From Clicktivism to Hacktivism: Understanding Digital Activism

Abstract and Figures

Digital activism provides new opportunities for social movement participants and social movement organizations (SMOs). Recent IS research has begun to touch on digital activism, defining it, exploring it, and building new theory to help understand it. This paper seeks to unpack digital activism through an exploratory literature review that provides descriptions, definitions, and categorizations. We provide a framework for digital activism by extending Milbrath's (1965) hierarchy of political participation that divides activism into spectator, transitional, and gladiatorial activities. Using this framework, we identify ten activities of digital activism that are represented in the literature. These include digital spectator activities: clicktivism, metavoicing, assertion; digital transitional activities: e-funding, political consumerism, digital petitions, and botivism; and digital gladiatorial activities: data activism, exposure, and hacktivism. Last, we analyze the activities in terms of participants, SMOs, individuals who are targeted by the activity, and organizations that are targeted by the activity. We highlight four major implications and offer four meta-conjectures on the mechanisms of digital activism and their resulting impacts, and reveal a new construct where participants digitally organize yet lack an identifying cause, which we label connective emotion.

What is Hacktivism? Civil Disobedience, Cyberterrorism, or Something Else?

There are different motivations behind hackers’ actions. They can be stirred by anything from monetary gain to bragging rights to boredom (‘because they can’). But frequently, the driving force behind breaking into systems, stealing information and disrupting services is to demonstrate civil disobedience.
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We know about white hats and black hats, which are differentiated mostly by their motivations and ethical codes, but today we will dig deeper into another type of hacker—and no, we’re not talking about grey hats (that’s a topic for another time). We’re talking about modern-day activists, not the ones who stand on the streets holding signs protesting the current political climate, but the ones who employ their technical knowledge, combined with a strong sense of justice, to convey their often politically motivated messages by performing hacks. We are, of course, talking about hacktivists.
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The topic of “hacktivism” always sparks debate, not only on the legality and severity of their crimes but also on their ethical codes; whether they’re freedom fighters or merely cyber criminals hiding behind the activist’s veil. So before we form our individual opinions and decide whether hacktivists are our friends or enemies, it’s important to understand the term, learn how it all began and familiarize ourselves with the individuals and groups operating in this manner.

Ethical Hacking VS Hacktivism:
Where Perspectives Matters.

What is ethical hacking? There are codes of conduct for almost every industry, from the rules of the game in sport to the constitution in law to safety measures in factories. Ethical hacking is no different. It is governed by a code of conduct created by a community who consider themselves to be experts in this line of work. In the formal sense, an ethical hacker is either a company or an individual who identifies and exposes potential threats on a computer system, before someone with malicious intentions does so. Upon discovery, these gaps in the system are plugged to ensure the safety of the computers and networks being probed.
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‍Rules of the ethical hacking game The rules of the game include: asking for explicit consent from the party to be probed, respecting their privacy, ensuring that there are no open avenues for malicious hackers to enter the systems and finally they must alert the organisation/individual if there are any vulnerabilities they have found.
In fact, most companies with an online presence use a Bug Bounty program – a crowdsourcing initiative – to identify vulnerabilities on the company website in exchange for rewards in the form of compensation or recognition. Companies hope that in this way instead of becoming the victim of cybercrimes, they continue to remain a secure environment for their users.
However, there are instances when hackers attack a system under the umbrella of ethics, without adhering to the rules of the game. Can the ethical element of hacking still be present here?

Hack Brief: Anonymous Stole and Leaked a Megatrove of Police Documents

It's been the better part of a decade since the hacktivist group Anonymous rampaged across the internet, stealing and leaking millions of secret files from dozens of US organizations. Now, amid the global protests following the killing of George Floyd, Anonymous is back—and it's returned with a dump of hundreds of gigabytes of law enforcement files and internal communications.
On Friday of last week, the Juneteenth holiday, a leak-focused activist group known as Distributed Denial of Secrets published a 269-gigabyte collection of police data that includes emails, audio, video, and intelligence documents, with more than a million files in total. DDOSecrets founder Emma Best tells WIRED that the hacked files came from Anonymous—or at least a source self-representing as part of that group, given that under Anonymous' loose, leaderless structure anyone can declare themselves a member. Over the weekend, supporters of DDOSecrets, Anonymous, and protesters worldwide began digging through the files to pull out frank internal memos about police efforts to track the activities of protesters. The documents also reveal how law enforcement has described groups like the antifascist movement Antifa."It's the largest published hack of American law enforcement agencies," Emma Best, cofounder of DDOSecrets, wrote in a series of text messages. "It provides the closest inside look at the state, local, and federal agencies tasked with protecting the public, including [the] government response to COVID and the BLM protests."

Counterculture?

Few people are out protesting in the street or tripping on acid in America these days, yet many of the social principles of its hippie generation are now mainstream. The most celebrated example of the continuing influence of 60s alternative values is in the world of technology. In his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, media historian Fred Turner describes a group of 60s figures who did not revolt against a menacing, out of touch ‘establishment’ as the familiar narrative tells us, but took a seemingly contradictory interest in defense technologies developing within the military­industrial complex. Turner observes that the countercultural ethos of demanding access to knowledge invoked by Stewart Brand and others influenced the development of the personal computer products and network tools that popularized the web and initiated our shift to a society that thrives on information.
At first glance, what appears prescient about the 60s when looking at current American culture is the preoccupation then and now with computer technology, the natural environment and alternative forms of community; but today each is disconnected from the radical political action and oppositional ideologies of the earlier era. For instance, concern for the planet, which was cast as flaky and indulgent, is shared by the majority of people despite the ideological differences between the counterculture and popular American opinion now. Sustainability is so much a part of our collective economic consciousness that its importance is cited in business sectors – like real estate development – which once ardently resisted entertaining pro­environmental stances. Similarly, the communal principles of the counterculture – such as participation, sharing information, erring on the side of social inclusion, networking and identifying areas of agreement with others in order to form collaborations – are the basic axioms for building social capital now.