Hacktivism 1-2-3: how privacy enhancing technologies change the face of anonymous hacktivism

: 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.

Hacktivism 1-2-3: how privacy enhancing technologies change the face of anonymous hacktivism Internet Policy Review | http://policyreview.info 2 November 2014 | Volume 3 | Issue 4 which aim to shield their users from surveillance of their electronic communications and promise to preserve their anonymity. While many different PETs were developed and in use before it, Wikileaks was the first to provide easy to use PETs for the masses. It was also the first PET application that hit the headlines all over the world.
The easy availability of user-friendly PETs providing military grade online security to anyone enables a plethora of social practices. These practices affect, among other, international diplomacy, state security and counter-terrorism efforts. They have strong influence on the debate around online privacy and the legal and philosophical underpinnings of basic human rights. For the purposes of this article however, we will single out one out of the many possible transformations that PETs, their users and communities are a potential source of: how online political activism and electronic civil disobedience is being transformed.
This transformation is most easily understood through the rise and fall of Anonymous -the adhoc online swarm of vigilante activists that represented the "face" of hacktivism 1.0, and the way the launch of Wikileaks redefined what anonymous, and its potential really is.

ANONYMOUS 1.0
Anonymous was a name that frequently appeared in articles discussing the events around represents the collective whole of the internet. As individuals, they can be intelligent, rational, emotional and empathetic. As a mass, a group, they are devoid of humanity and mercy." (Encyclopedia Dramatica, 2011) 2 Anonymous, which started out as an ad-hoc online group committing mischiefs 'just for the lulz' (i.e., just for fun) soon transformed into a rather chaotic power of vigilante justice. They rallied against laws they thought of as unjust, they turned against what they have seen as corrupt businesses and individuals by using methods that usually bordered on (if not crossed) the threshold of legality (Coleman, 2012 (Kaulingfreks and Kaulingfreks, 2013), and who joins the online swarm rallying for the latest cause. Anonymous updated and democratised the methods they inherited from earlier hacktivist groups: they organised massive DDoS attacks using custom written software tools that enabled participation for even the technically unskilled (Sauter, 2013, p. 984), while more skilled members of the group performed impressive hacks (cracking and defacing websites) and doxxes, i.e., revealing highly private information on a target individual, including bank account transactions, social security data, private emails, etc.
Anonymous as a group was at its heyday in 2010-2011. They were a group that rallied against something. They were resisting something they are left out of, trying to make their voice heard, trying to get in. This is the message of Anonymous: we are united in our position of being excluded. We are united in our position of being outsiders.
The power of Anonymous is that it is a swarm which "attacks from all directions, and intermittently but consistently -it has no 'front,' no battle line, no central point of vulnerability. It is dispersed, distributed, and yet in constant communication. In short, it is a faceless foe, or a foe stripped of "faciality" as such." (Galloway & Thacker, 2007) The plastic Guy Fawkes mask, which became the ultimate symbol of Anonymous was not really about actually hiding the real identity of its members. Though the participation in DDoS attacks is an offence under US law as well as under the Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime, the DDoS tools the group distributed to the public made no efforts to hide the identity of its users.
As a result, many who participated in Anonymous were arrested in subsequent years (Olson, 2012;Shankland, 2011). Rather, the mask symbolised the universally shared feeling of exclusion, which applied to everyone with no regard to individual differences. The mask was also a reference to the methods of hacktivists of the 1.0 kind: We re-appropriate the entertainment that was offered to us by the military-industrial-entertainment-complex as a substitute for resistance (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1979) and turn it against the status quo (Debord, 1994). Rather than just enjoying the Warner Bros. produced movie and buying the merchandise associated with it, Anonymous appropriated the props and the message, and used them as an inspiration to rally against those very structures that produced the film, which was certainly intended to be entertainment rather than educational material on how to revolt against governments and corporations.
Hacktivism 1-2-3: how privacy enhancing technologies change the face of anonymous hacktivism Anonymous embodied the essence of hacktivism 1.0. The latter "breaks down into two broad streams of actions: 1. Mass virtual direct actions, which use cyberspatial technologies of limited potential in order to re-embody virtual actions, [and 2.] digitally correct actions, which defend and extend the peculiar powers cyberspace creates." (Jordan & Taylor, 2004, pp. 114-116) On the one hand, hacktivism 1.0 gives technically less skilled individuals the chance to participate in electronic civil disobedience actions. These actions, like virtual sit-ins or DDoS attacks, fit into the tradition of sit-ins and other physical and electronic civil disobedience (Sauter, 2013). Some would argue that various social network-based actions, such as Facebook and Twitter campaigns also belong to this category, where individuals self-organise using Facebook pages and Twitter hashtags to express dissent, build resistance and achieve social change (Lindgren & Lundström, 2011). Such hacktivism requires no technical skills, it is easy to join the swarm and participate in the action. Hacktivism 1.0 could also mean complex technological stunts, committed by a few, highly skilled computer programmers. The cracking of websites and databases, the disruption of the 'infostructure' of the target organisations, or the development of highly specialised software tools (to aid, for example technically less skilled activists) may yield high rewards, but they are also high-risk, complex, costly and time consuming actions, and as a result they are relatively rare (Coleman, 2013). Hacktivism 1.0 is thus torn between highly effective but rare instances of hacking, and relatively frequent cyberprotests where the place of impact is separated from the place of resistance, and thus yield little more than symbolical results.
The Wikileaks related actions of Anonymous marked the apex of hacktivism 1.0. While such hacktivists gained enormous amounts of press attention, it soon turned out that this attention was the most they could hope for. The power of Anonymous was based on the belief that the sole number of participants would be enough to win any battle. But their effectiveness in terms of disrupting the everyday operations of these companies, or inducing a shift in their policies was nil. Their symbolic victories were short lived. Gladwell (2010)

ANONYMOUS 2.0
Ironically, while everyone was busy with Anonymous (the group, with a capital A), Wikileaks quietly introduced another type of anonymous (the individual, without any capitals), that turned out to be much more important than the "stampede of coked-up lemmings" that Anonymous was.
This new type of anonymous was protected by strong and reliable crypto technology rather than a cheap plastic mask. It was individual rather than a swarm, and most importantly it was on the inside, rather than being on the outside. The anonymous of Wikileaks are those powerful individuals in privileged positions within the existing power structures, who by leaking secrets can safely subvert the very power structures that they define (and that define them), because they can rely on PETs to safeguard their identity.
Hacktivism 1-2-3: how privacy enhancing technologies change the face of anonymous hacktivism Leaking classified information to the press and whistleblowing has a long tradition (Alford, 2002;Glazer & Glazer, 1989), and many countries have laws that grant protection to journalistic sources in order to encourage the watchdog role of the press (Blasi, 1971;Privacy International, 2009; Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, 2014; McGonagle, 2014). Wikileaks offers a technological solution to the age old problem of how to protect the identity of a source whose willingness to cooperate ultimately depends on his/her ability to remain safe by staying anonymous. Relying on the traditional methods of conspired meetings and often contested legal safeguards is costly and risky. Wikileaks hoped to lower the threat of de-anonymisation through the creation of a safe technological space in which the identity of the source is protected by strong cryptographic algorithms, obfuscation and other software and hardware tricks. The sheer number of secrets exposed through Wikileaks, and their subsequent impact proves that access to low cost, easy-to-use PETs can significantly lower the costs of exposing and confronting power from within (Lipman, 2011, p. 119-123)  The task of keeping power transparent requires a new type of hacktivist, who has the necessary tools to coerce that transparency on power. Anonymous 2.0 is the source of a new type of hacktivism, hacktivism 2.0. While hacktivism 1.0 was the activism of outsiders, and its organising principle was to temporarily get outsiders into the territory of the other, hacktivism 2.0 is done by insiders. While it is certain that technology in itself cannot and will not be the (sole) solution to anything (Morozov, 2013), in other words one cannot solve problems through technology only, having access to the right tools at the right time when the demand is there certainly helps. Hacktivism 2.0 cannot exist without PETs, whose one important purpose is to help people get information out from an organisation. PETs, like in the way Wikileaks put them into use, shift the source of potential threat from a few dangerous hackers and a larger group of mostly harmless activists -both outsiders to an organisation -to those who are on the inside.
For mass protesters and cyber activists anonymity is a nice feature, but it isn't necessary or even desirable under every circumstance. Putting a name and a face next to a political action is sometimes the most powerful form of protest. On the other hand, for insiders trying to smuggle information out, anonymity is a necessary condition for participation.
Easy anonymity lowers the risks and costs associated with dissent, and thus radically transforms  (Stalder, 2010) Being anonymous allows those who do not want to define themselves -at least not publicly -as activist, radical or dissenter to enter the activist scene. The promise -or rather, the conditionof anonymity in the context of Wikileaks is that one can be on the inside and on the outside at the same time. Through anonymity the mutually exclusive categories of inside/outside, cooption/resistance, activism/passivity, power/subjection can be overridden and collapsed.
Assange's quest for a well mannered and well-behaving, ethical, productive and accountable power created by the Wikileaks transparency is very similar to the benefits Bentham assigned to his Panopticon design3, as cited by Foucault: "Morals reformed -health preserved -industry invigorated -instruction diffused -public burthens lightened -Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock -the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws not cut, but untied -all by a simple idea in architecture!" (Foucault, 1979) Wikileaks' coerced transparency extends the Foucauldian disciplinary power to the very body of state and government by placing power under the surveillance of anonymous subjects. But while it may be true that the Panopticon produces more efficient, more productive, more obedient, and more controlled subjects, it remains to be seen whether the outcome of applying the panoptic schema to power yields anything more than more panopticism.
The way the US state apparatus has reacted to Wikileaks clearly illustrates this dilemma. In a memorandum issued on 3 January 2011, the National Counterintelligence Executive and the Director of the Information Security Oversight Office detailed the procedures by which they hoped to prevent any further leaks. The document is a 14-page long checklist covering all aspects of keeping secrets: "the measures in place to determine appropriate access for employees to classified information"; the existence of counterintelligence programmes; the use of back-up media; "a trend analysis of indicators and activities of the employee population which may indicate risky habits or cultural and societal differences other than those expected for current employees for security clearances" and the "use [of] psychiatrist and sociologist to measure the relative happiness as a means to gauge trustworthiness, and the despondence and grumpiness as a means to gauge waning trustworthiness" (Lew, 2011, p. 6).
This document, as well as the recommendations formulated in reaction to the Snowden Hacktivism 1-2-3: how privacy enhancing technologies change the face of anonymous hacktivism revelations (Office of Management and Budget, 2014) is the blueprint for an internal total transparency (i.e., total surveillance) programme that is designed to maximise the control over the state apparatus by detecting potential leakers and preventing information breaches. The state reacted to the threat posed by hacktivism 2.0 by creating a transparency of its own. This is the classic example of internalisation (Scott, 1971): the state, under surveillance, has internalised the expectations and now is busy learning how to make sure that what is not to be shown stays truly hidden. Secrets to outsiders can only be protected through total transparency on the inside. This is the problem with total control: it does not annihilate undesired behaviour, it does not mute and reform inappropriate and prohibited desires, it only suppresses them, and fosters secrecy and deceit. Transparency will not break the logic of power based on panopticism: "The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body; its vocation was to become a generalized function.
[…] On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social 'quarantine', to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of 'panopticism'" (Foucault, 1979, p. 207 2013, p. 15). The subject's position of being "a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised", its state of living in a "sequestered and observed solitude" (Foucault, 1979, p. 201) can only be subverted if there is a place, hidden from surveillance where we are free to make our choices (Bauman & Lyon, 2013;Bogard, 2006). PETs are important because they allow the individual to counter surveillance, and thus liberate individuals, when other safeguards of freedoms and liberties are lacking or lagging behind.
The PETs provisioned anonymity allows individuals to enjoy certain freedoms. If everyday citizens have an autonomous zone (Bey, 1991), a safe haven, hiding in the discontinuities of cyberspace, from where they not only can oversee and control the state apparatus; but which is safe from surveillance and outside interference, which is peer-produced and thus reflects the ethical and ideological consensus of its users (Bodó, 2014), then we have a virtual space which is not locked down in the oppositional struggles of the status quo, but has the potential to develop something completely independent from it. Free, autonomous individuals, having the potential to create their own world in the autonomous space without surveillance and interference: this is the promise of post-Wikileaks PETs, and the task ahead of hacktivists of the third generation.

POLICY IMPACT
As it stands now, PETs are the only at least relatively effective safeguard against total surveillance. On the other hand, the same PETs that protect the basic human rights on the digital networks are being used in a number of other situations by a number of other groups to, for example, trade drugs and arms, or exchange child pornography (Bodó, forthcoming). PETs are thus increasingly threatened by law enforcement (Masnick, 2014), and the often legitimate goals to catch PETs-using pedophiles and assassins is in clear conflict with the interest of many others who use the same technologies, the same networks to protect their privacy.
There are deeply vested economic and governmental interests to keep the network open for surveillance. If PETs are able to prevent surveillance, then we should expect a long term conflict between the technology-based and the normative and legal based agents for control. We have already seen similar conflicts in regard to file-sharing technologies, where rights holders have long been trying to delegitimise and outlaw the use of P2P software (Giblin, 2011). As a response, P2P software developers came up with ever more autonomous systems, which were always able to be one step ahead of any copyright enforcement effort. We should expect and be prepared to deal with policy interventions that aim to delegitimise and outlaw the use of PETs, in a similar manner. Unless we all have well defined and well protected digital rights, the second best option of PETs is all what we have. Academics and activists should be prepared to defend these technologies, as they seem to be one of the few technologies of freedom (De Sola Pool, 1983) we are left with.
Hacktivism 1-2-3: how privacy enhancing technologies change the face of anonymous hacktivism rather than being locked in a diametric relationship with power aims to create its own autonomy through avoiding surveillance.
Which type of hacktivism is more relevant for the future? It depends on our answer to the question of how to be truly free in the age of ubiquitous surveillance. If we think that it is enough to put the observers under surveillance, then the Wikileaks introduced hacktivism 2.0, which relies on anonymous insiders coercing transparency on power may be the answer.
However, Galloway and Thacker (2007, p. 41) argue that control in a networked society functions through the data produced by individuated subjects. If we agree, then negating this control is not to gather data on the observers -which is nothing more than being engaged in the oppositional (symmetrical) power relationships, but to be what anonymous really means: invisible. Invisible in its strictest sense: being beyond the determinations that define the identity and the discourse. The function of hiding behind a mask, in this context only makes sense if rather than all of us hiding behind the same Warner Bros. licensed Guy Fawkes mask, we all have our own mask to wear.
Whatever we think of the right course of action, both types of civic activism depend on the easy availability of strong Privacy Enhancing Technologies. Software technologies, such as PETs or P2P file sharing software are created in the niches between the actual, the potential and the desired. They are the products of particular social, political, economic conditions and reflect the opportunities, the threats, and most importantly the perceived failures and deficiencies in and around the contexts in which they are born. Technologies enable the emergence of new and unexpected social practices, which in turn become subject of interpretation in multiple discursive contexts. The major impetus for Tor's development was the US military's need to communicate without the threat of foreign surveillance. Its easy availability for everyone is based on the understanding that secret communication is best hidden in the noise created by others communicating in secret. Allowing individuals to negate control may not have been the primary aim of providing governmental funding to, or the primary goal of the development of PETs. But now, lacking any other effective legal or political protection of human rights and other constitutionally protected freedoms, we rely on PETs to have at least a modicum of privacy. This situation is far from being ideal, but currently this is the best we can hope for. For this reason it is essential that PETs be protected from efforts of delegitimisation and illegalisation. PETs may come with the cost of giving up considerable amounts of security. But this has always been the price for freedom.

FOOTNOTES
1. In a previous version of this article the launch of Wikileaks was accidentally dated to 2010.
This was a mistake.
Hacktivism 1-2-3: how privacy enhancing technologies change the face of anonymous hacktivism located watchtower. It is designed to force inmates to adjust their own behaviour to what they believe is expected from them by the invisible observers in the watchtower.