Hello. Can everybody hear? Is this working okay? Okay. Good morning and welcome to

the hacktivism panel. I'm Oxblood Bruffin and joining me are Gabriella Coleman, Frank Rieger, and Stefania Milan just arriving. If you ask 10 different people what hacktivism means you might get 10 different answers. I say this because I have a very specific understanding

of hacktivism which evolved from the cult of the dead cow and that is using technology to improve human rights. It's short and sweet but by no means universally accepted so in the interest of consensus perhaps we could start with this from the German cultural

studies scholar Peter Krupp and I quote, hacktivism is a portmanteau of hack and activism and is the subversive use of computers and computer networks to promote a political agenda. With roots in hacker culture and hacker ethics, its ends are often related to free speech,

human rights, or freedom of information, end quote. I would argue that hacktivism began with the Yippies. The Yippies or youth international party as they were officially known were formed by the American political activists Jerry Hoffman and Abby Rubin. These characters

turned politics and anti-corporatism into theater and casting a wise eye to the ways in which hacking could disrupt the system. Abby Hoffman and the technical expert Al Bell started the Pioneer magazine, the youth international party line in 1971. Later the name was changed

to TAP, T-A-P, for technological assistance program. The magazine included details on how to make free telephone calls, build telephone hacking devices, and encouraged pranking. I take particular pleasure in bringing attention to TAP because two members of the cult of

the dead cow were prominent in the TAP movement. Lord Digital, who founded MindVox, the first ISP in New York, and the Night Stalker, a former CIA contractor in Vietnam who returned from that experience thoroughly radicalized and was one of my earliest mentors in hacktivism.

At the same time, it's important to acknowledge other salient factors because hacktivism didn't just emerge from technology and the internet. It was a blend of the machine with disparate social factors. The Berkeley free speech movement, second wave feminism, civil

rights, the anti-nuke movement, post-colonialism, punk, and for lack of a better phrase, just fucking things up. Here many of us think of hacktivism as the stuff that anonymous does, de-dosing or defacing websites and occasionally stealing data and publishing

it on payspin. There are other hacktivists acts. Whistleblowing, which in the cases of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden means unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and receipt and publication of that information by actors like WikiLeaks, Laura Poitras, and

Glenn Greenwald. And if you can believe the press, there are other kinds of hacktivists. They wear masks and make videos, but they preach radical Islam and they're called ISIS or Daesh. There's also the Syrian Electronic Army who have raised Twitter hacking to an

art form and assorted other groups. Military analysts would call what these groups are doing net war, a form of low intensity conflict and crime waged by networked non-state actors. Typical examples include terrorists and organized crime syndicates. But for the purpose of

our discussion today and also because we only have an hour, we'll focus more on those flavors of hacktivism that don't also include bloody violence in their toolkits. This then leads me to the question, can we associate ethics with hacktivism? By Peter Krupp's definition, the answer would be yes, because hacktivism is associated with hacker

ethics. But Dr. Krupp conveniently avoids elaborating exactly what hacker ethics are. So part of our job here today will be to help clarify that notion. And with that, I should like to invite our panelists to share their opening remarks. Biela, would you like to start?

Hi, everyone, and thanks, Oxblood, for that awesome introduction. I'm going to tell you a little bit about how I got to this topic, because I think that will be a good way to open with my opening provocation. So I'm a cultural anthropologist, and I was a very, very traditional cultural anthropologist. I worked in Guyana, South America on religious healing.

But I was interested in the questions of patents and intellectual property. And then one day, one of my hacker friends, although I didn't know he was a hacker, I just thought he was a programmer, but he was a hacker, pulls me aside and says, you know what? If you are interested in challenges to intellectual property law, you might want to learn about this thing called the copyleft. I

was like, huh, copyleft? You know, the license that free software hackers invented in the 1980s to challenge copyrights and patents and software. And I kind of dove into that world. And basically, I was amazed that a bunch of, you know, clever engineers reinvented the law in such a way that became widespread and used. And that kind of awakened my fascination

with hacker politics. And so I jumped ship. I became an anthropologist who studied hackers, and specifically the politics of hacking. And I'm very interested in the different modalities that hacktivism takes, stretching from legal hacks to illegal hacks to the historical stuff

that Oxblood talked about, such as the Yippies, to the role of the Chaos Computer Club here in Germany. And then my specialty is anonymous, which I'll be talking about. Now, my two provocations, and this is how I'm going to end, are the following. The first is in the form

of a statement. I think without Europe, we wouldn't have as interesting or as profound forms of hacktivism as we do. Even though there's very important North American components, Europe is the center of gravity in the West. And then the second comes in the form of a

question. Although hacker politics have long existed since the Yippies or dramatic, dramatic acts of civil disobedience with Phil Zimmerman, for example, who released PGP, we've seen a true explosion of hacktivism and hacker politics in the last five years, stretching from WikiLeaks to anonymous to everything in between. And the question is,

why? These are a group of people who are socially and economically privileged, who are taking on enormous risk. And you don't see that same trend with other groups, such as doctors and lawyers, who are privileged. So that's maybe something I'd like to talk about. So with that, I'll pass it over to Frank.

Yeah, thanks for the introduction. The CCC has always been basically something of hacktivism before the term was coined even. I think what you talked about, the various definitions and roles of the term hacktivism, mostly stem from differences in how you interpret hacking

as a term. And we as the CCC more or less stick to the old school MIT way of saying, okay, hacking is understanding technology and making it your own, taking the system apart so

that you know how it works and then making what you want to do with it. So we are not so much about breaking into websites and especially not about de-dosing. So, but this is basically when what your society's and your culture's definition of hacking is drives also what society's understanding of the term hacktivism is. And hackers have always been somewhat

political because they have been the marginalized thing for a very long time. And so hacker politics focused in the beginning very much on hacker things like the right to tinker, the right to communication, fighting against the telecommunication monopolies. So these

kind of things politicized the movement. And the more digital things, the network computers became core to our society, basically the more these topics moved into the center of society's attention, the more politicized the movements and the groups also became. And now we are

facing the situation that basically all politics has digital components or essentially we cannot abstain, so we cannot as a movement or a social group, we cannot really abstain from being somewhat political. And the forms that we prefer as a CCC are stuff that at least

contain a component of fun, so like taking the fingerprints of our minister of interior and publishing them so that everybody can use them on a fingerprint scanner. This is the stuff that we like, so the things where somebody can have a good laugh, on the other hand understand

the political meaning. But some of the topics that we need to care about are so much more serious that it's not always possible to make people laugh about it. But one thing that brought Axplot and me together was the very old thing when it was 1999, yeah,

approximately, when there was a kid that wanted to release a DDoS toolkit called Stacheldrat was the name, I think, and they wanted to do DDoS China and Iraq with that, and we both actually talked

talked him out of that and came up with what we called back then declaration of digital peace or cyber peace, saying, okay, we as hacker groups abstain from DDoSing because DDoS is a means of preventing communication, and the right to communication

and basically freedom of communication for everyone is something that's very dear to us, so using these tools of preventing communication is something that we don't want to do, and we ask others to think about if that's the right way of achieving a political means, and that kind of started this whole debate, I think, on what tools hacktivism can use, if

it's legitimate or not, and so we're not condemning people, we're just saying, okay, this is something that we don't really like, and yeah, that is the, I think, the more or less the start of the whole debate in the wider international sphere. Hello everyone, sorry for coming late,

the reason why I just joined is that, well, my name is Stefania, and I'm coming directly from Mongolia, where I was attending a very strange conference called the Freedom Online Coalition Conference, which is the fifth of this kind, and the Freedom Online Coalition is an inter-conventor

coalition of 26 countries, if I remember correctly, it's a little ironical that amongst those countries you have the USA, the United Kingdom, but also France, that just passed a very interesting law on surveillance, but the purpose of this coalition is to defend freedom online, even more

ironical, it was launched by Hillary Clinton, and it is supported by that type of people, let's say. Why was I there? Because we're trying with some other civil society actors, you know, multi-stakeholder governance, it is called, so everyone has a voice, all the stakeholders who have an interest in the

topic, we are trying to develop some guidelines on a rights-informed approach to cyber security, so the idea behind that is that, well, there's a lot of decisions that are being taken, you know, above our head, they are very non-transparent, they tell us it's national security,

well, when there is a chance to have a look at what they do and have a say, we're trying to hijack the process to some sort of policy hacking and pass some ideas that government might eventually like as well. I'm not sure where this is gonna go, but, you know, I'd like to

introduce this snapshot from Mongolia, in light of what once Biela wrote about anonymous being the guardians of our civil liberties, and hacktivists more in general. Now, as we know, it's a very complex term, there are a lot of different approaches that we already heard so far, but I'm very much in that, and along that line, I'm a political scientist and I do believe that

hacktivism is essentially a form of democratic participation, like any other. I might agree or not agree with the actions and the tactics, but that's what essentially it is. However, in the opening speech, in the series of opening speeches of this Freedom Online Coalition event,

there was the Dutch human rights ambassador, who is a thematic ambassador who deals with human rights across the globe, who basically placed together under the enemies hacktivists, cyber terrorists, credit card frauds, all of that, all together. Now, what surprised me is not

that this approach, which is pretty widespread, unfortunately, amongst many governments, including those that are there to defend our freedom online, but, well, these are the same people who are trying now to pass a piece of legislation, to adopt a piece of legislation on ethical hacking. Why? Well, because it is a hype, because they realize that to protect their borders,

they also need hackers, and they might not have in government already the people that they need. So, I actually, in a separate meeting, I questioned the guy, by the way, I don't think this is public information, this ethical hacking piece of legislation that I'm trying to pass, so don't quote

me on that, but for sure they're working on it, and they couldn't really articulate what was the idea behind, you know, on the one hand, putting hacktivists in jail, in a way, if they could, if they have the chance, certainly put them in that bucket, but at the same time trying to co-opt them. So, my question, I guess, for this panel would be, you know, reverse around the idea of

hacker ethics. Where is the ethics? How do we define it within the activist sphere, but also outside of it? And how do we resist the temptation of joining the enemy? And, you know, how do we resist the hype? How do we deal with that? How do we also deal with the fact that amongst our

people, there might be someone who is actually already working for the enemy? And we all know that, right? So, you know, the issue of hacker ethics is a particularly important thing these days, in light of what is happening also in the cybersecurity sphere. It's something that we really ought to take seriously. And I would like also to know what Frank thinks, for example, given, you know, the story of the CCC, and how, for example, they have interfaced with

the government in different ways. And actually, I'd like to pick up on something that Frank mentioned, this declaration of war that was made by a group called Legion of Underground in 1999. And it's when a coalition of hacker groups from North America and Europe got together.

So the original hacker groups involved in that, or security groups, would have been 2600 Chaos Computer Club, Cult of the Dead Cow, Hispahack, Loft Heavy Industries, Frack, and Pool House. I had actually gone back and looked at the document and read it quite carefully.

And one thing jumped out at me, and this is a quote from the original release. It says, governments, and this is, you know, like the statement that we jointly made, governments worldwide are seeking to establish cyberspace as a new battleground for their

artificial conflicts. The Legion of Underground has inadvertently legitimized this alarmist propaganda with its dramatic announcement. They declared the cyber war on China and Iraq, in their announcement. With its dramatic announcement, played into the hands of

policy makers who want complete control over the internet and are looking for reasons to seize it. If hackers solicit recognition as paramilitary factions, then hacking in general will be seen as an act of war. Ergo, hackers will be viewed as legitimate targets of warring states.

Do you think that was a prescient comment, or do you think even anything has changed in the last 16 years? I think we were relatively precise in predicting what will happen and that. And I think that back then, we managed to delay that for a couple of years,

because the hacker groups that were out there listened actually, and there was a lot of debate on that statement, and there was a lot of thinking about what means of action are justified, what are the ways of interacting with the politics sphere, or how to use the technical means

that we have in the talent in the political sphere. And so I think back then, that was a very precise description of the dangers ahead, as we see today, because this is basically what

we have today. And there's one thing that's probably important to know, that before that, before that we came to the point, the CCC also toyed with the denial of service thing as a means of political action. Back then, when there was a lot of political protest

about the French nuclear tests in Moore, and back then, the CCC was also involved in campaigns to basically denial of service the French telephone network, which, because there was not much internet, was basically the thing to do then. And we learned a lot from that, and we decided

not to do that again, going back to first principles, meaning communication is a human right, we don't have to stop that. But this type of debate was very much smaller. I mean, it was very small groups of people, so the hacker scene was much smaller, and today it's a much,

much, much wider and more, very more diverse thing, so that there are even many more opinions, not so much fixed groups. I mean, does Anonymous have an opinion on that? Yeah, I'm going to mention two things. First of all, who here has seen War Games, the film?

Okay, so a few people. This is an interesting factoid, and it just goes to what Uxblood was talking about. That film, which, you know, had a happy-go-lucky hacker, Matthew Broderick, who almost started War, War 3, when he interacted with this computer called Whopper and was playing a game with it. You know, that actually helped instigate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in

the United States after lawmakers had seen that, and so it's very interesting how a form of popular culture back in the 1980s, combined with kind of rhetorics of cyber war, helped create the law in the United States that helps entrap kind of hackers. So I just wanted to mention

that. Now, in terms, I think Frank is totally right. I mean, back in the 90s and 80s, the hacker scene was really small, and you could kind of reach consensus to some degree over hacktivism and tactics, but today, I mean, you have so many different kind of groups and entities

that, if anything, the field of hacktivism is defined by its diversity, and even Anonymous has a very famous statement called Anonymous is not unanimous, right? And some people within Anonymous don't even like DDoS and others embrace it, but there was one moment, actually, where

I think they really decided on the legitimacy of DDoS, and it was in the fall of December, or the fall of 2010, Anonymous was DDoSing the Copyright Industry Association web pages, from the Motion Picture Association to others in the UK, and the Pirate Party, which we can

consider as contributing to hacktivism through traditional means, begged Anonymous to stop. Would you stop DDoSing? Please stop DDoSing. Stop. And then, actually, a secret little channel in Anonymous decided to stop. They decided to stop, and then they announced to the public

chat channel that they were going to stop. Well, the hundreds of people in that public channel were like, fuck you guys. No, we're DDoSing. This is our tactic. And then they kind of engaged in this conversation, and Anonymous released a very sophisticated statement about why they considered

DDoS as a form of civil disobedience. Now, this doesn't mean we need to agree with it. I'm just pointing to the fact that, actually, they have thought through the issue based on, you know, their own debates within Anonymous. So you don't have simply debates between hacker groups. You even have them within hacker groups as well. Yeah, I can attest to that. I mean,

the CCC is famous for its internal debates. We are quite intense on that. So the interesting thing for me is that when the term hacktivism is being lumped in with, as you described,

with criminal activities and basically seen as something that borders on terrorism, so which I also heard from government officials, then what they actually try to do is to prevent hacktivism being a legitimate form of political protest. And the question how this can evolve,

so what means of non-traditional protest or show of political force can be done and what are accepted in society, what are not accepted in society is a process.

So it's not something that we can decide now or where we can predict how this will end. So it could very well be that, let's say, just an example, not nailing it down, saying the service is okay as long as it only affects one website or but it's not okay if it affects whole countries or something like that. So that maybe something

like consensus moving out that borders on it's okay to, I don't know, have a strike at one factory but not to hold a ban or something like that. So the thing that we are looking now at is basically it's part of the process of our society becoming digital and learning how to

work with the tools that we have gotten. So learn how to on a much wider scale, how to work with that. And so what we do as hackers is certainly still something a little bit more privileged but the more technological education gets forward, the more people learn

about systems, the more people learn how to hack which we actively encourage, the more people these tools of civil disobedience in the digital sphere, their hands, and they will use it for their own means which I think is perfectly okay. I'd just like to maybe follow up on this.

I think Frank and I are more or less on the same side like dossing is bad and blah blah blah. But I'm interested in the arguments that favor it. And more recently they've been creeping up and I'm kind of familiar with some of them but either Stefania or.

So when I wrote a book about anonymous I had to you know actually contemplate about whether I agreed with d-dossing or not. And someone who had been involved in anonymous as a hacker, he'd been part of the old school scene in the early 1990s and had jumped into anonymous. He

was one of the old guys probably at the age of 30 or something. And one day he told me you know d-doss is like a moral pretzel. It's like on the one hand it's problematic but on the other hand it's effective. And that really resonated with me. And so by problematic he

meant you know some of the issues that that Frank was talking about which is you know you are at some level kind of robbing folks of free speech. But on the other hand by d-dossing you get the attention of the mainstream media and further a cause. Well I actually got a

student, Molly Sauter, a PhD student who ended up writing an entire book on d-dossing. And so obviously I read the book. And I think she makes a really compelling case that if you take a kind of contextual view of free speech it's not that every actor in society

has equal access to free speech. And so then when you put that in perspective some of the d-dossing that anonymous does for example against Paypal, MasterCard, and Visa, you're not really taking away their ability to speak when you d-doss them. You know why? Because they're incredibly rich corporations who can go right to the New York Times, talk to the New York Times,

they could sue the heck and arrest folks because of the d-dossing. Their ability to speak through that d-doss does not go away. And in fact a marginalized group who doesn't have access to the same media channels at the corporations do they gain a voice. So in some ways it's a free

speech leveler right? So I actually am kind of comfortable with that tactic to some degree if you take a kind of contextualized view of free speech. On the other hand you know if you have a state d-dossing a small NGO for weeks on end and then you kind of crush that NGO who never had much of an ability to speak anyways, well that's kind of a net free speech law. So I

see the value of treating it more through a kind of contextualized lens than a kind of abstract free speech metric. Yeah I think we are not in disagreement that it can be

an justified tactic. I'm just of the opinion that in almost all cases it's the most stupid tactic available. So there it is doesn't require much skill, it doesn't require much creativity, it is a relatively blunt thing that doesn't transport the message in itself,

but it needs a message to be attached to it. And so I'm yeah and it violates my first principles so just basically communication is in principle good. So the thing that we would like to encourage is basically that the tools that we have and the creativity that is out there is actually being used so that we are yeah not try to stick to the same all tactics again because

if you look at the effectivity of DDoS just from one moral perspective just effective activity it's not very effective anymore. So we need to be very very large scale to be actually

getting into mainstream media so if you're just DDoSing one company or another it is basically just a blip on the news and you're not getting even your message across. Which is why actually after the fall of 2010 and early 2011 Anonymous kind of stopped DDoSing and then started doing a lot of hacking. Yeah I just would like to to add a comment as well intersects

what you're talking about which is the issue of visibility of tactics and how do the actions intersect mainstream media and what's the value of that and the fact that well for example where the critical art ensemble started envisioning this tactic so we're supposed to be tactical

media so small things not practiced by the mass that would intervene ad hoc in certain situations and also as an activist myself I would never have sought visibility because visibility would have meant bringing my tactics under the spotlight which meant then also exposing myself and other

people to probably repression for example and we see now that actually especially with Anonymous that issue of visibility and getting attention and operating more or less in tandem with mainstream media is actually the mainstream in a way so I wonder whether you have different tactics for different times or whether it is a phase that is bound to somehow you know

vanish in a way when mainstream media are going to be sick of it and it's not going to be news anymore in the same way in which social media revolutions are not going to be news anymore so I don't know I would like to know what other people think of the visibility and mainstream media. I think you can always get the attention of your action is relevant

and funny enough so this is something that people tend to forget that it must be a good story I mean you need to really understand the mechanism of media and if it is not a good story but just a news item then it will have at maximum a very short-term impact and doesn't

really change anything but just yeah be a news item and so the constantly evolving tactics and constantly changing the way how you do things is part of the game so basically not sticking to the same old tactics and not sticking to the same modus operandi of action

is good both for avoiding law enforcement and also for actually being active effective in what you do and so looking too long at one tactic or another is probably counterproductive so uh what I found fascinating though is that um the the especially with anonymous is that

it is so susceptible to false flag operations so for instance op isis is something where I'm pretty sure that that's more or less in a false flag operation of western intelligence and so the but the ability of western intelligence to actually understand what the the space of

activity that you can do on an anonymous label is and actually use that and extend it a little bit or has also the the huge danger of delegitimizing a label like anonymous and basically making it a tool for everybody to to follow his interest that's a great

question Stefania because a lot of political movements and I'll just give one example Greenpeace was like amazing at getting media attention in the 1980s and then all of a sudden because they were using the same tactics and had the same message like basically there was a media block out you know and one of the things if you look at the history of hacking from

the 60s to today is just how much attention different you know hacker groups and actions have gotten they've really been very successful at at gaining attention and this is in part because hacker groups morph over time and then you know they use different tactics as well

and this is I'm going to say two things I think one of the reasons why actually anonymous has been so interesting is because at root they're unpredictable they they are triggered by world events and world events are unpredictable you don't know which event they're going to kind of jump into and that always kind of keeps them fresh at some level they kind of go away for

three months and then next thing you know they're fighting police brutality in the United States and then this is also you know I'm kind of conflicted a little bit about like crazy chaotic hacking or hacktivism but the one good element about that is that it ensures some level of both

triggering that kind of media attention and another interesting element is that it kind of you know retains or gives gives hacktivism a certain type of bite you know which I think is a good thing in the long run too but then do we really need the mainstream media

and I mean I like what Frank said earlier about the education so showing people that there are there's something different that there are different values that things can be done differently but we really need them because in the past we actually like to create our own well you know I think WikiLeaks is a great example here so WikiLeaks was created in 2006

right and they had this great website and they had great information that shocking information on it there were some leaks there that I was just like my jaw was dropping you know but they kind of were envisioning themselves as separate from the mainstream media not working with them

and it was not working you just can't necessarily put up information and have people come and then in 2010 Assange changed strategies for collateral murder they did a slick video for the video that showed US soldiers gunning down journalists they held a very fancy press conference in Washington

DC and some hackers here in Europe helped coordinate that and then all of a sudden they were working with the mainstream media and then WikiLeaks was everywhere so I think that we do but on the other hand I think it is important to create alternatives at the same time whether

it's something like indie media which was started by hackers and that helps spur citizen media or something like the copy left license is an alternative and that's one of the things that's so powerful about hacktivism is that there's ways in which they intersect with the mainstream and there's other channels in which they're creating alternatives

I think that it is not either or it is always both so it's the mainstream media reaches a lot of audience alternative media reaches lots of other audience that have dropped out of the mainstream media and you can use one way or another to get attention of both and it's not

essentially it's just in the end the question is how widespread the attention that you get is in both forms of social media or alternative media or mainstream media and they're all playing with each other and cycles so they're essentially the question is

if you are able to sustain attention for an issue that they're caring about because it's relatively easy with a good hack or prank or whatever or DDoS to get very short attention but it's extremely hard to actually sustain that attention into political change and that is I think the thing where hacktivism needs to evolve to basically

not just about getting attention and getting short-term messages out but actually using these tools also to affect long-term political change or at least attention longer-term attention to issues which is a very hard thing to do in today's media environment so I have a question

for you know anyone on the panel but what is distinctive about hacker politics or hacktivism in comparison to other forms of more traditional leftist forms of activism what's you know is there something distinctive I mean as I said in the beginning I have a very specific

understanding of hacktivism so for me it's obviously the technology part but the the ethical framework if you will comes from the united nations declaration on human rights so for me hacktivism is all about human rights as it works through technology and across the digital

and the internet so to go back to things like dossing or like these various tactics that we more or less discarded in the early days because we thought there were violations of access to information which is a basic human right and freedom of expression which is a basic

human right so I tend to take a fairly absolutist view in that sense so for me specifically the the ethics would have come out of the UN and have applied not just to speech and privacy and

lots of other good stuff but this kind of maybe is a sideways segue in many ways I'm a completely inappropriate person to be the moderator because I have a very distinct point of view and I don't really have a scholarly understanding you know of what hacktivism is from the beginning and

to the end or as it continues and what the various motivations and actors are so I was trying to do my due diligence and researched as much as I could about various groups and and one interesting thing in your provocation you said that hacktivism was most vital or most effective in

Europe or roughly Europe is very important right so in the research that I was doing especially looking at the early groups like I went back and honestly the earliest thing I thought would qualify would be the Yippie's and then there's a big gulf until 1984 and that was a group that

was founded in Germany 1984 Network Liberty Alliance and so they were the first people to really use technology and social action together in a in a much more sophisticated way

and they were the first group to get seriously behind Richard Stallman the GPL and really push that ahead with with other players in Europe but certainly they were very very effective I may be wrong but I also think that the whole indie media movement came out of

some kind of 1984 coalition because it was founded here but it was an international group it was founded in Seattle actually which indie media was founded in Seattle oh but it was incredibly vibrant in Europe again it's one of these things where the United States is so big that I think you're going to have very important groups and entities but if you kind of

do a per capita breakdown the number of like hacktivists and activists is much much larger in the European continent compared to the USA which has very large kind of um you know tech entrepreneurial sectors which which takes a lot of the hacker sort of um energy away from the

activism I think okay uh there's something else I discovered uh in my travels um trying to find out uh who else was involved uh generally in hacktivism various actors and players and one thing I discovered is that there are feminist hacktivist and there is a whole

discourse around feminist hacktivism uh and I'm guessing a lot of that came out of various writings like maybe the cyber feminist manifesto I think that was 1979 and some various uh other sort of scholarly and just playful articles about this uh do we know what

this is uh feminist hacktivism is or or what it's aiming to achieve anybody maybe even somebody out here knows um I guess I can I can share some experience

that I encounter when um working with what I call actually radical internet activists rather than hacktivists perhaps because it was a few years back there may be knowledge sometimes also influence about what is uh around at the time and um well I wouldn't often encounter women but not often enough and being a woman I was actually questioning why that was the case well

you know there are a lot of obvious reasons but what I um kind of uh liked was um a group that was a women-only group they were running a server and they were running a service or an alternative isps non-commercial running basically hosting websites and mailing lists

for other feminist groups and they were a women-only space not as an end in itself but as a sort of means to an end which was to create a cozy environment for people for women in this case or gender aware people to operate and learn because one of the great concerns that

I had was that they were being well patronized by people who knew more and the people who knew more were invariably men so um I don't know exactly how this intersects the cyber feminist manifesto but I think this is a very important dimension I don't be a lecture has written

something about it I mean I think it's a huge problem because as Frank mentioned you know you're not going to have politics independent of the digital and whether it's journalism you know hackers are refiguring journalism whether it's intellectual property hackers are refiguring intellectual property whether it's um you know kind of direct action hacktivism

it's hackers participating and there's very low numbers of of women who participate in these worlds and on the one hand it's a simple mirror of what is going on in computer science you know the peak in the United States of computer science undergraduates occurred in

1984 and it's been downhill since right I mean there's a true more systemic problem and then in the world of hackerdom you know I think it's really important not to paint one unifying brush so some sectors and some groups have been fantastic when it comes to boosting diversity

so python an open source project you know had a diversity statement I was at their conference this year a couple of years ago they had something like five percent of the speakers were women now it's like 50 they've really done an effort to um you know make it more inclusive I would say some other sectors of hackerdom like the security world are atrociously

bad when it comes to gender and then the hacktivist circle definitely have issues in so far as they're very very informal so unlike let's just say an open source project it's very difficult to to recruit in some ways because there's informal cultural norms and

informal mechanisms so in those cases we just need to boost the number of female developers in society I mean that's a core core requirement and then also boost the issue so that people can you know talk about it and and engage in formal informal means of recruiting folks as well

but luckily I don't know whether you've seen it but there is like I think it's called the nerdy barbie or something which has sunglasses and oh sorry glasses sunglasses and a little computer in their hands so talking about the mainstream and how it intersects behavior and

activism as well right and there's really interesting things there was just a study that showed that if a computer science class in college is tied to political or social issues the number of women who enroll in the class is often over 50 percent right so we need to

hack the education system as well and teach computer science in different ways to address this anything else that we want to bounce around because one thing that I'd like to do I'm guessing that a number of people have questions so as much as possible

I'd like to engage the audience over here's the first question hi thank you very much for for your stimulating thoughts I just wanted to say something about feminist activism and I think going from what Frank was saying about politics I think what's

interesting about the intersection of feminism and well digital activism or political action on the internet or through digital means is trying to reframe politics trying to reframe relationships and agency with the digital it's not just about actions and I think it's it's something that's kind of coming back and people are and evolving as well

and hopefully we're gonna be hearing more about it I think limiting the discussion to either the gender gap of women in tech which is definitely a problem or the focus on harm and excessive kinds of harm that women face online in my opinion maybe this is provocative but it it really kind of limits the discussion about possibilities and and kind of what comes

next and reimagining cyber feminism yeah I think that the the right way to to go forward on is basically treating it as one of the major issues that we have as a movement basically that congress for instance we try to to be as inclusive as possible without making it the

major topic of the conference because the topic of the conference is more or less what it is offering stuff like the tutorial programs where we say okay please come we have somebody who guides you through congress which is hugely successful and are also trying to boost role

models which we think is the most important thing that we are basically bring women forward give them give them positions to be role models to to encourage other women to to come and take up the stuff the the thing is also that we see that especially education is part of

activism basically teaching kids to hack is something that we do at the chaos at school thing where we try to basically bring forward two little kids the idea that they are basically

controlling a computer making it your own making it do what you like this is the initial spark this is the initial feeling that basically empowers you and bring it forward really helps and that also helps women actually to and girls to to get into into the way of thinking like a

hacker and using these tools and so on and this is something where we where we will try to do more of course with our limited means but I think this is one of the core she's starting education as early as possible about what is it the heck of thinking and how to how to get there

hi so I wanted to posit a question about future technologies and the potential for hacking them in a kind of hacktivist way specifically robots internet of things virtual reality and and the kind of potentials that you can imagine there

or it's gonna be wild I mean the we what we're seeing so far is that the way technology can be used has by far not been fully explored so the as ways of circumventing restrictions

as ways of basically making people laugh about the state and its security paranoia the technology is still great I mean if you look at the that we have seen last week the the first public instance it was not the first instance but the first public instance of a small drone being used as a graffiti spraying instrument that that made headlines that is

just the beginning so the more robots we have the more fun you will have with them that's for sure the big problem I see there is that the we need to be very aware that it needs to still be something where people understand this is not terrorism

so this is not this is not digital violence but this is something legitimate that furthers course it carries a message it has a very clear purpose and the purpose is carried with the means so that means that the way of doing that activity of using technology app using technology

in a way to carry the political message must be always clear because when people don't understand that and let's say you just bring down a mobile phone network regardless of what the message you're carrying with that is people will remember you as the guy who prevented emergency calls

yeah I always like to say you know currently if you're going to do a lot of hacking it's best to do it on this side of the Atlantic just because the punishments are a lot less stiff and in fact one of the best places and it's quite exciting I mean we didn't really talk about

Latin America in this panel but there's been unbelievable anonymous-led hacking against governments that have exposed corruption for example in Peru by LALSEC Peru and these countries actually don't have the cyber resources in their intelligence organizations to catch these folks so really there can be some really interesting configurations where some of the

more interesting stuff is going to be happening out of the Middle East or Latin America and then I'll just actually say even though this is not really related to your question but I think Frank answered it really well you know the most interesting hacker hacktivist group is RedHack in Turkey they've been in existence for 16 years they're Leninist Marxist

they've hacked the electrical company and have erased debts you know and so in some ways I think like some of the biases we have about our understandings of hacktivism have to do with the fact that well we've we've looked at CDC we've looked at CCC but we haven't looked at the groups in Latin America we haven't looked at RedHack and so a lot of hidden histories here as well

and if I can bring it actually back to to the issue of robots and internet of things and virtual realities well I think actually hacktivists is a very have a very important role to play in the limit demilitarizing the discourses the narrative as well because all of this has a lot of privacy implication the extent to which users are in control of their data for example

is important and if we take activism as also possibly playing a role in shaping the narrative and the perception what is good what is legitimate what is not good and what governments should not do well I think that besides playing with tools we should also really look at the policy side of things. I am Tatiana Batsikeli, I just want to give a little

information connecting with the discourse of cyber feminism because I'm running this project called Disruption Network Lab and we are inviting the founder of the VNS Matrix the 29th and 30th of

May here in Berlin at the Kunstquartier Bethanian as part of the Disruption Network Lab project so if people are interested to meet them other cyber feminists and transgender hacktivists I'm just inviting them sorry for the little propaganda but I thought that was useful since

you mentioned them and there will be Francesca Darimini and Virginia Barrat. Thank you for that input any other questions from the audience get back to you Oxblood

you have a couple of more minutes for a roundup last statements and then I actually have a sort of a question going back to I believe Molly's rationale for like a

contextual style and I think if I understand part of the argument that it gives voice to the little man this kind of thing to I don't know do something to somebody or some institution or something and the sense that I get from that it seems to be the little man that I like

attacking the institution I don't like and I'm wondering about the little men we don't like at all attacking the institution institutions that we do if if part of the argument is well

there are legitimately a lot of unheard voices not all of which we would agree with so this for me also is somewhat problematic because let's say the little man is a disgruntled tea party member or something out there in that range and they decide that they don't like the

EFF for the ACLU and so my voice is going to attack this horrible institution like yeah I mean I think you've really put your finger on the moral conundrum and I you know there's examples like that with you know let's just say ISIS who did the hack against the French TV company right you know I'm no big fan of ISIS at all but nevertheless I think I

actually think it was an interesting political intervention and in some ways I was like oh maybe it'll inspire other activists with causes I do support to do something similar right and I still do think and this relates to the demilitarization discourse that Stefania was talking about

um you know I'm not like a huge fan of DDoS because it does lose effectiveness there's more interesting things to do but nevertheless when it's a little person whether it's someone on the right or the left attacking a big institution there's no damage it's it's relatively um you know it it's it's too often equated with this hack in the media

where there is damage where there's loss of data when there's not so I think it's really important to kind of contextualize what DDoS is and make it clear and then under those circumstances I still feel like it's not that big of a deal you know um now if it is an organization who really is

truly truly shut out from communicating in the long term I do see it as a problem but the state is not going to give up their right to DDoS the state DDoS is right there even if we give it up they're not going to give it up and so in that case you know I still think it can be

a worthwhile tactic um actually this has happened in the past so we have seen our hackers associated with Nazi and right-wing groups hacking leftist sites publishing their data um which has been long-term a tactic of we are Antifa hackers who basically hacked into

Nazi flirt boards and uh t-shirt shops and published the data from that and sometimes they strike back and I think the only reason that they why this isn't limited currently is simply because that if you I think the hacker mindset in principle is associated with

anti-authoritarian thinking and that limits the talent pool on the right but this must not hold up so it's not a natural law it's just something that is currently the case and could very well be that we that we actually um yeah see more of that and that

the hacktivism that is happening or as you have seen for instance with several DDoS attacks against for instance in UK there was this one abortion clinic that was DDoSed and so on so this is actually happening that the tools available to everybody or the tools um and the question is

just who wields them better I mean both technically and politically and propaganda wise we probably will see that it's going to be very interesting and wild yeah I guess very often I mean I speak now as a scholar we have the tendency to actually look at the groups that we like because you spend a lot of time with this group so we don't

like to spend it with the people that make us uncomfortable and so there is an over emphasis on the kind of good cases nonetheless like same with voting we might argue that it's not actually that good that everyone has a vote especially when we see the outcome of certain voting process in certain countries but yeah after all this is what we call democracy which

is also not that perfect so I do think that somehow there are different voices with also within the the hacktivist community in itself and well it's not the perfect system but it's till we change it great at this point I'm going to say thank you Oxblood for moderating this great panel with Stefania, Gabriella and Frank um I think it was very insightful

so a round of applause for you and thank you very much