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The computer hacking community has a rich history of political activism -- or 'hacktivism' -- that has come to define it in the era of WikiLeaks. If there's one thing that unites hacktivists across multiple generations, it's dedication to the idea that information on the Internet should be free -- a first principle that has not infrequently put them at odds with corporations and governments the world over. Adapted from the source document.

This short essay explores how the notion of hacktivism changes due to easily accessible, military grade Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). Privacy Enhancing Technologies, technological tools which provide anonymous communications and protect users from online surveillance enable new forms of online political activism. Through the short summary of the ad-hoc vigilante group Anonymous, this article describes hacktivism 1.0 as electronic civil disobedience conducted by outsiders. Through the analysis of Wikileaks, the anonymous whistleblowing website, it describes how strong PETs enable the development of hacktivism 2.0, where the source of threat is shifted from outsiders to insiders. Insiders have access to documents with which power can be exposed, and who, by using PETs, can anonymously engage in political action. We also describe the emergence of a third generation of hacktivists who use PETs to disengage and create their own autonomous spaces rather than to engage with power through anonymous whistleblowing.

Les cyberattaques gagnent en complexité à travers l'hacktivisme, où des hackers utilisent des outils de plus en plus puissants pour des finalités diverses, avec une agressivité croissante. La défense des systèmes d'information doit donc s'adapter sans cesse à ces menaces majeures.

This research explores hacktivism as a new form of online political activism. It uses qualitative interviews with a gender-equal sample of 10 self-defined hacktivists to address issues of gender and the discursive strategies used by males and females to handle the hacktivist community's male-only stereotype. The semi-structured interviews are analysed using Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA). The analysis indicates that male hacktivists relate to this dominant male-only representation through discursive techniques such as the suppression of gender (Male Oblivious Discourse) or mechanisms of vindication (Male Justification Discourse). Female hacktivists use the accentuation of gender and sexism to counteract male-dominant discourses and establish Female Discourses of Resistance (Emphasis Discourse; Negation Discourse). These gender-related argumentative positions and rhetorical mechanisms demonstrate how the male-only stereotype is created and maintained and how it affects not only hacktivists' talk and sense-making but also their identity and the hacktivist actions they perform.

This book focuses on the phenomenon of hacktivism and how it has been dealt with up to now in the United States and the United Kingdom. After discussing the birth of the phenomenon and the various relevant groups, from Electronic Disturbance Theater to Anonymous, their philosophies and tactics, this timely and original work attempts to identify the positive and negative aspects hacktivism through an analysis of free speech and civil disobedience theory. Engaging in this process clarifies the dual nature of hacktivism, highlighting its potential for positive contributions to contemporary politics, whilst also demonstrating the risks and harms flowing from its controversial and legally ambiguous nature. Based on this hybrid nature of hacktivism, Karagiannopoulos proceeds to offer a critique of the current responses towards such practices and their potential for preserving the positive elements, whilst mitigating the risks and harms involved in such political practices. Finally, the study focuses on identifying an alternative, symbiotic rationale for responding to hacktivism, based on a cluster of micro-interventions moving away from the conflict-based criminal justice model and the potentially unjust and inefficacious results it entails