95, 99.
23.
Paul F. Power, ‘Civil Disobedience as Functional Opposition’ (1972) 34 The Journal of Politics 37, 40.
24.
Hugo A. Bedau, ‘Civil Disobedience in Focus: Introduction’ in Hugo A. Bedau (ed), Civil Disobedience in Focus (Routledge, London 2002) 50.
25.
An exception could be the creation of a virus that attempts to express concerns about the undue demonisation of viral software in contemporary cybercrime regimes. 0100101110101101.org, ‘Contagious Paranoia: 0100101110101101.org Spreads a New Computer Virus’ (0100101110101101.org, 2011) http://0100101110101101.org/biennale-py/.
26.
CAE characterises direct action as policy subversion tactics, including information thefts and more destructive interventions that have a more coercive and less expressive character than ECD. Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance (Autonomedia, New York 2001) 14.
27.
Habermas and Calhoun (n 20) 134–135.
28.
William Smith, ‘Civil Disobedience and Social Power: Reflections on Habermas’ (2008) 7 Contemporary Political Theory 72, 79–80.
29.
Ibid. 81–82; See, for example, how the Supreme Court connected the elimination of limitations to spending money and effort in promoting or defeating political adversaries with free speech, surrendering election decisions even more to the influence of rich corporate elites. Adam Cohen, ‘Case Study: The Supreme Court and Corporate Free Speech’ (Time, 07 July 2010). http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2001844,00.html.
30.
Juergen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (William Rehg tr, Polity, Cambridge 1996) 384.
31.
Ibid. 382; Smith (n 28) 78.
32.
Habermas and Calhoun (n 27) 137.
33.
Smith (n 28) 79–80.
34.
Ibid. 78.
35.
Habermas and Calhoun (n 20) 137.
36.
Ibid.
37.
John Rawls, The Theory of Justice (n 20) 301; John Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical’ (1985) 14 Philosophy and Public Affairs 223, 236–237.
38.
Rawls, The Theory of Justice (n 20) 13.
39.
Rawls, The Theory of Justice (n 20) 326–327.
40.
Ibid.
41.
John Rawls, The Law of the Peoples; with the Idea of Public Reason Revisited (Harvard University Press, London 2000) 14–15; Rawls, The Theory of Justice (n 20) 342.
42.
Rawls, The Theory of Justice (n 20) 320.
43.
Alan M. Schwarz, ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1970) 16 McGill Law Journal 542, 564.
44.
Rawls, The Theory of Justice (n 20) 320–321.
45.
Ibid. 322.
46.
Ibid. 321.
47.
Ibid. 322.
48.
Ibid. 327–328.
49.
Ibid. 328–329.
50.
Ibid. 339.
51.
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Original Edition 1879, The Floating Press, 2009) 78–83, 90.
52.
Ibid. 99–104.
53.
As Mill says, ‘[j]ustice is a name for certain moral requirements, which, regarded collectively, stand higher in the scale of social utility, and are therefore of more paramount obligation, than any others; though particular cases may occur in which some other social duty is so important, as to overrule any one of the general maxims of justice’ (ibid. 113).
54.
As Greenawalt says, ‘[i]f […] what has happened is only a very bad policy decision and disobedience is likely to produce a careful reappraisal and possible reversal, the disobedience might well be warranted. The intensity of opposition demonstrated by self-sacrificing disobedience can serve to promote re-examination of crucial factual data as well as claims of justice.’ Greenawalt, Conflicts of Law and Morality (Oxford University Press, New York 1989) 234–235.
55.
Daniel Markovits, ‘Democratic Disobedience’ (2005) 114 The Yale Law Journal 1897, 1900–1901.
56.
Greenawalt, Conflicts of Law and Morality (n 54) 234.
57.
Markovits (n 55) 1901.
58.
Bedau, ‘Civil Disobedience in Focus: Introduction’ (n 24) 9.
59.
Power (n 23) 42.
60.
Rawls, The Theory of Justice (n 20) 320–321.
61.
Ibid. 341.
62.
Ibid.
63.
Ibid. 342.
64.
Steven R. Schlesinger, ‘Civil Disobedience: The Problem of Selective Obedience to Law’ (1976) 3 Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 947, 953; Rawls, The Theory of Justice (n 19) 312; Smith (n 28); Menachem M. Kellner, ‘Democracy and Civil Disobedience’ (1975) 37 The Journal of Politics 899, 900.
65.
Rawls, The Theory of Justice (n 20) 313; Kellner (n 64) 901; The European Court of Human Rights in Gorzelik v Poland (2005) 40 EHRR has argued that democracy identifies with the protection of minorities and the avoidance of abuses of the majority’s dominant position; Mead (n 1) 32.
66.
Alexander M. Bickel, ‘Civil Disobedience and the Duty to Obey’ (1973) 8 Gonzaga Law Review 199, 210; Habermas and Calhoun (n 20) 137.
67.
Kenneth E. Himma, ‘Hacking as Politically Motivated Digital Civil Disobedience: Is Hacktivism Morally Justified?’ (2005) 17 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=799545#.
68.
Alexandra Samuel, Hacktivism and the Future of Political Participation (Harvard University, 2004) http://alexandrasamuel.com/dissertation/pdfs/index.html, 12.
69.
See Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso Books, 2014) 107–109.
70.
Small-scale actions like web defacements often cause less disruption and inconvenience than mass actions, like virtual sit-ins. See Meiring De Villiers, ‘Distributed Denial of Service: Law, Technology & Policy’ (2007) Paper 7, University of New South Wales Faculty of Law Research Series, 1, 25–26.
71.
Vinit Haksar, ‘The Right to Civil Disobedience’ (2003) 41 Osgoode Hall Law Journal 415. For example, small groups could be more politically and tactically considerate than more expansive collectives, such as with Anonymous, where motivations and beliefs of participants could vary.
72.
Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1979) 269.
73.
Ibid.
74.
Web defacements and redirects are examples of individual or small group efforts, while a sit-in at a small office could not accommodate all the protesters that a march for a similar cause would.
75.
For example, Anonymous might criticise attacking certain websites as irrelevant to a cause and yet some members might still proceed with a protest, despite the general condemnation of the choice.
76.
Raz (n 72) 237; Kent Greenawalt, ‘A Contextual Approach to Disobedience’ (1970) 70 Columbia Law Review 48, 56–57.
77.
Martin C. Loesch, ‘Motive Testimony and a Civil Disobedience Justification’ (1990) 5 Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy 1069, 1112–1113; Alan M. Schwarz, ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1970) 16 McGill Law Journal 542, 553–554; Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (4th edn, Harvest Books, San Diego 1972) 69–70, 74; Rawls, The Theory of Justice (n 21) 342.
78.
Rawls, The Theory of Justice (n 21) 321–322.
79.
Raz (n 72) 267; Schwarz (n 77) 565–566; Anthony D. Woozley, ‘Civil Disobedience and Punishment’ (1976) 86 Ethics 323, 325; Greenawalt, Conflicts of Law and Morality (n 54) 245.
80.
Rawls, The Theory of Justice (n 21) 336; Craig P. Colby, ‘Civil Disobedience: A Case for Separate Treatment’ (1968) 14 Wayne Law Review 1165, 1167–1168. Arendt recognises that many changes in the US legal system have happened because of the pressure CD has exerted on reformative political mechanisms and legislatures: Arendt (n 77) 80–82; Moreover, the government is forced by confronting such incidents to also witness the social disaffection for its practices, realise its shortcomings, and try to minimise points of friction with citizens. Power (n 23) 47.
81.
Mark E. DeForrest, ‘Civil Disobedience: Its Nature and Role in the American Legal Landscape’ (1998) 33 Gonzaga Law Review 653, 657–658.
82.
Ibid.
83.
U.S.C., Title 18, Part I, Chapter I, Section 16.
84.
(c.8).
85.
Greenawalt (n 54) 245.
86.
Himma (n 67) 2–3; Calabrese seems to agree, characterising as forms of violence only extreme hacking acts that irreparably destroy server files. Andrew Calabrese, ‘Virtual Nonviolence? Civil Disobedience and Political Violence in the Information Age’ (2004) 6 info www.emeraldinsight.com/1463-6697.htm, 332.
87.
Michael McGuire, Hypercrime: The New Geometry of Harm (Routledge Cavendish, Oxford 2007) 80.
88.
Majid Yar, Cybercrime and Society (Sage Publications, London 2006) 10–11.
89.
Tim Owen, ‘Cyber-Violence: Towards a Predictive Model, Drawing upon Genetics, Psychology and Neuroscience’ (1 September 2016) 9 International Journal of Criminology and Sociological Theory 1, 1–11.
90.
See America Online, Inc. v IMS et al. 24 F.Supp. 2d 548 (E.D.Va. 1998) ; As it was argued, ‘AOL’s loss of good-will when customers complained about the slow and balky operation of their service was an element of actionable damages, above and beyond physical damage to the system itself.’ Richard A. Epstein, ‘Cybertrespass’ (2003) 70 The University of Chicago Law Review, Centennial Tribute Essays 73, 81.
91.
De Villiers (n 70) 41.
92.
(1991) 93 Cr App R 25.
93.
For discussion, see Andrew Murray, Information Technology Law: The Law and Society (1 edn Oxford University Press, USA, Oxford; New York 2010) 340–341.
94.
Power (n 23).
95.
See (n 79).
96.
Mathias Klang, ‘Civil Disobedience Online’ (2004) 2 Info, Communications and Ethics in Society 75, 76–77; John Morreal, ‘The Justifiability of Violent Civil Disobedience’ in Hugo Bedau (ed), Civil Disobedience in Focus (Routledge, London 1976) 130–143, 135–138.
97.
Morreal (n 96); Vinit Haksar, ‘Civil Disobedience and Non-Cooperation’ in Hugo Bedau (ed), Civil Disobedience in Focus (Routledge, London 2002) 144–158, 146–147.
98.
Morreal (n 96); Haksar (n 97) 146–147.
99.
Morreal (n 96). For the need of some degree of coercion in CD, see Kimberley Brownlee, ‘The Communicative Aspects of Civil Disobedience and Lawful Punishment’ (2006) 1 Criminal Law and Philosophy Journal 179, 181.
100.
Morreal (n 96).
101.
McGuire (n 87) 124.
102.
Ibid.
103.
Bedau, ‘Civil Disobedience in Focus: Introduction’ (n 24) 8; Schlesinger (n 64) 956; Raz (n 72) 267.
104.
Quint (n 16) 125.
105.
Greenawalt, ‘A Contextual Approach to Disobedience’ (n 76) 61–64; Jonathan Simon, Governing through Crime (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2007) 154.
106.
Luke Allnutt, ‘Old-School Hacker Oxblood Ruffin Discusses Anonymous and the Future of Hacktivism’ (Tangled Web, 8 June 2011) http://www.rferl.org/content/hacker_oxblood_ruffin_discusses_anonymous_and_the_future_of_hacktivism/24228166.html; Tim Jordan and Paul A. Taylor, Hacktivism and Cyberwars: Rebels with a Cause? (Routledge, London 2004) 90–91.
107.
Bruce Johnson and Ho Youm, ‘Commercial Speech and Free Expression: The United States and Europe Compared’ (2008) 2 Journal of International Media & Entertainment Law 159; see also Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S 310 (2010).
108.
Klang (n 96) 82–83.
109.
Lijun Tang and Peidong Yang, ‘Symbolic Power and the Internet: The Power of a Horse’ (2011) 33 Media Culture Society 675, 676.
110.
D Zeidy, ‘Facebook Just REVERSED Ban Against Anonymous Group That Has Been Targeting ISIS’ (MintPress News, 18 March 2015) http://www.mintpressnews.com/facebook-just-reversed-ban-against-anonymous-group-that-has-been-targeting-isis/203449/.
111.
Stephanie Winston, ‘“Don’t Be Evil”: Uncovering the Implications of Google Search’ (2011) 7 Dalhousie Journal of Interdisciplinary Management 1; Nunziato (n 10).
112.
Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2009) 298; Scott Burris, Michael Kempa, and Clifford Shearing, ‘Changes in Governance: A Cross-Disciplinary Review of Current Scholarship’ (2008) 41 Akron Law Review 1, 28.
113.
Samuel (n 68) 210–212.
114.
Carl Cohen, ‘Civil Disobedience and the Law’ (1966) 21 Rutgers Law Review 1, 4–5; Hugo A. Bedau, ‘Civil Disobedience and Personal Responsibility for Injustice’ (1970) 54 The Monist 517.
115.
Jordan and Taylor (n 106) 79–80; 2600 Magazine, ‘Press Release – 2600 Magazine Condemns Denial of Service Attacks’ (2600 Magazine, 10 December 2010) https://dear2600.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/press-release-2600-magazine-condemns-denial-of-service-attacks/.
116.
An example of this is the protest against Lufthansa, where the company had been notified in advance and had taken precautionary measures in order to absorb the increased traffic with less disruption. See (n 16).
117.
Pamela E. Oliver, ‘Bringing the Crowd Back In: The Non-organizational Elements of Social Movements’ (1989) 11 Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change 4, 7–8; Jordan and Taylor (n 106) 152–153; Bruce Simon, ‘Illegal Knowledge: Strategies for New Media Activism: Dialogue with Ricardo Dominguez and Geert Lovink’ in Bousquet Marc and Wills Katharine (eds), The Politics of Information: The Electronic Mediation of Social Change (Altx Press 2003) 55–65, 58–59; see, for example, use of hacktivism in struggles against the Iranian regime and the global support these protests generated. Jon Leyden, ‘Iranian Hacktivists Hand-Crank DDoS Attack’ (The Register, 22 June 2009) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/22/iranian_hactivism/.
118.
Ricardo Dominguez, ‘Electronic Civil Disobedience’ (thing.net, undated) http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html.
119.
Dorothy E. Denning, ‘Activism, Hacktivism, and Cyberterrorism: The Internet as a Tool for Influencing Foreign Policy’ in Jon Arquila and David Ronfeldt (eds), Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (RAND Corporation, 2001) 266–267.
120.
Rawls, The Theory of Justice (n 21) 327–328; Merton Tice, ‘Civil Disobedience: A Study of Law and Its Relation to Society’ (1968) 13 South Dakota Law Review 356, 361; Lasse Thomassen, ‘Within the Limits of Deliberative Reason Alone: Habermas, Civil Disobedience and Constitutional Democracy’ (2007) 6 European Journal of Political Theory 200, 203.
121.
Greenawalt, ‘A Contextual Approach to Disobedience’ (n 76) 61.
122.
Himma (n 58) 4–5; US courts have supported that there can be a presumption that petition and elections could always bring change legally, rendering the potential exhaustion of legal means impossible. See John A. Cohan, ‘Civil Disobedience and the Necessity Defense’ (2007) 6 Pierce Law Review 111, 141–142.
123.
Castells documents the power imbalances in modern information society democracies. Castells, Communication Power (n 112); Black also discusses the deficiencies of state regulatory processes and agencies, suggesting the need for regulation to move beyond the core democratic state: Julia Black, ‘Critical Reflections on Regulation’ (2002) 27 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy 1; Schwarz (n 77) 558–559.
124.
Raz (n 72) 269; A strike of ambulance drivers would most probably generate more social distress than a virtual sit-in on the website of the Ministry of Health.
125.
Kellner (n 64) 904.
126.
Ibid. 903–904; Arendt (n 77) An example is when strongly supported petitions are ignored without due consideration.
127.
Cohan (n 122) 141–143. For example, in US v Schoon, 22 Ill.971 F.2d 193 (9th Cir. 1991) (Schoon) , the Court argues that even the possibility for Congress to change its mind on an issue was sufficient to satisfy a reasonable assessment on the existence of legal alternatives.
128.
Examples are the European Commission or the United Nations Security Council.
129.
World Trade Organization in Africa, International Monetary Fund in Greece, Argentina, Romania.
130.
Greenawalt (n 54) 229; Rawls, The Theory of Justice (n 21) 327–328.
131.
See Yochai Benkler, ‘Free Irresponsible, Press: Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate’ 46 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 311, 331–332.
132.
WikiLeaks argued that after the donations froze, they witnessed a revenue drop of 95%: Alex Fitzpatrick, ‘Wikileaks Wins Battle against Visa, Mastercard’ (Mashable, 12 July 2012) http://mashable.com/2012/07/12/wikileaks-wins-battle-against-visa-mastercard/.
133.
Charles Arthur ‘Inside “Anonymous”: Tales from within the Group Taking Aim at Amazon and Mastercard’ (The Guardian Technology Blog, 13 December 2010) http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/dec/13/hacking-wikileaks.
134.
Fitzpatrick (n 132), The legal battle between Wikileaks and Visa for restoring their service to Wikileaks was decided more than a year after the processing of donations was suspended.
135.
Cohan (n 122) 142–143; Eric Engle, ‘The Rights’ Orchestra: Proportionality, Balancing, and Viking’ (2011) New England Journal of International Law and Comparative Law http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1704503; although the US approach is called means–ends rational review, the elements examined are similar.
136.
Herbert J. Storing, ‘The Case against Civil Disobedience’ in Hugo A. Bedau (ed), Civil Disobedience in Focus (Routledge, London 2002) 86; Stephen R. Alton, ‘In the Wake of Thoreau: Four Modern Legal Philosophers and the Theory of Non-Violent Civil Disobedience’ (1993) 24 Loyola University Law Journal 39, 63–64.
137.
Greenawalt, Conflicts of Law and Morality (n 54) 238–240.
138.
Arendt (n 77) 54–55.
139.
Haksar, ‘The Right to Civil Disobedience’ (n 71) 421–422.
140.
Coleman (n 69) 140.
141.
Ibid. 140.
142.
Woozley (n 79) 330.
143.
Greenawalt, ‘A Contextual Approach to Disobedience’ (n 76) 69–71.
144.
Colby (n 80) 1173–1174. However, in direct disobedience, one might object to punishment, since he considers the law disobeyed should not exist in the first place.
145.
Ibid.
146.
Joseph M. Kizza, Ethical and Social Issues in the Information Age (Springer-Verlag, New York 2010) 83; Katja F. Aas, Globalization & Crime (Sage Publications, London 2007) 156; Lawrence Lessig, Code v.2.0 (Basic Books, New York 2006) 18–20, 190–192; ‘disassociation and lack of physical proximity encourages people to participate in illegal activities in the Internet, such as hacking, denial of service[…]. They do not feel that in reality they are doing any serious harm’; Gregor Allan, ‘Responding to Cybercrime: A Delicate Blend of the Orthodox and the Alternative’ (2005) 149 New Zealand Law Review 175–176.
147.
These can range from total anonymity to open declaration of identification: Samuel (n 68) 214–215.
148.
Ibid. See the transparency policies of EDT and pseudonymity of Electrohippies in Jill Lane and Ricardo Dominguez, ‘Digital Zapatistas’ (2003) 47 TDR 129; DJNZ and The Action Tool Development Group of the Electrohippies Collective, ‘Client-Side Distributed Denial-of-Service: Valid Campaign Tactic or Terrorist Act?’ (2001) 34 Leonardo 269, 274; Even Anonymous, who generally advocates anonymising techniques, often employs software that allows IP-tracing and cannot be used through anonymising websites, eventually resulting in detection and prosecution of protesters. Stephen Mansfield-Devine, ‘Anonymous: Serious Threat or Mere Annoyance?’ (2011) 1 Network Security 4, 6; Evgeny Morozov and Will Oremus, “In Defense of DDoS” (Slate, 13 December 2010) http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2010/12/in_defense_of_ddos.html. ‘Unlike fingerprints, IP logs cannot specifically designate the person that was using that IP address. Law-enforcement will have to use real-world evidence to eventually find the last user of the terminal of interest.’ Allan (n 145) 151–152.
149.
Klang (n 96) 81.
150.
Coleman (n 69) 390–391.
151.
Lessig (n 145) 203; Constance Zhang, ‘Regulation of the Internet-New Laws and New Paradigms’ (2006) 17 Journal of Law, Information & Science 53, 67–68. Morozov has also emphasised how social media and the Internet in general can also facilitate the tracking down and deterrence protests and how new technologies of surveillance have struck a serious blow to the early-year presumptions that the Internet was a place of deliberate, impenetrable anonymity: Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (Public Affairs, New York 2011). See the counterargument in Trevor Thompson, ‘Terrorizing the Technological Neighborhood Watch: The Alienation and Deterrence of the White Hats under the CFAA’ (2008) 36 Florida State University Law Review 537, 547–548.
152.
Lessig (n 145) 45–46.

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Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK
Vasileios Karagiannopoulos

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Karagiannopoulos, V. (2018). Looking into the Positive and Negative Aspects of Hacktivism. In: Living With Hacktivism. Palgrave Studies in Cybercrime and Cybersecurity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71758-6_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71758-6_3
Published: 06 March 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-319-71758-6
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