From its roots in culture jamming, we look at the early days of hacktivism from the early manifesto by The Mentor to the exploits of The Electronic Disturbance Theater, The Electrohippies, the Hong Kong Blondes, et.

1. (H)ac(k)tivism
Lecture 2

2. admin
• Library
• On blackboard…
• Blog
• questions

3. Culture Jamming cf Mark Dery
examples
• Banksy
• Joey Skaggs
• Negativland
– Chicken Diction
– Helter Stupid
Back to Situationists
10 Tactics on uses of humor

4. Culture jamming: how/why it works
• pierces the veil of the Spectacle
Ok but how?
• draws attention to brands, consumerism, and
other abstractions. It foregrounds them.
• makes explicit the connection between wealth
and the exploited.
• Deflates authority: cf Nolan Void essay

5. The Rise of Hacktivism
• The Hacker Ethic
• Cult of the Dead Cow and Hacktivism
• The early days of Hacktivism

6. The Mentor: Conscience of a Hacker
Another one got caught today, it's all over the
papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer
Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank
Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.

7. The Mentor 2
But did you, in your three-piece psychology
and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look
behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever
wonder what made him tick, what forces
shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world...

8. The Mentor 3
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm
smarter than most of the other kids, this crap
they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.

9. The Mentor 4
I made a discovery today. I found a computer.
Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want
it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like
me... Or feels threatened by me... Or thinks
I'm a smart ass... Or doesn't like teaching and
shouldn't be here... Damn kid. All he
does is play games. They're all alike.

10. The Mentor 5
And then it happened... a door opened to a
world... rushing through the phone line like
heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic
pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day
incompetencies is sought... a board is found.
"This is it... this is where I belong..."

11. The Mentor 6
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been
spoon-fed baby food at school when we
hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you
did let slip through were pre-chewed and
tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists,
or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had
something to teach found us will- ing pupils,
but those few are like drops of water in the
desert.

12. The Mentor 7
We explore... and you call us criminals. We
seek after knowledge... and you call us
criminals. We exist without skin color, without
nationality, without religious bias... and you
call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you
wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it's for our own
good, yet we're the criminals.

13. The Mentor 8
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of
curiosity. My crime is that of judging people
by what they say and think, not what they
look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you,
something that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You
may stop this individual, but you can't stop us
all... after all, we're all alike.

14. A brief history of hacktivism

15. 1. Electronic Disturbance Theater
In 1998, Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT)
developed and utilized a tool called Floodnet
to target the Pentagon, the White House, the
School of the Americas, the office of Mexico’s
president, the Mexican Stock Exchange and
the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, all in support of
the Zapatista guerrilla movement in Mexico.

16. 1. Electronic Disturbance Theater
method. Floodnet, which has subsequently been
released as part of EDT’s “Disturbance Developer
Kit,” allowed users to participate in a sit-in attack
on these sites by a simple click on an icon on
EDT's Web site. The Floodnet software then
directed the participating computers to
continually attack the target Web sites. It has
been estimated that 10,000 people accessed
Floodnet in this two-day action resulting in
targeted servers being hit at a rate of 600,000 hits
per minute.

17. More about EDT
Dorothy Denning: the FloodNet attack on the
Pentagon was met with perhaps the first
military response to a hacktivist attack.
Immediately after detecting the attack the
Pentagon servers redirected the FloodNet
clients to a hostile Applet which tied up the
attacking computers, ultimately forcing them
to reboot.

18. The Electrohippies
FloodNet has subsequently been deployed by a
group called The Electrohippies who used it to
target the World Trade Organization and
various e-commerce websites, defending their
actions in Biblical terms: "As Jesus ransacked
the temple in Jerusalem because it had
become a house of merchandise, so the
recent attacks on e-commerce web sites are a
protest against the manner of it's [sic] recent
development."

19. More about Electrohippies
Electrohippies recognized that DDOS attacks did
have the result of denying speech to the target,
but came up with a formula for determining
when such action was justified:
1. the acts or views perpetrated by the targets of a
[D]DoS action must be reprehensible to many in
society at large, and not just to a small group.
2. the attack should show proportionality, -- it
should focus on a single issue, and not the
organization as a whole.

20. More about Electrohippies
• The theory is that the attacks should be
counterpoints that allow alternative points of
view to become visible; the goal is not to
silence the targeted group but to restore
informational balance.

21. More about Electrohippies
• The Electrohippies also distinguished between
server side attacks and client-side attacks,
where a client-side attack is coming from
multiple individuals (using Floodnet, for
example), the though being that such action is
more democratic.

22. Oxblood Ruffin objects
• "Denial of Service attacks are a violation of the
First Amendment, and of the freedoms of
expression and assembly. No rationale, even
in the service of the highest ideals, makes
them anything other than what they are--
illegal, unethical, and uncivil."

23. 2. The Internet Black Tigers (Sri Lanka)
• An offshoot of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil,
the Black Tigers showed that slick tools like
Floodnet weren’t necessary to carry out a
denial of service attack.

24. 2. The Internet Black Tigers (Sri Lanka)
method. The Tigers, protesting the Sri Lankan
government, organized email bombings
(flooding servers with email) that attacked the
Sri Lankan consulates in Seoul and Ottowa,
taking them offline. The message flooding the
servers was also quite simple: "We are the
Internet Black Tigers and we’re doing this to
disrupt your communications."

25. 3. Hong Kong Blondes
• The Hong Kong Blondes was an underground
network of Chinese students spread across at
least three continents. It was started by
Blondie Wong, who had reportedly witnessed
his father being stoned to death during the
1966-'76 Cultural Revolution. Group primarily
protested censorship and the violations of
human rights that occurred in China.

26. 3. Hong Kong Blondes
method. The group launched cyberattacks against
the "Great Wall" -- a series of firewalls put in
place to block access to Western Internet sites.
With members operating inside and outside of
China, the group claimed to have found
significant security holes within Chinese
government computer networks and claimed to
have defaced government Web sites, torn down
firewalls and even disabled Chinese
communication satellites. They worked to
forewarn political dissidents of imminent arrests.

27. 4. WANK Worm
• According to Julian Assange, the WANK worm is the first
instance of hacktivism. On Oct. 16, 1989, during the Cold
War when nuclear war was an immediate possibility,
hackers hit the NASA computers with the WANK Worm.
Two days prior to the launch of the plutonium-
fueled Galileo space probe from the Kennedy Space
Station, NASA employees logged on to see a humorous yet
frightening welcome screen: "Your computer has been
officially WANKed. You talk of times of peace for all, and
then prepare for war," and "Remember, even if you win the
rat race, you're still a rat." The machines of the U.S.
Department of Energy and NASA worldwide had been
penetrated by the anti-nuclear WANK (WORMS AGAINST
NUCLEAR KILLERS) worm.

28. 4. WANK Worm
method. Once inside NASA’s system, the WANK worm
began to travel through the network of interconnected
computers, crawling through any holes in the security
system. While the worm attack did not stop the shuttle
launch, the recovery from the attack did require a
massive expenditure of money and effort. Because the
worm avoided attacking the computers in Australia and
New Zealand and the worm source code showed
specific instructions to avoid infecting machines in New
Zealand, it is suspected that the attack originated from
Australia. Some have credited the Melbourne-based
hackers, Electron and Phoenix.

29. 5. Net-strike Attack Devised by the
Strano Network
• On December 21, 1995, a group called Strano
Network conducted what is recognized as the
first Internet sit-in. The action targeted the
Web sites of various French government
agencies to protest French nuclear and social
policies.

30. 5. Net-strike Attack Devised by the
Strano Network
• Method. A web sit-in occurs when the
attackers generate a sufficient volume of
traffic to a Web site, preventing any legitimate
traffic from accessing the site. In this case
participants from all over the world were
instructed to point their browsers toward
designated sites and constantly reload the
pages. Because of the excessive traffic, the
targeted Web sites were made unavailable.

31. 6. UrBaN Ka0s
• On June 30th, 1997, the Portuguese hacking
group UrBaN Ka0s hacked and defaced the site of
the Department of Foreign Affairs of Republic of
Indonesia and 25 other military and government
sites as part of the global protest against the
Indonesian government. The goal was to support
and bring attention to the people of Timor, who
had been oppressed and violated for decades by
the Indonesian government. It is by most
accounts the first large-scale hacktivist action.

32. Possible topic (from Fabio Chiusi)
• When I saw the Google Project Glass video, I
immediately thought about your experience with
virtual worlds, and your words on Facebook
dictatorship. Since this project is part of a larger wave
of unintrusive augmented reality devices, that will
bring notifications, social media streams, pop ups,
promotions etc. in front of our very eyes in real-time,
I've been guessing: what will be of the self? Will the
dictatorship of social media moguls and search engines
and targeted ads be even more severe and invasive
than it is now? And with what consequences on both
the individual and society?
• What would Debord say?

33. 7. Toy Wars
• In 1999 an online toy retailer called eToys filed suit
against a group of European artists for their use of the
web address etoy.com – despite the fact that the artists
had been using that Web site for two years before
eToys.com came into existence. Depressingly, the court
sided with the corporation, granting an injunction
against etoy on Nov. 29 of that year. What eToys didn’t
count on was a group of hacktivists, incensed by the
injustice of the court decision, launching an internet
sit-in against eToys.com from Dec. 15-25, effectively
clogging the Web site during the Christmas shopping
season.

34. 7. Toy Wars
• method. What was interesting about the sit-in
was that it was structured as an online game
in which the goal of players was the
devaluation of eToys stock. And indeed, eToy’s
stock began to fall immediately after the
campaign started, and the company went out
of business within a short period of time.
Some commentators consider the sit-in to be
a significant contributing factor to the
corporation’s collapse.

35. 8. The World’s Fantabulous Defacers
• In November 2000, one of the most prolific
hacktivist goups of all time emerged and
operated for about two years, defacing, by some
estimates, more than 400 Web sites during its
operation. Called the World’s Fantabulous
Defacers, its modus operandi was to deface
institutional Web sites by inserting flash videos
and audio files that highlighted human rights
violations against Muslim populations (the goal
being to raise “global awareness” – which
presumably explains why the defacements were
in English).

36. 8. The World’s Fantabulous Defacers
• Alexandra Samuel, then a PhD student,
interviewed two of the principle actors of
WFD (M0r0n and nightman), and learned that
they had a fairly large portfolio of causes in
the Muslim world: “We have defaced FOR
many issues, if you look at our defacements it
says “FREE KASHMIR, PALESTINE, LIFT THE
SANCTIONS ON IRAQ, FREE CHECHNIA.” So
you see we are FOR all those people suffering
in the world against atrocities!”

37. 9. PROJECT CHANOLOGY
• Project Chanology (also called Operation
Chanology) was a protest movement against the
practices of the Church of Scientology by
Anonymous, a loosely unorganized Internet-
based group that emerged from the 4chan
message boards. The project was started as a
“mental warfare” response to the Church of
Scientology's attempts to prevent the online
sharing of a video interview with
actor/Scientologist Tom Cruise.

38. 9. PROJECT CHANOLOGY
• Method. The project was publicly launched with a video
posted to YouTube, "Message to Scientology," on January
21, 2008. The project's goals were to "take down all
Scientology Web sites as an immediate act of retaliatory
censorship, counteract Scientology's attempts to suppress
the videos (and other cult materials) by constantly
reposting them, and publicize the cult's well-documented
history of employing suppressive and violent tactics to
mask its illegal or immoral activities." The initial cyber
attack, which came in the form of a distributed denial of
service attack, was followed by black faxes, prank calls, and
other activities intended to disrupt the Church of
Scientology's operations.

39. Wikileaks
• Leaking site Developed by Julian Assange
– Background as a hacker
– Endorses hacktivist ethic: information wants to be
free.
#2: Daniel-Domscheit Berg (aka Daniel Schmidt)
Member of Chaos Computer Club in Germany

40. DDB