Inside Hacking and Hacktivism

This blog post is in response to the articles The Hacker Work Ethic by Hinamen and What Is Hacktivism 2.0? from metac0m.

To first offer my critique of what I just read, I would say that both articles start out really strong, but gradually lose their focus by the end. The metac0m article starts out really strong with providing several definitions of the term "hacktivism" as well as its basic underlying ideals and principles, but starts to run out of steam when it cites actual cases of hacktivism occurring on websites in the early years of mainstream internet prominence (which the article classifies as the period between 1997-2000). This portion of the article jumped back and forth from case to case without providing any real insight into their significance in history or elaborating more on some necessary details of how they pulled off such acts.

As for the Hinamen chapter, it came off a s just a little too ambitious for its own good. Hinamen did a fine job of reiterating the concepts and beliefs held by hacking enthusiasts, but when it starts going into events form the history of Western Civilization such as the histories of Christianity and the Protestant Reformation, the reader starts to wonder how this is relevant to hacking until they read the conclusion. The conclusion did a serviceable job of tying the whole article together, but it would've served the article better had the author went back to how his ideas relate to hacktivism as he mentioned something from history.

Now, for my commentary on the idea of hacktivism. I believe the idea has some great potential, but we just haven't seen it applied in a meaningful way in real life yet. The metac0m article bought up some instances of hacktivism, but those were examples that didn't really change a whole lot in the long run and ultimately seem forgettable in retrospect.

Hacktivists have some admirable tenements in that they believe information should be easily accessible to all who wish to see it and that they hate censorship (which in itself is kind of an ambiguous phrasing). It would really be something if they could get into the government records of a country like China which is known for actively trying to censor information from its citizens particularly on the internet. and made such information more easily accessible. Anyone who was following world news closely around two years ago has seen what kind of effects mere social media has had in orchestrating "the Arab Spring". I believe hacktivists can acheive something similar and that it would be a better use of all their time and effort than targetting online shopping websites.