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(V. 1.0 January 2001)
Contents:
~~~~~~~~~
[01] Introduction........................................metac0m
[02] Media Watch.........................................metac0m
[03] Interview
with Oxblood Ruffin!cDc...................metac0m
[04] Interview
with Ricardo Dominguez ...............Coco Fusoco
[05] Abstracts,
comparisons & importance's.........Chris Brennan
[06] Interview
with m0r0n/nightman/m0sad.................metac0m
[07] What is
Hacktivism?...........................Erika Pearson
[08] The DeCSS
case and how to change a Big Business.......Dr. Z
[09] The Debate
on the Tactic of ECD................Gidget Digit
[10] zapatista
tribal port scan code.........................EDT
.::[01]-[Introduction]
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::[metac0m]
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
This is the first edition of The Hacktivist, a monthly e-zine covering and
examining issues and events concerning hacktivism and electronic civil
disobedience. The Hacktivist Magazine is a production of thehacktivist.com,
a web site dedicated to examining the theory and practice of hacktivism and
electronic civil disobedience while contributing to the evolution of hacktivism
by promoting constructive debate, effective direct action, and creative
solutions to complex problems in order to facilitate positive change.
The Hacktivist Magazine is a determined effort to sustain both a continuing
discussion of hacktivism and ECD as well as a dialogue between hackers and
activists.
The Hacktivist is a magazine and a forum and is therefore dependent upon
reader input. Readers are encouraged to submit articles of their own for
publication. Reviews and feedback on our articles and mass media articles
is also encouraged.
Special thanks to all those who have contributed to and inspired the creation
of The Hacktivist. In particular thehacktivist.com would like to thank:
Oxblood Ruffin and the CULT OF THE DEAD COW, Ricardo Dominguez/Stefan Wray
and the EDT, Paul Mobbs and the electrohippies, The Critical Art Ensemble,
Gidget Digit, attrition.org, hacktivism.tao.ca and all the contributors to
The Hacktivist Vol 1.
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.::[02]-[Media Watch]
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::[metac0m]
:::[http://thehacktivist.com/mediawatch.html]::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Net tightens around the hacktivists
Big corporations and governments want to curb the protests of the cyber hippies
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Computer activists - "hacktivists", as they have become known - are squaring up
to governments and corporations who want to restrict their activities. They are
not opposed to business, but their immediate political aims, which range from
improvements in working conditions to political independence, are fuelled by
anger at the commercial dominance of cyberspace. Their tactics range from sending
straightforward emails of complaint to crashing websites or diverting visitors to
different sites. Some have overwhelmed servers with email "bombs" of thousands of
protest messages or launched computer viruses and worms."
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,416954,00.html
Both Sides Hacked Over Kashmir
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"More than 40 Indian sites have been infiltrated this year by hackers like G Force
Pakistan and Doctor Nuker, who have left poignant pro-Pakistan slogans and reasons
why Kashmir belongs to that country."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,40789,00.html
2000 year-in-review: The Year in Computer Crime*
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Hacktivism and Web Vandalism
Breaking into Web sites and networks to expose vulnerabilities is no longer enough
for some crackers and script-kiddies. Some are now using their skills to promote
political causes or wage protest campaigns in cyberspace by posting messages on
targeted Web sites."
http://www.infosecuritymag.com/dec00/yearincrime.htm
2000: A look back
eWEEK analyzes the year's 10 brightest and most challenging moments in IT
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As the year wore on, more and more corporate hacks were being publicized, and
experts were hinting at the great number that didn't get reported. Then, near
the end of the year, hacktivists targeted OPEC and Israeli government sites and,
of course, Microsoft, a corporate attack that demonstrated a new level of
sophistication. Most ominous of all, not many people are predicting 2001 will be
any better."
http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2665428,00.html
Cyberattacks Raise U.S. Security Alarm
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All in the Interpretation
The Pentagon's findings have raised awareness to the perils of cyberattacks,
especially when combined with increased reports of "cracktivism" throughout both
the private and public sectors."
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nf/20001218/tc/cyberattacks_raise_u_s_security_alarm_1.html
Turkish PM's Web Site Hacked in Protest at Economy
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Hackers claiming to be the children of underpaid civil servants penetrated the
Turkish Prime Minister's Web site Sunday, leaving a message protesting against
the government's economic policies."
http://news.excite.com/news/r/001203/08/net-turkey-hackers-dc
Secret plan to spy on all British phone calls
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Britain's intelligence services are seeking powers to seize all records of
telephone calls, emails and internet connections made by every person living in
this country.
http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,406191,00.html
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.::[03]-[Interview with Oxblood Ruffin! of the CULT OF THE DEAD COW]
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::[Interviewed by metac0m]
:::[http://www.cultdeadcow.com]::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
1)Described as the spot where hacking and activism meet, hacktivism has
not yet developed into a unity between the two. The tactics and
motivations of hackers and activists seem to be at odds when it comes to
hacktivism. You've suggested that "One does not become a hacktivist
merely by inserting an "h" in front of the word activist" is that just
healthy democratic debate or an inherent barrier between the two points
of view?
>>Oxblood Ruffin:
We are dealing with homonyms. There are two separate words, and two separate
fields of action, in my view.
[h]acktivists are traditional - and here i don't use the term traditional in
any negative sense - social justice types who use the internet and digital
technology as an extension of their protest palette. A good example might be
the WTO protests in Seattle in which the Internet played a seminal role as
an organizational and broadcast tool. Mailing lists were set up,
meetings/protests organized, information distributed across Web sites, etc.
Technology was used to orchestrate a real-world protest, something that
happened on the ground, and involves real people. That's fine, and there are
quite a few causes along these lines that excite my own sympathies. But this
is not "hacktivism".
Hacktivism takes place on-line, and remains on-line. It doesn't really have
anything to do with organizing a lot of bodies to execute a certain action
on the ground, à la the Electrohippies. It could involve one programmer
writing code that might have significant impact on the entire Internet. So,
hacktivism is about the Internet, and keeping it functioning and fresh. Our
primary concern, if this doesn't sound too presumptuous, is in maintaining
the good health of the Internet. Others might want to take some social
action that might get people from below the poverty line [for instance] onto
the Internet. So here you'd get involved in real-world economics to raise
living standards, or whatever it would take to make this happen. We on the
other hand would like to dedicate our work to making sure that when these
people actually do get onto the Net, that they find a healthy, vibrant,
open, and above all free [as in expression] Internet when they get there.
2)Why has the cDc taken the lead on the hacktivist campaign despite the
connotation hacktivism has accrued, that of web page defacement and
denial service, while other notables in the hacker/computer security
field seem to be standing back taking a wait and see approach?
>>Oxblood Ruffin:
The CULT OF THE DEAD COW has always taken a leadership postion, in
everything. Standing on the sidelines, playing it safe, this just isn't our
style or interest. And quite frankly, we intend to change the public
perception of what hacktivism really is. Web defacements are so jejune, so
completely sophmoric and unworthy. It takes little to no skill to execute
these defacements, and even if there were some purpose behind them, they
would still be an abridgement of free speech.
One of my favorite taglines that G. Ratte [cDc founder] came up with is
"Show and Prove". This really is what the cDc is all about. Let all the
nitwits make a grab for their fifteen minutes, and let all of the so-called
security experts play it safe and make superior noises from the sidelines.
We're in this to make a difference, and we won't stop till we do.
3)In a report by Reporters Without Borders called "The Enemies of the
Internet" 45 countries were identified as restricting access to the
Internet, using content filtering "to protecting the public from
'subversive ideas'". However, after detailing the abuses RWB simply
"calls" on the violating governments to stop such behavior. Given your
experience with the Hong Kong Blondes and the case of China (which was
on the list) how can hacktivists effectively assist in this campaign?
>>Oxblood Ruffin:
RWB are quite effective in taking the lead and raising public awareness of
various issues. In this instance, they, and others, have gotten in front of
Net censorship. But there's only so much they can do. Who will take up the
challenge? The political classes? Don't hold your breath. They're much to
busy taking polls to find out what's safe to order for lunch tomorrow. We've
decided that there's something that we can do. The cDc has formed an
umbrella group of international hackers called "Hacktivismo" who will work
towards making Net censorship less of a done deal than it used to be.
We are engaged in our first project that will allow clients accessing the
Internet from behind [so-called] national firewalls to end-run blocking
software that sets limits on exactly what sites citizens can access. We're
looking to completing by late spring. For the time being, I'm not free to
get into technical details on this project.
4)It has been argued that beyond issues of free speech and access to
information there does not seem to a willingness or unity of purpose
amongst hackers in regards to activism. Do you think this is accurate?
>>Oxblood Ruffin:
Yes. I've always said that hacktivism is a noun in search of a verb. It's a
word that is a marketer's or editor's wet dream, but it doesn't have much
associated with it other than public confusion, to the extent that the
public is even aware of the word. But things are changing, a little.
Increasingly I'm finding a lot of interest among younger hackers to actually
do things, as opposed to just offering moral support. Once there is a public
demonstration that hacktivism is not about Web defacement, or other such
efforts, I think we'll see
5)There was a time when what nation-states did within their own backyard
was seen as their sovereign right even when that behaviour extended to
human rights violations, even genocide. You've worked for the UN and
often highlight the Universal Declaration of Human rights. What role do
you think that hacktivists can play on an international level in support
of human rights?
>>Oxblood Ruffin:
The raison d'être of hacktivism is Article 19 of the Universal Declaration
on Human Rights. We take this very seriously, and to the extent that we can
do something about making this a reality, we'll try. As i mentioned [in
question three] we're working on a network application that will support
human rights on an international scale. It will be interesting to see how
governments react to this:-)
6)You've suggested that "hackers have a lot of stamina for harsh bug
fixes" and that hacktivism fuses this hacker ethic with a solution. How
do you see hacktivism as it now stands and what might the future of
hacktivism hold?
>>Oxblood Ruffin:
When I wrote that my thinking had not evolved to the point it's at now.
The Internet must remain essentially emancipated. This is most true at the
code level. Open-source code and "open standards" are far more favorable to
the good health of the Internet than proprietary and closed standards. I
once describe hacktivism as "an open-source implosion". The methodology is
as important as the motivation.
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.::[04]-[Interview with Ricardo Dominguez (EDT & CAE)]
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::[Interviewed by Coco Fusoco]
:::[http://www.thing.net/~rdom]::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Performance Art in a Digital Age: A Conversation with Ricardo Dominguez
Thursday 25 November 1999, Institute of International Visual Arts
By Coco Fusoco
CF: How did Electronic Disturbance Theatre come about?
RD: I will respond with a story from sub-comandante Marcos. Hola.
Bienvenidos, hermanos y hermanas. Welcome sisters and brothers, I'm going to
tell you a little story, una pequeña historia: Pedrito (a Tojolabal, two and
a half years old, born during the first Intergalactic) is playing with a
little car with no wheels or body. In fact, it appears to me that what
Pedrito is playing with is a piece of that wood they call "cork", but he has
told me very decisively that it is a little car and that it is going to
Margaritas to pick up passengers. It is a gray and cold January morning and
we are passing through this village which is today electing the delegates
(one man and one woman) who will be sent to the March meeting. The village
is in assembly when a Commander-type plane, blue and yellow, from the Army
Rainbow Task Force and a pinto helicopter from the Mexican Air Force, begin
a series of low over flights above the community. The assembly does not stop;
instead those who are speaking merely raise their voices. Pedrito is fed up
with having the artillery aircraft above him, and he goes, fiercely, in
search of a stick inside his hut. Pedrito comes out of his house with a piece
of wood, and he angrily declares that "I'm going to hit the airplane because
it's bothering me a lot." I smile to myself at the child's ingenuousness.
The plane makes a pass over Pedrito's hut, and he raises the stick and waves
it furiously at the war plane. The plane then changes its course and leaves
in the direction of its base. Pedrito says "There now" and starts playing
once more with his piece of cork, pardon, with his little car. The Sea and I
look at each other in silence. We slowly move towards the stick which
Pedrito left behind, and we pick it up carefully. We analyze it in great detail.
"It's a stick," I say.
"It is," the Sea says.
Without saying anything else, we take it with us. We run into Tacho as we're
leaving. "And that?" he asks, pointing to Pedrito's stick which we had taken.
"Mayan technology," the Sea responds. Trying to remember what Pedrito did I swing
at the air with the stick.
Suddenly the helicopter turned into a useless tin vulture, and the sky became
golden and the clouds floated by like marzipan. Muchas gracias, I hope you
enjoyed the story.
This Mayan technology, this stick is a metaphor for what Electronic Disturbance
Theatre has created as its performative matrix. The stick represents a third, or
a fourth, or fifth alternative to the apocalyptic or utopian sense of the Internet.
Those of us working in the virtual domain are constantly told to obey the utopian
dream of the wired world where there will be no class, sex and no issues of
identity. Alternatively we are fed the apocalyptic visions of viruses and
Y2K. But, the Zapatistas, using this Mayan technology, advocate another
type of gesture which I would say is related to magical realism.
This realism involves having the knowledge of the dangers that doing such
simple acts such as getting water or going to the next town in Chiapas (a
space under the constant threat by the Mexican's low-intensity tactics), and
also, knowing that a story or a poetic gestures might be able to get you
around danger - more so than carrying a M-16 with you - the Zapatistas use
the politics of a magical realism that allows them to create these spaces of
invention, intervention, and to allow the world wide networks to witness the
struggle they face on daily. It was the acceptance of digital space by the
Zapatistas in 12 days that created the very heart of this magical realism as
information war. It was this extraordinary understanding of electronic
culture which allowed the Zapatistas on 1 January, 1994, one minute after
midnight just as (NAFTA) a Free Trade Agreement between Canada, U.S.A, and
Mexico went into effect - to jump into the electronic fabric, so to speak,
faster than the speed of light. Within minutes people around the world had
received emails from the first declaration from the Lacandona Jungle. The next
day the autonomous Zapatista zones appeared all over the Internet. It was
considered by the New York Times as the first post-modern revolution. The
American intelligence community called it the first act of social net war.
Remember, that this social net war was based on the simple use of e-mail and
nothing more. Like Pedrito's "stick" gestures can be very simple and yet
create deep changes in the structures of the command and control societies
that neo-liberalism agenda, like NAFTA, represent.
But, back to your question. How did EDT come about? Digital Zapatismo is
and has been one of the most politically effective uses of the Internet that
we know of since January 1, 1994. EDT has created a counter-distribution
network of information with about 300 or more autonomous nodes of support.
This has enabled the EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army) to speak to
the world without having to pass through any dominant media filters. The
Zapatistas use of communication on the Internet, e-mail and webpages, created
a electronic force field around these communities in resistance. Which
literally stopped a massive force of men and the latest Drug War technologies
from annihilating the EZLN in a few days. The Zapatistas themselves really
did not expect to live very long after January 1.
When the communiqués signed by Subcommandante Marcos were distributed
globally through the Net. They began to flow between pre-existing anti-NAFTA
and other newly formed activist listservs, newsgroups, and personal Cc:
lists, news, reports, analyses, announcements about demonstrations, and calls
for intercontinental gatherings spread throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia,
Africa, and Australia. By the summer of 94 we began to hear the Zapatistas
use the terms "intercontinental networks of struggle" and "intercontinental
networks of resistance."
This movement of information through these various Zapatistas networks of
resistance can be said to have occurred via a strange chaos moving
horizontally, non-linearly, and over many sub-networks. Rather than operating
through a central command structure in which information filters down from
the top in a vertical and linear manner - the model of radio and television
broadcasting - information about the Zapatistas on the Internet has moved
laterally from node to node.
The primary use of the Internet by the global pro-Zapatista movement has been
as a communication tool. However particularly since the Acteal Massacre in
Chiapas at the end of 1997 in which 45 indigenous people were killed, the
Internet has increasingly been used not only as site or a channel for
communication, but also as a site for direct action and electronic civil
disobedience.
Beta actions of electronic civil disobedience occurred early in 1998.
Information about the Acteal Massacre, and announcements of Mexican consulate
and embassy protests, was transmitted rapidly over the Net. The largest
response was a street protest, drawing crowds of between 5,000 and 10,000 in
places such as Spain and Italy. But there were also calls for actions in
on-line communities. On the low end of digital activism people sent large
amounts of email protest to selected email targets of the Mexican government.
The Anonymous Digital Coalition, a group based in Italy, issued a plan for
virtual sit-ins on five web sites of Mexico City financial corporations.
They issued information about the time zones so people could act together when it
was 10:00 a.m. in Mexico City. They instructed people to use their Internet
browsers to repeatedly reload the web sites of these financial institutions.
The idea was that repeated reloading of the web sites would block those web
sites from so called legitimate use. This idea was the jump off point for the
Zapatista FloodNet which automated the reload function to happen every 3
seconds. Which was created by the Electronic Disturbance Theater. The group
is composed of myself and net artists, Carmin Karasic, Brett Stalbaum, and
Stefan Wray, an activist and media scholar.
CF: EDT's actions are passed through an artist-driven server called The
Thing. You have characterized this server as a form of social sculpture.
RD: As a net performer I was interested in a matrix that would articulate
social issues as well as performative issues with and within the parameters
of code. I was interested in the possibility of agit -prop theatre on-line.
But I needed to have an infrastructure to stage and create virtual
performances. In the early 1990s artists did not have access to network
technology as readily as we do at the end of the nineties. I was in
Tallahassee, Florida, during the 80's where I was a member of Critical Art
Ensemble (The group that developed the idea of Electronic Civil Disobedience),
and I heard that in New York there were artists who were trying to create
online communities. So I came to New York and the main community I found was
bbs.thing.net which was started in 1991 by Wolfgang Staehle.
He saw the emergence of pre-web electronic communities called bulletin board
systems (BBS) as a continuation of social sculpture. The BBS (http://bbs.thing.net)
offered arts communities ways to establish themselves, to send information to one
another and also to conceive of new artistic practices deriving from conceptualism
and from performance.
When I arrived at The Thing in New York, Wolfgang Staehle said, "Welcome to
The Thing. There are a bunch of machines here, go sit down, Ricardo, and
start learning and I'm not going to help you." I spent two years gathering
information through these communities. This server became main platform for
the Electronic Disturbance Theatre's use of the Zapatista Floodnet
system, which creates a disturbance online that, for lack of a better term,
could be characterized as a virtual sit-in software.
CF: Can you explain a little bit about how you conceive of EDT work as
performance?
RD: Augusto Boal, who theorized and performed what he calls "invisible
theatre" once argued that middle class theatre was able to produce complete
images of the world because it existed within a totalized social mirror of
production. Other sectors of society that wanted to create a different kind
of reflection could only produce incomplete performances that pointed towards
something beyond what already exists. There is a history of the theatre of
this type of critical social performance; the theatre of Erwin Piscator who
just read newspapers on the street or recreated the stories on the streets
for people passing by; Bertolt Brecht's Epic Theatre, the Living Theatre,
and Teatro Campesino working with Cesar Chavez, etc. Each of these groups
created gestures that worked to literally implode every-day street realities,
new theatrical modes of presentation and direct political manifestation.
These type of agit-prop groups pointed to the possibility of new forms of
the performative matrix that could be translated onto the digital stage. That
the techniques to create social drama or civil drama could be once again
developed in this new space. More recent groups such as Gran Fury created
what the government called riots. Nonetheless, they used very stylized type
of gestures and by developing a particular look, color of clothing, T-shirts,
gestures, like Die Ins, they created a new type of direct action theatre on
the street.
This is a history of performance that EDT continues. What I am interested in
are practices that break with traditional performance art or traditional
theatre, and that more importantly, reflect a critique and discontent by a
community. Now, activist, direct action performers, or more traditional forms
of agit-prop theatre, can chose to use the spectacle of collective action
that is visible such a street action, or they can chose to be invisible
performances of digital gestures, such as the uploading the names of the
victims of the Acteal massacre into Mexican government or Pentagon servers.
CF: I wouldn't call your Acteal action invisible, I would just call it
abstract. This is perhaps the biggest conceptual leap a viewer of your
work must make, if that viewer is conditioned by the conventional of theatre
from the flesh world. The performance language EDT uses doesn't look like
live theatre because it's not mimetic. We expect to see a play unfold before
our eyes. Even most experiments with Internet theatre involving avatars
attempt at some level to reproduce the visual codes of theatre, cinema and
television while the role of the director and the actors gets splintered and
distributed among the participants. But, as you walk me through a FloodNet
Action - all I'm seeing as a record of mass activities is are lines at the
bottom of the screen. The moving lines to me resemble the cyphers of audio
editing programs that visualize the length and depth of sound. What the lines
in fact are is a record of virtual presence with actual repercussions.
I'd like to consider your work with EDT in relationship to a specifically
Latin America genealogy. There are several examples of performance art from
the 1970s and '80s that was designed to take place in the street to
reappropriate public space during political periods of extreme repression.
I am thinking here of the emergence of the Chilean avanzada during the
Pinochet dictatorship, and the street actions of carried out by several collectives;
the Grupos in Mexico during the same period that involved performances in
public places and that formed a delayed response to the massacre of
Tlatelolco, and work by The Border Art Workshop/El Taller de Arte Fronterizo.
In a sense, the objective of that work was to point to the absence of civic
life, to force awareness of that absence into the open to engender a dialogue
about how public life had been eviscerated by political power. Can you talk
about how you transposed that dynamic into the domain of the virtual with EDT?
RD: Well we do it through a simple gesture. The public space of
electronic culture as it exists now is through browsers, such as Netscape or
Internet Explorer. An intrinsic component of each of those public spaces or
browsers is the 'reload' button. This reload button allows individuals online
to make sure that the information they're getting on their web page is the
latest information. EDT sees the browser as the public base of the virtual
community. It is the space where communities gather, either to chat, to
exchange information or to put up representations of their cares or concerns
or, in the case of e-commerce, what they're trying to sell you. What EDT has
done is to create an Applet. Brett Stalbaum, one of the members, took this
public function and just added another element. Instead of the user hitting
the reload button, the system automatically turns and refreshes itself the
more people come to the site. The more people enter the Zapatista Floodnet
the faster that refresh or reload button calls on the information the resides
on the government servers on which the Sit-In is taking place over and
over. Each person who joins adds to the speed and number of request for
information from the targeted server.
Through this means EDT creates a mass representation of the community.
This representation constitutes a disturbance on the site. The more hits
there are to President Zedillo's web site, the more our presence is felt,
and the less functional the government site becomes, until it is eventually
overwhelmed by the public. This disturbance points to the nature of what
public space means and who is allowed to be present in the public space of
the Internet. Our simple gestwhat's going to happen when you enter. We
request that you disable your Java script program. We have asked people to
disable their Javascript programs because we have had long term Javascript
wars with the Mexican government, in which they have tried to counter our
Javascript by attacking it. Javascript is a type of object-oriented programming
language, developed from the Java programming language, that is used in web
browsers to control the processing of forms and other special functions.
Javascript was devised by Netscape, and first appeared in its basic form
(Javascript 1.0) in their Netscape Navigator 2 browser. Because of its versatility,
it was soon adopted by Microsoft in their Internet Explorer 3 browser. The
evolution of Javascript has had to keep pace with the increasing demands for
greater versatility in page design.
In 1997, the various models of the language were standardized, which led to
the release of Javascript 1.2. There have always been compatibility problems
between Netscape and Microsoft versions of Javascript, and this can be a
problem if one tries to generate broad-based actions over the Internet.
The issue however is not so much the detail of the language itself - what
counts is how the incorporation of a programming language into web browsers
affects the ability of the web to be used as a campaign tool.
CF: How then does this relate to a Floodnet Swarm action?
RD: FloodNet performs automatic reloads of the site in the background,
slowing or halting access to the targeted server. FloodNet also encourages
interaction on the part of individual protesters. Net surfers may voice their
political concerns on a targeted server via the "personal message" form which
sends the surfer's own statement to the server error log. Additionally, a
mouse click on the applet image (containing a representation of the targeted
site), sends a predefined message to the server error log.
The Zapatista FloodNet system advises you that your IP will be
harvested by the government during any FloodNet action. When you click and
enter FloodNet, your name and political position will be
made known to the authorities. This is similar to having your picture
taken during a protest action on the street. There could be possible damage
to your machine that may occur because of your participation in FloodNet
action, just as in a street action the police may come to hurt you. But
during the past FloodNet actions only two individuals have reported their
machines crashing out of 80,000-plus that have participated, and the only
time this happened was when the Department of Defense, the Pentagon attacked
us on September 9th, 1998. The FloodNet also clogs bandwidth, it may make it
difficult for individuals using small pipelines around the world to get
information. FloodNet does not impact the targeted web sites specifically,
as much as it disrupts the traffic going to the targeted web site. Something
similar happens on the street, when individuals find themselves unable to get
to work or buy a newspaper because of an action out on the bridge. Once you enter
FloodNet you see that targeted URL on the bottom three frames.
You begin to see President Zedillo's web site reloading, every
3 to 7 seconds on three different frames. The more people come, the faster
it reloads. This creates a disturbance, a symbolic gesture that is
non-violent. It doesn't break a server necessarily since many such as the
Pentagon are quite robust and expect millions of hits. But FloodNet does
create a sense of solidarity, what I would call 'community of drama' or a
community joined by the magic stick. It also creates a mirror, that brings
real criminal acts into view. This magical stick calls forth the most
aggressive tendencies of the information war community. Take for example the
Department of Defense. They attacked us during the September 9th, 1998 VR
Sit-In that we did during the Ars Electronica Festival, in Linz, Austria - the DOD used a
counter-hostile Java applet against FloodNet, which is the first offensive
use of information war by a government against a civilian server that we know
of. We believe we should be protected from such actions, that the government
cannot attack civilians using any kind of software or hardware. What has
become apparent is the kind of violence that these information war systems
are now implementing against civilians to control whatever public space there is.
CF: How does Swarm work? I'm particularly interested in how the Internet
gestures end up on screen as a kind of abstract performance language.
RD: We're just dealing with a browser. In fact, the gesture of reloading
itself, as performance, doesn't really matter much. The real drama and the
real space of performance comes before and after the action, and follows the
structure of a three act play. In the first act you announce what is going
to happen. The middle act is the actual action itself. The last act is a
gathering of dialogue about what happened - this is where the most
instructive drama occurs. A social drama among different communities - net
activist, net artist, and net hackers. The dot coms and government sites
and also play their parts in this social drama.
The FloodNet gesture allows the social flow of command and control to be
seen directly - the communities themselves can see the flow of power in a
highly transparent manner. During the last act of every action we did, we
would see the endless flow of words come. I would receive e-mail not only
from EDT members, but from people around the world saying I am participating
- what exactly is happening or happened, what is going on in Chiapas. The
e-mail came from around the world. A woman from South Korea, an Aborigine
from Australia - and we began to create a network for a social drama because
they're interested on what is the response would be, what is going on, how
can we help etc. A virtual plaza, a digital situation, is thus generated in
which we all gather and have an encounter, or an Encuentro, as the Zapatistas
would say - about the nature of neo-liberalism in the real world and in
cyberspace.
CF: Can you explain the meaning of the visual signs that appear on
screen during a Floodnet action?
RD: While Floodnet action goes on, EDT not only recalls President Zedillo's
web page, but we also call internal searches. For example, we will ask for
the names of the dead, or about the question of human rights in Mexico. We
ask the server the question, "Does human rights exist on President Zedillo's
web site?" And then a 404 file emerges backstage, if you will.
CF: What is a 404?
RD: 404 files are the reports of this mistake or gap or the missing
information in these servers. We ask President Zedillo's server or the
Pentagon's web server 'Where is human rights in your server?" The server
then responds "Human rights not found on this server." We ask "Where is Ana
Hernandez on this server and the server then responds " Ana Hernandez is not
found on this server." This use of the "not found" system, also know as 404
files - is a well known gesture among the net art communities. EDT just
re-focused the 404 function towards a political gesture.
CF: Is Ana Hernandez someone who was killed by the Mexican army?
RD: Yes, she was killed in the Acteal Massacre on December 22, 1997. We
started doing these actions in response to that massacre. One of the artists
working with EDT, Carmen Karasic, wanted to create an electronic monument of
remembrance to those who died. This kind of performance gesture borrows very
much from Conceptual Art. The actual performance may take place in an
invisible area, but at the same time it aggravates and disturbs the
infrastructure of President Zedillo's web site.
CF: What you are doing makes me think of Rachel Whiteread's casting
negative spaces. In a sense you are operating within a virtual domain, and
are pointing to the absence of information, which amounts to an absence of
concern for ethical issues and lives.
RD: Yes, we bear witness to this with a gesture that retraces a Latin
American performance tradition. We are bearing witness to the gap or to the
invisibility that has been caused by the engines of destruction.
CF: When you theorize EDT's practice you often mention connections with
Ancient Greek concepts of the Agora and Demos. How do you envision
virtual performance as a kind of metaphorical speech in light of this
genealogy?
RD: The idea of a virtual republic in Western Civilization can be traced
back to Plato, and is connected to the functions of public space. The
Republic incorporated the central concept of the Agora. The Agora was the
area for those who were entitled to engage in rational discourse of Logos,
and to articulate social policy as the Law, and thus contribute to the
evolution of Athenian democracy. Of course those who did speak were, for the
most part, male, slave-owning and ship owning merchants, those that represented
the base of Athenian power. We can call them Dromos: those that belong the societies
of speed. Speed and the Virtual Republic are the primary nodes of Athenian
democracy - not much different than today. The Agora was constantly being
disturbed by Demos, what we would call those who demonstrate or who move into
the Agora and make gestures. Later on, with the rise of Catholism - Demos
would be transposed into Demons, those representatives of the lower depths.
Demos did not necessarily use the rational speech of the Agora, they did not
have access to it; instead, they used symbolic speech or a somatic poesis -
Nomos. In the Agora, rational speech is known as Logos. The Demos gesture
is Nomos, the metaphorical language that points to invisibility, that points to
the gaps in the Agora. The Agora is thus disturbed; the rational processes of its
codes are disrupted, the power of speed was blocked. EDT alludes to this history
of Demos as it intervenes with Nomos. The Zapatista FloodNet injects bodies
as Nomos into digital space, a critical mass of gestures as blockage. What we
also add to the equation is the power of speed is now leveraged by Demos via
the networks. Thus Demos_qua_Dromos create the space for a new type of social
drama to take place. Remember in Ancient Greece, those who were in power and
who had slaves and commerce, were the ones who had the fastest ships. EDT
utilizes these elements to drama and movement by empowering contemporary
groups of Demos with the speed of the Dromos - without asking societies of
command and control for the right to do so. We enter the Agora with the
metaphorical gestures of Nomos and squat on high speed lanes of the new
Virtual Republic - this creates a digital platform or situation for a
techno-political drama that reflects the real condition of the world beyond
code. This disturbs the Virtual Republic that is accustomed to the properties
of Logos, the ownership of property, copyright, and all the different
strategies in which they are attempting enclosure of the Internet.
CF: What are some of the responses that EDT has received from the US
military and also from the Mexican government?
RD: These confrontations began when EDT undertook its Swarm performance in
Linz, Austria at Ars Electronica. On Tuesday September 9th, 1998 we started
to do the largest virtual sit-in that we had ever done on Mexican President
Zedillo's web site, the Pentagon and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. That
morning I received a call from someone who I assumed to be representing the
Mexican government who spoke Spanish with a Mexican accent. He said "Is
this Ricardo Dominguez? " I said, "Yes." He said, "We know who you are, we know
where you're at, we know where your family is, we are watching you, do not go
downstairs, do not do your performance, because you know what the
situation is, this is not a game," and then he hung up. I went down and we
did the action anyway, but about three hours later we were attacked. We
didn't know who it was. Hackers had told us the night before that they would
attack us so we thought it might be them. Managers of President Zedillo's
website had tried to hack us before, so we thought it might be them.
Then we received an e-mail message from www.wired.com, an important on-line
news portal, saying that it was the Department of Defence that had initiated
a counter-measure or a hostile Javascript Applet against the Zapatista
Floodnet. As a result, the coverage of EDT's activities by major news media
exploded. An article about us appeared on the front page of The New York
Times, (Hacktivists' of All Persuasions Take Their Struggle to the Web by
Amy Harmon, October 31, 1998). The U.S. military commented in a knee-jerk
manner, 'Well we don't know if what EDT is doing is illegal, but it
certainly is immoral." From that point on we have been in dialogue with the
military, which is very strange for us. I certainly didn't expect it,
neither did any other members of EDT.
The military invited us to do what we call "The National Security Agency
Performance" for some 300 Generals and military men and also NSA people as
well as Congressmen. On September 9, 1999, we did an hour and a half
performance for them. We approached it as theatre. They interrogated us. Of
course they wanted to know who was in charge, how extreme could we possibly
get, what was the future like, what do we expect from the growth of this new
term 'hacktivism' which has emerged as a response to the drama, if you will.
The dialogue with the military continues. Recently I met with naval
intelligence people who showed me their large holographic simulation war
machines. So the Electronic Disturbance Theatre's performance, even though I
keep thinking that it's going to end, always seems to be spiraling to a new
level. I've been asked if I'm concerned that I'm speaking to the military,
and why I don't worry about what they're attempting to do to us, either by
co-opting or gathering information about us. One of the things about us is
that, unlike hackers, EDT is very transparent. We use our names, people know
who we are and what we do and we always let people know, and this really
disturbs the military. They are modernist at heart; they want secrets, they
want encryption, they want cyber-terrorists, and they want cyber-crime. What
we give them is net art performance that allows everyone to see who the real
cyber-terrorists are.
CF: EDT also distributes the codes freely, right?
RD: Yes, on January 1st, 1999, one minute after midnight, in celebration of
the 5th Declaration of the Lacandona, and the 5th year of the Zapatistas, we
distributed what is called "The Disturbance Developer Kit" or DDK, which is
free to anyone if they come to our site. During our actions, many groups
contacted us that wanted to do virtual sit-ins, so we developed this kit
that's quick and easy to put up. It has been used by wide variety of groups
such as Queer Nation, the international animal liberation groups, and
anti-arms trading groups. There's a big action coming this November 30th
against the World Trade Organization and there is a UK group that is using code
based on our DDK called "The Electro Hippies." Our performance continues with a
new acts that consists of distributing of software.
CF: Does EDT ever coordinate its virtual actions with more traditional
forms of mobilization and protest?
RD: When EDT began the Swarm performance, we tried to theorize a hybrid
action. We wanted to mobilize people online as well as having direct
representation on the ground in the streets. For the upcoming World Trade
Organization protests we're developing different platforms. We're also
working with Freespeech.org and Paper Tiger Television, and the new
independent media groups to send out real streams representing the
activities of the communities of direct action on the ground, so that
individuals in Seattle and outside the city can have information about what
is going on that has not been filtered through the mainstream media. We're
going to set up maps of Seattle so that people can use their Palm Pilots to
see what routes are being blocked by the police. We can also do
counter-surveillance.
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.::[05]-[Abstracts, comparisons & importance's of the Linux/open-source
:::software movements in radical/activist communities]:::::[By: Chris Brennan]
:::[http://www.unaesthetic.net]:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
This article will attempt to highlight some similarities between the Linux/Open
source software movements and the
D.I.Y/anarchist/punk/radical/activist/whathaveyou communities, it will also
stress the importance of these movements for said communities and anyone
harboring similar qualities or interests. Please note that this article does not
intend to define any of the above communities or political ideas, as my
definition of the above may not exactly parallel majority.
A brief rundown on what Linux and open-source actually is: Linux, in simple terms
is a computer operating system - not unlike windows or macOS. It's the basic
software interface a person interacts with to control the computer hardware.
Linux is a variant of an operating system called UNIX. However, Linux is
open-source. Open-source means that the source code is freely available to
anyone. Source code is what programmers type out when they are creating a
program, it's the medium between human readable language, and language readable
by a microprocessor. That code is later compiled into a file called an
'executable', for those of you familiar with windows this would be most any file
with an ".exe" extension that can be run, or executed.
A person having access to the source code means they may alter it in any way they
see fit, granted they have the knowledge to do so. Windows is not open source in
that only Microsoft Corporation has access to the source code, and only they may
make changes to the operating system. Linux and other open source projects are
completely driven by the communities that use them and in that respect will only
reflect the efforts of those users. On the other hand you have windows - an OS
created by a corporation. The main interest of a corporation is to make money. In
a situation where a software companies main interest is to make money, you will
see that the decisions they make are many times not in the best interest of the
users which purchase their products.
A few prime examples of said activity most commonly result in the following
problems:
Security issues. This is especially important these days with everyone being
connected to some kind of network. Often times when working on a software
project, companies will be understaffed or on a deadline - this often leads to
source code not being double checked for bugs, programmers taking shortcuts to
save time, etc. In other words, corporations are compromising software quality
for reasons directly related to profit margins. In the open-source community,
everyone has access to review the source code being compiled; in the event of a
problem this enables someone with the know-how to fix the problem as soon as it's
identified. Having the source code also makes it much easier to identify Trojan
horses and viruses if you infact get the source code from an untrusted source.
Working as a network administrator, I often see individuals & companies putting a
lot at stake when allowing network/internet access to computers containing
valuable data. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to access to data on trusted
machines due to flaws in security models or defective software.
Buggy software & stability issues. For much of the same reasons as above, software
companies are putting out notoriously buggy & unstable software. This often times
will lead to program & system crashes, lost & corrupt files, etc. Can you say
"windows blue screen of death"? It's not uncommon for Linux systems to have an
uptime (running without the event of a reboot) of months or even years.
What does this all amount to? Open-source: for the people, by the people. It's the
high-tech version of a collective community. It's bringing power and equality to
the little guys. It's all about D.I.Y. Where do we come into this? I see a lot of
people denouncing the usage of computers for various reasons; and I do fear that
this kind of attitude will put us farther back in the race when it comes to
future forms of activism & protest. The new wave is digital information. That is
a fact. It's not going away any time soon so we must evolve and get used to it or
we will surely loose ground in the grand scheme of things. It's important that
movements like open-source take precedence early on before standard protocols &
procedures, rules & regulations harden in their molds. The electronic future will
be based heavily on what happens at these semi-early stages in computing and the
Internet. In recent years we've seen the boom of the Internet - showing no signs
of slowing any time soon. It will have a huge part both economically and socially
in our future. It will somehow affect you, no matter how far removed you are from
technology. As it stands right now, the ground rules are still being laid on the
Internet. Issues dealing with freedom of speech and privacy are hot topics. These
are very important times for people to get involved because what's happening now
will most defiantly carve a path into the future. In the past few years interest
in open-source has snowballed, this means things are looking up as far as
freedoms go. Governments and corporations alike fear the Internet in the respect
that they cannot directly control it. With something so large, dynamic, and
chaotic, no one entity can gain a handle on it - which is exactly how it needs to
stay if we are to have any freedom whatsoever.
In this new arena we will have to devise a different way of doing things. A term
that's been coined semi-recently is Hacktivism. More or less, it's the act of
hacking in the name of activism. Hacking by definition of the media is a much
different thing than what the average hacker would define it as. Hacking doesn't
necessarily have anything to do with illegal activities, however that's an
entirely different article in itself. Like modern day activism, Hacktivism may
for instance take some routes deemed unlawful by the powers that be in order to
fully and adequately portray one's message. Like an group of activists may lock
down to block an intersection in order to make their point in full, a hacktivist
might temporarily disable a website or computer network in order to get their
message across. As a group of animal activists might burn a fur vendors' store to
the ground, an animal hacktivist might very well gain access to and destroy the
customer database for a well known fur vendor. With each instance you will see
much of the same extremes. Instances are given as an example that activists in
each arena might believe in destructive/violent or non-destructive/non-violent
forms of protest. And the medium in which the protests are taking place does not
necessarily denote the manner of activism, or beliefs of the
activists/hacktivists involved in the demonstration.
So, if this has at all piqued your interest in open source projects, including
Linux - then you're probably wondering where to go from here. It defiantly helps
to have a bit of computer knowledge under your belt when making the change from
windows to Linux. Linux is a far more complex and intricate system than most
average PC users are used to. I'd recommend reading up on it before attempting to
make the switch over. If you know someone familiar with it, have him or her do
the installation and teach you the basics. I also urge anyone whom is already
familiar with Linux/open-source having interests in activism or radical politics
& the punk community to get involved in helping inform other activists and
radical-minded people about these movements and how they affect us.
All in all, we are fighting for a common freedom. In this day & age technology is
abundant and I believe we must embrace it early on & establish ourselves. Looking
at any part of the technology industry, you'll see that there's quite a lot of
money flowing in and out; it's in our best interest to see to it that that money
is going to a useful place, useful meaning somewhere other than to buy an IBM
executive his fourth Ferrari. The US Census Bureau says the population of the US
on 9/14/2000 was: 275,715,531 (That's 275.72 Million). This means Bill Gates
could give $177.38 to every person in the United States. Let's say you wanted to
spend every dime of Gates' money, and you set a time limit of 14 years to do it.
Assuming you worked regular 8-hour days, all 365 days a year, with no breaks, you
would have to spend $198,000.00 a minute (that's no typo) to run him dry. Need I
even mention the fact that millions go starving every night on the streets? Need
I even utter the fact that Bill Gates is obviously not the only man who displays
this kind of disgusting imbalance of wealth among our society? We must make it
clear that we are to be the digital splinter under the skin of capitalism, class
inequality, media-disinformation, government control, corporate personification,
and all else that plagues our frail society. It's the little things that make a
difference. We all matter, as do our actions. Each dollar is a vote in a
capitalist society, WHERE DO YOU WANT (your money) TO GO TODAY?
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.::[06]-[Interview with m0r0n/nightman and m0sad team]
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::[Interviewed by metac0m]
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
In recent months over 300 people have been killed, the majority being
Palestinian youths, in the on going conflict in Israel/Palestine.
This conflict has extended to the electronic realm, particularly the Internet.
In the past month over an estimated 115 web sites have been attacked in an
ongoing struggle between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli "hackers". The most
high profile (from the media coverage standpoint) tactic has been web page
defacement.
A survey of the media reports of these defacements shows that the framing of
the coverage has been a combination of hacktivism and cyber-war - a misleading
combination. On the one hand the coverage depicts the tit-for-tat defacements
in terms of "war", "attacks", "retaliation", and "casualties" while at the same
time explaining the events as hacktivism. Thus the coverage confines hacktivism
to warfare between vandals. The two concepts are, in fact, terribly inconsistent.
However, the pattern is emerging: hacktivism = war = vandalism.
Is this hacktivism?
Two of the actors involved in these defacements are m0r0n/nightman and the m0sad
team. The content of the sites they've defaced ranges from rants to gruesome
pictures - each denouncing the other. To try to understand their motivations and
intentions I had them answer a list of the same questions.
1) Why have you undertaken this campaign?
>>m0r0n and nightman: We are Muslims and working for the Muslims is our
duty. Our purpose is just to aware people of the fact that Israel is an
unethical and evil country which is torturing the people of Palestine.
>>m0sad: I decided to get involved in this campaign in retaliation of all
the useless defacing of the Israeli's websites.
2) Do you feel that it is making a difference in the conflict on the
ground?
>>m0r0n and nightman: Our duty is to aware people. This is a cyber war
and not a physical war.
>>m0sad: I think it will take more than this to make a huge difference
but I hope that it will at least make a presence known that I would like
to stop the violence that is occurring .
3) Do you feel that the targets that were defaced were directly related
to the crisis in the Middle East or were they simply vulnerable targets?
>>m0r0n and nightman: We have defaced many Israeli sites.. more than 20
if we are not mistaken. Currently we are working/defacing/hacking for a
group named WFD (world's fantabulous defacers). After joining we had a
team work and we defaced about 10 more Israeli sites. On the whole we
have defaced about more than 30 Israeli sites AND WE HACK TO CREATE
GLOBAL AWARENESS NOT TO SHOW ADMINS THAT THEIR SITES
ARE VULNERABLE! You can see our group's hack
@ http://www.alldas.de/hacked/H_68BDB782.html and before that when we use
to hack individually and when we hacked more than 20 Israeli sites our
archives of those sites are here...
http://www.alldas.de/hacked/H_F499C2BF.html
>>m0sad: The targets that were chosen to deface was simply vulnerable and
with special name or/and extensions.
4) Do you consider your defacements to be "hacktivism" if so how?
>>m0r0n and nightman: We consider our work as jihad (because we are
fighting for Islam), as hacktivism because we hack into servers and
deface pages.
>>m0sad: The website defacing was done to make a presence that I want it
all to stop.
5) What does hacktivism mean to you?
>>m0r0n and nightman: Nothing but a very good method to create awareness
amongst people.
>>m0sad: HacKtivism....That could have many meanings. It really depends
on what side you are standing on at the time.
6) It seems that "both" sides are defacing web pages in retaliation to
one another. Is this the best way to engage in hacktivism or are there other
more constructive, solution oriented ways?
>>m0r0n and nightman: You must be indirectly referring to m0sad. Ah, he
and his team has only defaced 3 or 4 sites which were not even directly
related. He is hacking against Islam. We are not hacking against Israel
we are hacking against their atrocities!
>>m0sad: There are always more constructive solutions but until they stop
and look at the situation and make the attempt to stop what is occurring
then I have no choice to retaliate.
7) Do you see a viable solution for this "cyber war"?
>>m0r0n and nightman: Yes. We won the fight when lion and type0 were
defacing. And we are going to win it again. A viable solution is that
people are their own judges. And we know what people have judged by now.
:)
>>m0sad: Yes there is a solution. There always is. But when they refuse
to listen to reason that solution can never be applied to the situation.
8) How do you see the current situation, on the ground and on the
Internet, playing out?
>>m0r0n and nightman: On the ground is awful. On the Internet! Well...as
long as the ground affects do not calm down the internet won't! This is
a fight for the "right" not a "playing out".
>>m0sad: I see the current situation continuing on as long as one or the
other problem exists. They are fueled by each other both directly and
indirectly and can't end until both are solved.
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.::[07]-[[What Is Hacktivism?]
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::[By: Erika Pearson]
:::[http://madcelt.org/~erika]::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Hacktivism "refers to the merging of political activism and computer
hacking."(xv) It is the end product of a meeting of hackers (tech. skills) and
political/social activists. In very basic terms, the hackers provided the
weaponry and the activists located the target.
Hacktivism (as a discrete phenomena) is a very recent development. However, as
we have already seen, it has roots and formative ideas that go back nearly to
the beginning of the microcomputer revolution. As a means of social protest,
it also draws deeply on the techniques and many years of experiences brought
in by 'real life' activists. This includes knowledge on conducting sit-ins,
media events, acts of civil disobedience, etc.
However, instead of just adopting wholesale these techniques, the new
hacktivists have taken these ideas as a basis from which to develop new and
interesting techniques more suited to the medium in which they will conduct
their protest. As one hacktivist was quoted as saying:
"If you have 10 people at a protest, they don't do much of anything,
.....[i]f you have 10 people on line, they could cripple a network."
(xvi)
Civil disobedience was one of the first activist tools' to be translated into
an electronic context. The Electronic Disturbance Theatre was considered by
many to be the first true hacktivist network. The EDT defined the term
'electronic civil disobedience,' and were the first to implement it in a
hacktivist event. The EDT are active for causes such as Zapatista, and its
members were the creative and technical force behind actions such as SWARM.
But the flow of information and technique has not been all one- way. Activists
who have come from 'real life' protests are also adopting the tools and
techniques of the hackers when working for a cause. Activists are finding
that, by coming online, they are expanding not only the range of tools at
their disposal, but also the ways they can connect with like minded
individuals and groups. Also, they can approach their targets on a dual
level, both through real-life and virtual forms of protest.
"But the rapid growth of the Internet has transformed what was once a
hacker playground into, among other things, a far-reaching political
platform. What's more, the tricks invented by hackers have become easier
for activists to learn and adopt because they are now widely published
on how-to Web sites.
As a result, radical groups are discovering what hackers have always
known: Traditional social institutions are more vulnerable in cyberspace
than they are in the physical world. Likewise, some members of the
famously sophomoric hacker underground are finding motivation in causes
other than ego gratification." (xvii)
The reasons why hackers have taken to activism is as diverse as why activists
have taken to the web. However, the main reasons that comes up again and
again when conversing with these hacker-activists themselves are threats
against their environment, and changes in their own worldview. Such a change
was summerised by John Vranesevitch, who said:
"We're starting to see right now the first generation of people who have
grown up on the Internet....These hackers are entering the ages where
people are most politically active. This is their outlet."(xviii)
A Brief History of Hacktivism: "The Revolution Will Be Digitized"
Below is a summary table of some of the more prominent and recent targets,
with notes on the issue and the tactics used by the hacktivists involved.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Target(s) International Issues/ Tactics Hacktivist(s)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Balkan Press Defaced Albanian, Croatian and Kosovo Hackers
Serbian web sites relating to Group/ Black
Kosovo Hand/ Serbian
Angel
China Government censorship. Removed Blondie Wong
content filters. Warn activists Hong Kong Blondes
about imminent arrest. Defaced web Bronc Buster &
sites. Domain hijacking. Planted Zyklon/Legion of
Trojan Horses. Underground (LoU)
France Antinuclear protest. Denial of Strano Network
service attack.
India/US Independence for Indian controlled Dr Nukor/Pakistan
Kashmir. Defaced Karachi Stock Hackerz Club
Exchange, US military and commercial Muslim Online
sites, including Disney Syndicate/GFORCE
India Protest nuclear bomb testing. Milw0rm & Ashtray
Defaced web sites. Lumberjacks
Indonesia Independence for East Timor. Alleged Secretos/Kaotik
human rights abuses. Defaced web sites. Team
Mexico Independence for Chiapas. Alleged Ricardo Dominguez
human rights abuses. Denial of Service Electronic
attack using Floodnet utility Disturbance
Theatre
Myanmar Political identity (Burma). Alleged Danny-Boy/X-ORG
human rights abuses. Defaced web sites.
NASA Antinuclear protest. Computer virus Wank
or worm.
Sri Lanka Independent homeland for ethnic Tamils. Internet Black
E-mail bomb. Tigers
World Trade Various agendas. Denial of service Electrohippies
Organisation attacks. Collective and
many others.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Table 2.1: Some prominent examples of hacktivism.(xix)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This list is by no means complete. However, these samples give a good
indication of some of the pivot points in the development and application of
hacktivism. By examining four of these instances more closely, it can be
illustrated that these hacktivists share a positive approach to technology, a
willingness to fight for their own ideal of social justice, and the very
hacker concept that laws of boundaries, technical feasibility and common
sense are unimportant to the hacker trained activist.
Zapatista -- SWARM
SWARM was one of the first clearly hacktivist attacks on a political target.
Part of a series of protests conducted by the burgeoning Zapatista movement,
SWARM was billed as part-activist demonstration, part- artistic installation.
From reading the literature the hacktivists themselves produced at this early
stage, the impression is that they themselves were still unclear as to the
effectiveness or possible scope of action that their accumulated tools and
skills are capable of. SWARM was hacktivism by trial and error.
The main software tool used in this first action was a specially created
program called Floodnet.
" The Electronic Disturbance Theatre has produced a Java script program
called Floodnet, which is used to flood and block a targeted Website by
repeatedly calling for a specific or non-existent Web page on that
server."(xx)
When the action was first proposed, it was envisioned that participants would
manually load and reload the target page. In the hacker spirit of 'there is
always a better way,' the Floodnet utility was created to do the reload work
automatically.
During the SWARM action, the activists estimate that up to 10,000 users joined
in the Floodnet action, sending approximately 600,000 hits to the server
every minute.(xxi)
The authors of Floodnet considered it to be part-hacktivist tool, part
"conceptual net.art that empowers people through activist/artistic
expression."(xxii)
"In an artistic sense, this is a way of remembering and honoring those
who gave their lives in the defense of their freedom. In a conceptual
sense, the Floodnet performance was able to facilitate a symbolic return
of the dead to the servers of those responsible for their murders."(xxiii)
On April 10th, 1998, the action was announced to the general Internet
community. By the end of April, the SWARM proposal was part of the Ars
Electronic Festival. On July 12, one of the instigators of the action,
Zapatista activist Stefan Wray, arrived in Amsterdam and started alerting
non-Internet sources (i.e.: newsmedia) of the upcoming action. On August 25,
a bulletin was released outlining ideas for dual virtual and street protests.
On September 4, the HEART (Hacker Electronic ART) was established in front of
the physical location of the SWARM activation at Ars. Overnight, the list of
targets for the action were announced and disseminated to activists
throughout the web.
By September 7, activists started analysing the efficiency of Floodnet and
began examining concerns raised by the hacker community. On September 8,
hacktivists tested the technology on a local network to ensure that all
hacker concerns had been addressed. Bulletin's announcing the action were
then distributed by RTMark (http://www.rtmark.com)/.
Within hours of the action being launched on the 9th, countermeasures to the
Floodnet tools were detected. Those monitoring Floodnet used software patches
to try and avoid these countermeasures. During the day, action coordinators
discussed the action within the Festival and with the international media.
The following day (September 10) the DOD (Pentagon, US) admitted to being the
author and user of the hostile countermeasures. The action was considered
successful, even though the sites were only intermittently blocked.(xxiv)
eToy: "Financial might against right."
In an event know on the Internet simply as eToy, an American corporate that
went after a European net.art collective found itself a target of hacker
activists from around the world. It began when eToys, the American toy
e-commerce site, decided to appropriate the European art collective site etoy
- even though etoy had been in operation for over two years prior to eToys.
Many hackers and hacktivists have seen the attack on etoy as an attack on
their rights as citizens of the Internet:
"'eToys is trying to take advantage of a legal situation in which there's
basically no protection against corporations, whether you're an artist,
an activist, or just someone in the wrong place at the wrong time,' said
a hacker who identifies himself as "Code Blue." 'But they're relying a
bit too much on the legal. They're saying f*ck you to everything that
etoy stands for, and that's like spraying tear gas all over the entire
hacking community.'"(xxv)
In many ways, it could be argued that the eToys legal attack was the catalyst
which bound normally independent groups and individuals into a network based
around ideals of freedom of speech, individual rights in the face of
corporations, and the immediate and unprejudiced death of eToys.com Inc.
Following the ideals promoted by the Hacker Ethic, hackers went after the
corporation trying to ride roughshod over their fellow hackers - and won.
"'A precedent has now finally been set in stone,' said RTMark
spokesperson Ray Thomas. 'eToys thought it could act like corporations
typically do, but it had no idea how the Internet works. Now e-commerce
corporations have a choice: either obtain a legal stranglehold on the
Internet, so that this kind of defensive reaction is no longer possible,
or behave decently towards the humans who use this medium for purposes
other than profit.'"(xxvi)
This event began when eToys (the US e-commerce site) attempted to buyout etoy
(the European net.art site) for $500,000 in cash and stock options. When this
offer was refused, eToys sought a legal injunction on November 29, 1999. In
this injunction, they claimed they wished the etoy site to be shut down
because of unfair competition, trademark delusion, security fraud, illegal
stock market operation, pornographic content, offensive behaviour and
terrorist activity(xxvii) (etoy denies this).
In an action which went beyond the bounds of the injunction, Net Solutions,
the corporation which allocates and manages domain names such as
www.etoy.com, closed down the etoy domain. A month later, they also closed
down the electronic mail address @etoy.com, thus severing etoy from the
Internet. Many writers both within and without the growing etoy protest
movement saw this as a destruction of nothing short of the etoy artist's very
identity.(xxviii)
In the month following the injunction, several protests occurred
simultaneously. Many of these attacks were denial of service (dos) attacks.
Similar to 'Floodnet,' which was used by the Zapatista's during SWARM, these
dos attacks flooded eToys.com with bogus inquiries and orders. For commercial
websites, dos attacks can cripple or even kill a company.
Another avenue of attack the activists used was to force eToys share prices to
plummet. The stated goal was to get the shares to $0.00 - and they very
nearly achieved this goal. They went about forcing down share prices through
a combination of savvy marketing (as one commentator noted, etoy.com was a
collective of artists who used the media as their medium) and through
encouraging supporters to 'play a game.'
In the end, some media reports credited the activists with causing a drop in
stock value of up to 70%. Also, during the period of December 15-25
(Christmas retailing period), the dos attackers increased their activity, at
times completely shutting the website down.
Finally, on January 25, 2000, after an earlier verbal promise to back down
from the lawsuit, eToys formally withdrew from the lawsuit and paid costs,
leaving the etoy.com site to the net.art collective.
Jam Echelon Day - "The idea of hacktivism, or any kind of activism, is to
INFORM people of your plight." Bronc Buster
October 21, 1999, saw hacktivists from around the world combine for one of the
first hacktivist-style media events. In an attempt to generate interest and
raise public awareness on an international government surveillance system
known as 'Echelon,' hacktivists staged an event called 'Jam Echelon Day'
(JED).
Echelon, the email surveillance system, is proported to scan every email sent
over the Internet, looking for certain key words. If a keyword is found, it
triggers off an alert and the message is subject to further scrutiny. During
the events of JED, hacktivists encouraged Internet users to swap emails
loaded with key words and phrases.
Despite its name, JED was never seriously expected to jam Echelon.
Technically, jamming a system the size of Echelon is unfeasible and
unrealistic. Rather, JED was a symbolic action to raise public awareness of
government surveillance in general and Echelon in particular.
"The entire point of events like JED has always been mimetic, to raise
public awareness, and was never actually intended to STOP the damn thing.
(hell, that'd be illegal!)"(xxix)
To this end, many hacktivists proclaimed JED a moderate success. However, some
argued that since the majority of positive/education media attention was
through independent media outlets (such as www.indymedia.com) and that
coverage through more mainstream media sources was more negative in reporting
the hacktivists actions, JED was more a case of 'preaching to the choir,'
rather than educating the masses.
A16 - WTO: "No Justice! No Peace!" - A16 slogan
A16 is fascinating because it is a huge event that crosses repeatedly between
real life and virtual protest events. However, this crossover also makes it
difficult to tease out and examine individual actions in isolation.
But firstly, what is A16 about? A16 (named after the date of action, April 16,
2000), was an event which involved protesters from many different and diverse
backgrounds, such as labor, environment and human rights. They protested
against actions conducted by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) which
included world debt, environmental degradation and human and workers' rights
issues.
The media coverage of the events in Washington focussed on the highly visible
street protests that occurred on and around the 16th. In these protests,
thousands of activists gathered in marches, rallies and more creative
instances of public protest in the area surrounding the location of the WTO
meeting. Many protesters were arrested.
A less visible, less crowded, less policed arena of protest was online.
Hacktivists, not only in the Washington area, logged on and got involved in a
range of events as diverse as its real life counterpart. These events ranged
from email petitions, bulletins and online discussions, to acts of electronic
civil disobedience, denial of service and web defacement.
But the networks implemented were not only used by the hackers and
hacktivists. They were also used by other activists as a site to organize,
inform and mobilize fellow activists. As we shall examine further in a later
chapter, the hacktivists organizational and networking structures tended to
mimic the organizational structure of their own medium - the Internet.
Conclusions
Hacktivism has had a short, but interesting history. Whilst each hacktivist
event is uniquely tailored to the subject and the constituents of its
participants, there are some similar threads consistent between these events.
In every case, activists worked in cooperation with hackers to achieve a
common goal. In the case of SWARM, the activists taught themselves hacktivist
techniques. JED was the opposite, where hackers taught themselves how to
conduct a public protest. An issue like etoy saw hackers become politicized
over a perceived threat to 'their' domain, with activists (most of whom, it
would appear from reading their material, have some familiarity with
hacktivist technique) only coming on the scene at a later stage.
Finally, there are the ongoing WTO protests. Whilst only the A16 protest in
Washington DC has been outlined here, similar hacktivist and networking
events occurred at Seattle, Melbourne (S11), and Prague (S28). During WTO,
hacker skills were employed to help maintain group cohesion, information
flows and to mobilize. Hackers also got involved independently of their
street-based counterparts to conduct d.o.s attacks and to deface websites.
As we can see, hacktivism is already split by issues of appropriation - some
'hacktivism' is activists adopting hacker techniques. In other cases, it is
the hackers who are using the ideas and tools of more traditional activists.
Whilst both areas are equally fascinating, and to a great degree overlap, in
this thesis we will be focussing particularly on the hacker-hacktivists. The
hacktivists have retranslated activist techniques as the hackers as
individuals "grow up," and become politicized entities who are willing to use
their skills and associations to fight what they see as encroachments on
their rights as citizens and netzians.
To date, hacktivism as a concept has not truly entered the public arena.
However, early public coverage seems to suggest that hacktivists are an
'idealized' faceless enemy. They seem capable of threatening security and
stability of the average citizen, and they seem to have an almost mythic
ability to destroy a computer-dominated lifestyle. And as we shall see in the
next chapter, these attitudes are reinterpreted, challenged and in some cases
appropriated by the hacktivists themselves.
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.::[08]-[The DeCSS case and how to change a Big Business]
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::[Dr. Z]
:::[http://www.hackernews.com]:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
The DeCSS case and how to change a Big
Business (BB) in today's world
By Dr. Z (Nigel Loring)
I have watched this case of legal muscling and intimidation and just
had to comment with an attitude of "What are the hackers doing
here?" This is BB vs. scattered and unfocussed "hackers". Who do
I think will win? BB of course! Just look at the situation: BB wants
to establish that they will punish anyone they want by using legal
bullying tactics. They pick a small entity (the "little guy", a son and
his father) with a "potential" impact on BB's business. It doesn't
matter that the "potential" adverse effect is not real or logical. The
business is playing on their own field of expertise, where they know
the rules and the hacker community doesn't even read the rule
book. The media love it and BB plays it for all its worth. After all,
BB has labeled the little guy a "criminal", a nerd and a foreigner,
and the people who would complain are those other nerdy guys
(Linux users - and what place do they really have in the world high
technology order - just esoteric).
Why do I say that BB will win? Just look at the comments in
Slashdot's talk-back to the initial indictment: You can characterize
them as whiny, uninformed, and petulant. Suggestions are made
that boycotting of BB and donations to the little guy are the ways to
help. Give me a break! Boycotts don't work unless you have an
established big organization (Green Peace, Sierra Club, NAACP,
and the Christian Right come to mind). Donations from a few
hundred (or 10's) of hackers don't merit any stories in any media
(except in on-line talk-backs where they are buried by the high
volume of ranting, raving, and novice legal opinions).
Let me call into question who wants to be called a hacker. Check
out the L0pht's website and the definition they use. Their classic
definition is the best and most rewarding: doing things (solving
problems) in a way that was not intended or planned. For myself, I
think you should "hack" life. Wozniak did it, Gates did it, the
Internet originators did it, the guy who invented the spreadsheet did
it, and the L0pht is doing it. Look at what they did - it was different
and enjoyable, and with dedication, they made a difference. Yeah
sure, one might get arrogant like Gates, but take a look at the
others and the L0pht. They're in a different mold.
So, you have this case against reverse-engineering a trade secret
and then showing everyone how to do it. Let's be brutally frank
about it. The legal results are guaranteed: If you don't understand
the game that is going to play out here, you're going to lose. Just
slink away and let the legal people and BB play the game to get
what they want. In my opinion, if I was a lawyer for BB I would be
laughing at the ranting and raving going on by the "hackers", and
the media's obvious siding with my client. I have a no lose situation.
I can: Settle out of court before trial (BB wins and gags the "little
guy"); settle after starting the trial (BB wins by getting publicity that
they will pursue by legal bullying anything that THEY think might
hurt their interests); let the court decide (if BB loses, they WIN with
a spin-doctoring that says they only lost by a technicality in
Norway - and man, have they punished the little guy with his costs).
There you have it - end of episode - a clear case of flipping a coin
with the bet: "Heads I WIN, tails you LOSE."
But wait a minute. Aren't you hackers? Can't you see that if you
learn the game you can change the way things are done and get
the outcome YOU want?
You CAN hack big business and surprise the hell out of the CEOs
and lawyers. They have a soft underbelly. When a company
presses legal claims they are playing a high stakes game. Usually,
they do not play that game unless they are pretty confident they
can WIN. But sometimes they go wrong by underestimating the
resourcefulness of their opponent and being arrogant. That's a
deadly combination.
A classic case comes from years ago when the telephone
company sued a guy in California for extending his phone with a
home-made system to connect all the buildings on his farm. They
claimed that he was setting up an exchange and only the phone
company wanted to be able to do that. The phone company was
arrogant and wanted to set the precedent that they owned all phone
systems. They didn't expect that as a ham-radio operator he would
get the National HAM Radio Operator's Club to support and defend
him. The phone company lost big-time and this set the precedent
that the phone company owns ONLY up to your property or the box
going into your house. Inside, you can do whatever you like, so long
as it doesn't interfere with the phone company's operations. I bet
the phone company wishes it had never sued that ham-radio
operator.
So, this is how you can do the same thing today to the DVD
Consortium:
Did you know that owning one (1) share of any public stock entitles
you (or your proxy) to attend and vote at the Annual Stockholders
Meeting of that publicly held big business? Did you know that you
can actually make a few statements on the record at those
meetings?
Do you know that Mutual Fund Managers have forced big
businesses to merge, not to merge (see P&G and Warner-Lambert
talks in January) or do other business things because the Fund
Manager has proxy control of large amounts of the big business's
stocks. Did you know that each time big business's stock drops
and you find that a big business Officer sold his stock just before
the drop, you can sue him? Yes, you can, and it happens a LOT -
you just don't hear about it. Big business almost always settles out
of court before a trial (think they want to go to court when they can
get rid of the annoyance by paying off the complainer - it's almost
legal extortion - but the complainer has to lose money in the first
place for the suit to have teeth.)
The only kicker is: The fewer proxies, the less influence. Now, you
don't have much clout with one share. But what if you, and people
who think like you, combine your proxies and vote as a block. THIS
is power! THIS is what will make Big Business's CEO and other
company officers take notice. THIS is charging onto the playing
field with a rule book in your hand and power in your pocket. You
WILL be noticed! You should also realize that only a fraction of the
stockholders in a company ever assigns their proxies to someone;
usually BB asks the stockholders for their proxies to vote what BB
wants. So the stockholders meeting attendees represent only a
part of the total shares in the company. Your block of shares then
has more clout than you think. If you can get enough opposition to
the mainline BB view, the Meeting notice can even state them.
It doesn't have to stop there either. If you have a block of votes, then
the media is going to take notice also. Just imagine the story:
"Hackers, claiming ethical and economic reasons, plan to attend
Annual Stockholders Meeting to voice opposition to BB's DVD
policies." Imagine BB's CEO seeing that in his favorite media.
That's delicious and legal.
OK, you say you can't get hackers to descend on BB at the right
time (work schedules, travel, distances, costs). PLAY the game.
Hack the rules. (Remember, this doesn't mean break the rules -
just apply them in a different way that no one thought of before.)
You have proxies - pool them! Find a well-respected and ethical
organization and set up an account that holds stock owned by
individuals. The sole purpose of the account is non-profit and to vote
the proxies of that stock as a block. Have ONE person with those
proxies show up at the meeting. Broadcast it. Call up the company
and tell them what you plan to do (I smile when thinking of that
phone call to the Investor Relations Department of BB). Remember,
the Security and Exchange Commission, which allowed the
company to raise a lot of money by going public, makes BB play
by SEC rules. If you understand computers you can understand the
SEC rules. (Ha! Think the lawyers, who study the SEC rules, know
computers like a hacker does? No Way. The lawyers have to hire
outside experts --- Hmmm, maybe friends of yours.)
The beauty of this is that each of you still owns your shares of
stock. You aren't donating all that money to anyone! Later, you can
have the stock sold and get almost all the money back.
Let's look at examples of costs to you: If the Holding Company
sells it on-line, you might lose a few cents. Think of it this way:
Honest (and savvy) Holding Company sells 1000 shares at
$100/share through an on-line broker for < $10. If the 1000 shares
came from 1000 people then the per person cost of the sale would
be $0.01! Note that the transaction is $100,000 total, but Holding
Company only expensed $10 total. One on-line broker lets you
trade up to 5000 shares for <$10. (If you had 5000 shares of MSFT
(~$100/share) that would be $500,000 traded for <$10.) Ahh, the
beauty of on-line brokers! Do you feel that this cause is worth 1
cent? Now, I know that the Holding Company will have some
operating expenses too, but that can be worked out to cover
expenses with full disclosure guaranteed. This should be a cause,
not a plan to make anyone money.
Here's another angle in the hack. Your holding company can sell all
but a small number of the shares in BB #1 after the Stockholder's
Meeting and buy a lot of BB #2 to get ready for BB #2's
Stockholder's Meeting. You can rotate through a number of them.
When you get what you want, you cash out. That's what big
business would do. Gee, isn't that ironic, and a pretty good hack.
One noteworthy point at this juncture would be to highlight the fact
that investment clubs are regulated - they are not just informal
groups of investors. There is paperwork that needs to be filed. For
help starting up your own investment club, The Motley Fool
(http://www.fool.com/) has lots of resources that may be of
assistance. In particular, the "Investment Club" section of the
Motley Fool may be of interest.
Who knows, what you made the company do might please other
stock investors and you might sell at a profit. But, what you've done
could also hurt the company's image and cause the stock to go
down. Ha! (This is where you've got to smile.) You will have BB's
officers trying their hardest to not let the stock drop -- they're
working in YOUR (a stockholder) best interests (actually they're
trying to keep their stock options positive and they personally lose
money if the stock drops). Isn't it funny, that while you fight for your
cause, they can be fighting to not let you (a stockholder) lose any
money! Now, that's justice!
Well, that's the plan. Play the game - Hack life. Use the media,
don't let them always use you. Don't just vent your displeasure on
the talk-back, on-line magazines. Make a difference!.
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.::[09]-[The Debate on the Tactic of Electronic Civil Disobedience]
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::[Gidget Digit]
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
The Debate on the Tactic of Electronic Civil Disobedience
(just another case of Dirty Bodies clashing with Clean Efficience?)
The president of the World Bank, in his speech to the political and
technological elite at last summer's "Global Knowledge for Development"
conference, used the word "revolution" no less than 16 times, in a brief
10 minutes. He was referring to the already over-hyped "information
revolution", where executives of Microsoft, WorldCom, and AT&T are the
revolutionaries.
The Electronic Disturbance Theatre is heralding this same "information
revolution" with a call to cyberwar. But the people's movements will not
be driven by a Java applet.
The internet has obvious limitations as a medium which depends upon one's
ability to read and write (usually English) and one's technical access,
all piled on the amount of time one can spend plugged in. It is also
equally obvious that it is currently one of the cheapest forms of global
communication, and as more relatively low tech computers become equipped
with e-mail and list service, there is increasingly better access to
grassroots information. All of these factors make it a good tool to
improve our communication strategy, but a poor place to choose as a site
for direct action.
Yet, several yanquis in a high-wired, post-modernist academic environment
are organizing "Electronic Civil Disobedience" as if power is no longer in
the streets. As if the Spectacle is the main stage of engagement. And
this suits the suits just fine. It removes the debate from the public
sphere and places it in the private. When the Electronic Disturbance
Theatre talks "direct" action in corporate networks, with hordes of
businessmen already self-defined as 'revolutionaries', grassroots
activists should see right away that this is definitely not our area of
strength. Their "information revolution" is largely about deskilling
workers. Terms like 'flexible' labour, or 'outsourcing' are code words
for removing benefits and long-term support and forcing people into
socially isolating piecework. The ECD tactic neither organizes electronic
workers into sabotaging nor unionizing against this "progression", and
worse, it de-mobilizes and de-politicizes solidarity activism.
Much Ado About Virtually Nothing
"Electronic Pulse Systems" are designed to centralize "swarms" of
computer users in order to "automate" the repetitive process of reloading
a web-page. In theory, with enough participants, the "FloodNet device"
thereby overloads the target server. A "denial-of-service attack" is
another name for this ECD 'hack' or 'jam' that causes a temporary
interuption in an opponents public web page service. Used on the White
House back in May, it had nil affect, and used on Zedillo's site, June
10th, it actually backfired. (This action took place after Mexican human
rights organization AME LA PAZ specifically asked the Electronic
Disturbance Theatre to avoid choosing targets in Mexican cyberspace.)
Activists may recognize the ECD similarity with the old trick of getting
large numbers of people to continuously re-dial a target's phone lines, or
tie up fax machines with garbage data. Organizing ECD seems to be like
getting as many people as you can together and going to stand in front of
a billboard. It's an ineffective use of activist time and resources.
Because it's on-line though, it is currently attracting mucho hype from
mainstream media.
Warrior Machismo
There are several reasons for the speedy spread of this particular meme.
With often two or three rounds of announcements leading up to an "act" in
the unfolding play, there is no doubt that the Electronic Disturbance
Theatre understands spin. It's a weird mix between rhetoric appealing to
sixties-non-violent-civil-disobedience folks, and adventurist "electronic
tinkerers" of the brave new world.
Such appeals as to "today's nomadic warriors who wander on the net" is
pure romantic nonsense designed to coax the DOOM-playing wanna-be
"revolutionaries" into doing something remotely political. Much better
use of time to help those without access, who are already active in
struggle, to use the tools for their needs, than try to work within the
capitalist view of the masses as consumers.
Rather than politicizing through praxis, ECD siphons off the energy of the
movement on the ground, when folks who may become more engaged in activism
with encouragement and participation are told to reload a web page, or
send an e-mail to a politician. Many would contend this does more to
assuage gringo guilt than effect any real change.
SUBVERT AND REPURPOSE-- POPULAR THEATRE
Sit-ins and blockades are not old-school and obsolete. When a government,
whether the US Federal, or your local school, has no popular support, they
are still damn fine "devices" for publicly unseating illegitimate leaders,
and for physically re-placing them with people power. That physical
change is the basis of the establishment of rebel autonomous communities.
And that "transformatory" change is also educational because popular
theatre is part of the streets. Real "mass, public participation" by
necessity means that human beings have to form direct face-to-face
relationships with one another, in order to facilitate decision making for
themselves.
Floodnet runs counter to this, and I don't only mean centralized
automation of the process. It actually quantifies democratic participation
into hit measurements. Yes, it is easy and convenient to "participate
from home or work" (if you have a computer!) But all this emphasis on
being able to attack without your body, just by hitting a button, ignores
the realities of boundaries -- in the time needed for organizing, the
locality of human relations and needs.
DIRECT ACTION GETS THE GOODS
Why send an e-mail of complaint to the politician, when you could work to
make him obsolete? Our priority needs to be in building the autonomous
municipalities and the tangible solidarity here in the north, that would
support and work in concert with the struggles of our zapatista and
mexican comrades.
In essence, this is the central meaning of direct action that the
Electronic Disturbance Theatre cannot edit out in Microsoft Word. It is
immediate. As organizers of the international Reclaim the Streets
movement contend, "Direct action enables people to develop a new sense of
self-confidence and an awareness of their individual and collective power.
It is founded on the idea that people can develop the ability for
self-rule only through practice, and proposes that all persons directly
decide the importance of the issues facing them." Such praxis comes
through seeing, touching, listening and truly working with people next to
you on the picket line, in the march, on the soup line, in your
neighborhood.
It is eventually socially isolating to sit in a room alone and type
because the medium only extends part of your body. The information
transmitted across the net about demonstrations may help to determine the
general size and scope of our movements. But when the "act" of
"disobedience" is simply hitting a button, when the net is relied upon by
organizers as a site for mobilization, then we miss entirely the real
character of resistance. Worse, it will become painfully obvious to
people in struggle that our other senses of communication are dangerously
underdeveloped.
Analog Zapatismo
"Electronic Civil Disobedience" to defend the Zapatistas might not be
*such* a bad idea if there was already massive resistance in the streets.
Right now, the claims of the Electronic Disturbance Theatre to be 'just
another affinity group' carrying out 'one tactic in a range of available
tactics' ring hollow. But to its credit, the EDT says it does want to help
in setting up and defending a server in a zapatista support base.
As the urgent situation currently stands, there is a "low intensity" war
going on, which breaks out in massacres or mass imprisonment when Mexican
state police and Federal agents forcibly enter and try to dismantle the
autonomous communities. It is a matter of life and death that we mobilize
people --bodies, physical support-- to bring medicine, food and
communication supplies, and to bear witness with our physical presence,
either there, or here in the streets, and at the businesses whose
investments perpetuate this war. [A Mexican Solidarity Network is
beginning to emerge in several norteamericano cities, but when reading the
desperate pleas for help which come out across e-mail support lists from
Chiapas, it is clear we have a long way to go.]
Our power is still in the streets, and we should not welcome a move to
the realm of the electronic with a rally call, but rather with intelligent
information gathering, a critical analysis of the electronic environment.
Instead of declaring cyberwar deep in capitalist territory, we need to
take a peaceful, cautious approach to the technology with the goal
improving the communications infrastructure in the service of the movement
on the ground.
This will necessitate broadening access, slowing down the devastating side
effects of the "knowledge economy" by sharing constructive skills,
hardware and software so that people of the south can tell their own
stories, not suffer the fallout of cyberwar. Building this infrastructure
and autonomy will do far more to defend and expand public space within the
networks and on the ground, than any "electronic civil disobedience".
keep it real.
!Venceremos!
^ i don't even know how to make this upside down in said Microsoft
Word.TM
fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
.::[10]-[zapatista tribal port scan code]
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::[Electronic Disturbance Theater]
:::[http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html]::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
zapatista tribal port scan code*
A port scan is not a crime. It is no different in spirit from counting the
windows of a building on a public sidewalk, or observing the number of
doors.
-- EDT, 2001
Chiapas, Mexico - January 3rd, 2000 - the Zapatista Air Force
"bombarded" the federal barracks of the Mexican Army with
hundreds of paper airplanes. Each one carrying a message to
counter the deafening noise created by the soldiers attempts
to silence their protests.
EZLN
http://www.ezln.org
In remembrance of this event the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT)
releases a digital translation of the Zapatista Air Force Action:
the *zapatista tribal port scan code.*
The distribution of the source code for the** zapatista tribal port scan
(ZTPS)**
will be followed by the release of a ZTPS Tool Kit on January 15th, 2001
through EDT's home page.
Electronic Disturbance Theater
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html
** zapatista tribal port scan (ZTPS) by EDT**
/* socketChecker -a simple port scanning class-
Opens a socket, checks it for a service, with a time-out.
Returns a String describing either the socket response, or
the result of the attempt to open the socket. Works for
both tcp-ip and udp services. A call to the factory method
checkSocket does it all (see below). Since the method
returns a String object after "time-out" milliseconds, you
might want to put the call *the checkSocket* method in it's
own thread.
*This code is completely free source
*If you download or use this code, please feel compelled to
make any improvements that you might make available to
the public domain.
*Utilize this code at your own risk - port scanning will
sometimes bristle the hairs of some sys admins.
As we know, the only thing a sys admin needs to do is
to complain (regardless of truth, and without responsible investigation),
for an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to pull the plug on a user.
*But if a socket is visible over the *public* Internet,
then a sys admin, (and everyone else), should expect
it to be scanned. A port scan is not a crime. It is no
different in spirit from counting the windows of a
building on a public sidewalk, or observing the number
of doors. If it sets off alarms, then it is the responsibility of
the sys admin to separate the potential threats from poetry,
free vision, or paper airplanes in public places.
Electronic Disturbance Theater
*/
import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
public class socketChecker implements Runnable{
file://declarations
private String server;
private DatagramSocket dsock;
private DatagramPacket packet;
private int port;
private Socket socket;
private String response="";
private BufferedReader is;
private PrintWriter os;
public static final int TCP=0;
public static final int UDP=1;
private int type;
private boolean tcp; // if tcp true, then a tcp scan is done. if false,
udp.
private String message;
private boolean error=false;
// constructor - this is used by the factory method. You should not call it.
public socketChecker(String server, int port, int type, String message) {
socket=null;
dsock=null;
packet=null;
this.server=server;
this.port=port;
this.type=type;
this.message=message;
response="trying; no connection"; // default response reports message
// if there is a problem connecting it will be caught as
// an exception in the run method...
}
// methods
/* This static factory method is what you use to scan a port
public static String checkSocket(String ahost, int aport,
int timeout, int type, String message);
ahost - the machine to scan
aport - the port to scan
timeout - tells the thread how many milliseconds to wait for the socket
to respond...
int type - you can use the static ints socketChecker.TCP or
socketChecker.UDP to choose tcp or udp scans...
message - a String used either to message a port (TCP), or as
the data for the UDP packet.
(use depends upon "type" of scan selected in type)
*/
public static String checkSocket(String ahost, int aport,
int timeout, int type, String message) {
socketChecker look= new socketChecker(ahost, aport, type, message);
Thread t = new Thread(look);
t.start();
try {
t.join(timeout);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
System.out.println("InterruptedException e: " + e.toString());
}
return look.getResponse();
}
// getResponse simply returns the String response
private String getResponse() {
return response;
}
// the run method
public void run() {
if (type==TCP) {
tcp=true;
} else {
tcp=false;
}
if (tcp) {
response="trying TCP=\"" + message + "\"; no connection";
// open a tcp socket
try {
socket = new Socket(server, port);
} catch (Exception e) { // catches mainly security and unknown host
exceptions
response+="; " + e.toString();
error=true;
}
if (!error) { // if the socket is open Reader and Writer
try {
is= new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(socket.getInputStream())
);
os= new PrintWriter(
socket.getOutputStream(),true /* autoFlush */
);
} catch (IOException e) {
response+="; IO problem; " + e.toString();
error=true;
}
if (!error) { // if Reader and Writer are open
response="sending TCP=\"" + message + "\"; no reply";
try {
os.println(message);
} catch (Exception e) {
response+=("; "+e.toString()+"="+message);
}
try {
response="sending TCP=\"" + message + "\"; reply="+is.readLine();
} catch (IOException e) {
response+="; " + e.toString();
}
}
}
} else {
// open a udp socket, send a packet, get response..
response="trying UDP packet=\"" + message + "\"; can't create";
try {
dsock=new DatagramSocket();
} catch (SocketException se) {
response="SocketException: " + se.toString();
error=true;
} catch (Exception e) { // mostly to gather the variety of possible
security exceptions
response+="; " + e.toString();
error=true;
}
if (!error) {
response="sending UDP packet=\"" + message + "\"; can't send";
try {
dsock.send(new DatagramPacket(message.getBytes(),
message.getBytes().length,
InetAddress.getByName(server),
port)
);
} catch (UnknownHostException e) {
response+="UnknownHostException:" + e.toString();
error=true;
} catch (IOException e) {
response+="IOException: " + e.toString();
error=true;
} catch (Exception e) { // mostly to gather the variety of possible
security exceptions
response+="; " + e.toString();
error=true;
}
if (!error) {
response="UDP packet sent=\"" + message
+ "\"; no reply";
byte[] buf= new byte[1024];
packet= new DatagramPacket(buf, buf.length);
try {
dsock.receive(packet);
error=true;
} catch (ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException e) {
response="server trying to overflow buffer: " + e.toString();
error=true;
} catch (IOException e) {
response="IOException: " + e.toString();
error=true;
}
response= "UDP packet sent=\"" + message + "\"; reply=" + new
String(packet.getData(), 0, packet.getLength());
}
}
}
}
}
*******
End of zapatista tribal port scan code
*******
+ message + poetry packet +
}
}}
\+ Mayan Code+\
Zapatista Technology
Maya Time
Air Notes
Armed Words
Paper Force
EZLN 2001
San Andres
peace pact
signed accords
indigenous rights
Paz Digna
Fox promise
La Realidad
distributed encounters
beyond Seattle
las futuras
always already
future hacking
against neoliberalism
continuing repression
taking Land
taking communities
taking rights
Ya Basta!
new dawn
nightmare ends
jungle waits
silence breaks
nuestra arma
nuestra palabra
Yepa! Yepa!
Andale! Andale!
Arriba! Arriba!
Subcomandante Insurgente
Mexican Southeast
November 2000
post presidente
Ernesto Zedillo
assassination administration
going nowhere
Acteal 1996
peace justice
bad joke
sisters brothers
conciencia internacional
necesitamos difundir
la palabra
tomar accion
nueva fronteras
Lacandona dark
all power
for D.F
italian kilowatts
counter power
for Chiapas
virtual autonomy
real politics
not over
top down
cracks open
reality arcs
No Illegals
Mexico USA
Operation Gatekeeper
Border war
Every hour
Someone dies
amor rabia
suspended particles
adicciones ironicas
mariposa rotas
drift zones
futuras globales
auto nomedia
network art
tactical media
net strikes
hack tivismo
indy media
La Mar
Old Antonio
Don Durito
Little Pedrito
Commandante Tacho
Commandante Ramona
Zapatista Technology
Maya Time
Air Notes
Armed Words
Paper Force
EZLN 2001
}continue switch
}
}
}
}
*****
Communique' from the Clandestine Revolutionary
Indigenous Committee -
General Command of the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation. Mexico.
January, 2001.
To the People of Mexico:
To the Peoples and Governments of the World:
Brothers and Sisters:
This past December 22 it will have been 3 years since the Acteal killings.
On that day, 3 years ago, 45 children, women, men and old ones, all
indigenous, were massacred by a paramilitary group of Ernesto Zedillo's
government.
Those intellectually responsible for this crime against humanity continue
to go unpunished. The dirty war which made it possible continues. The
counterinsurgency doctrine which inspired it continues still. The
paramilitary structure which carried it out remains untouched. The
military protection of the assassins continues.
Despite what the lavish government publicity campaign says, nothing has
changed. There is nothing in place in Chiapas which would ensure that
Acteal will not be repeated.
For Acteal to be finally put in our country's past, it is necessary for the
truly guilty ones to be punished, it is necessary for the warlike viewpoint
to be finally abandoned and for there to be a serious commitment to the
political path. It is necessary that the paramilitary groups be dismantled,
it is necessary for the foundations of dialogue to be set through the
signals which were demanded.
The EZLN is calling on political, social and non-governmental organizations,
on intellectuals and artists, on religious men and women, on all honest
persons in Mexico and the world, to mobilize in demanding an end to the
policies which made Acteal possible and the fulfillment of the 3 signals
which were demanded for the renewal of dialogue.
Democracy!
Liberty!
Justice!
>From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.
By the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee
-
General Command of the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation.
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos.
Mexico, December of 2000.
EZLN
Zapatista National
Liberation Army
\ http://www.ezln.org\
{
dsock.receive(packet);
{{swtich_over}}
The distribution of the source code for the** zapatista tribal port scan
(ZTPS)** will be followed by the release of a ZTPS Tool
on January 15th, 2001 through EDT's home page.
Electronic Disturbance Theater
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html
fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
.:::[ Copyright (c) www.thehacktivist.com 2001. All Rights Reserved. ]:::.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
::[ Contact: thehacktivist@hushmail.com ]::
::[ ]::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::[ ]::
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