Tenured 'Hacktivists'
Ubiquitous
it defined as "computer hacking . . . as a means to a political end."
Online vandals had broken into government computer systems in China,
India, Indonesia, Serbia and Croatia, and inserted their own messages.
Another tactic was the denial-of-service attack, in which "an unusually
large volume of requests will overwhelm the computer that is serving up
the target's Web pages. This can cause legitimate visitors to see error
messages instead of the pages they are seeking, and it can even crash
the server computer." An outfit called Electronic Disturbance Theater
had used denial-of-service attacks against America's defenses:
On Nov. 22 [1998], the group says, it plans to attack
the Web site of the School of the Americas, a United
States Army training center for foreign military personnel,
some of whom have been accused of human rights abuses.
Recent targets have included the sites of Mexico's
President, Ernesto Zedillo, and of the United States
Defense Department.
This worried U.S. officials, even during the Clinton administration:
Security experts said the recent spate of digital vandalism
underscores the risk to companies and governments that
increasingly rely on the Internet for commerce and
communication.
''What this demonstrates is the capacity of groups with
political causes to hack into systems,'' said Michael A.
Vatis, chief of the National Information Protection
Center, a new Federal agency. ''I wouldn't characterize
vandalizing Web sites as cyberterrorism, but the only
responsible assumption we can make is there's more going
on that we don't know about.''
Established by Attorney General Janet Reno this year,
the center is in part a response to the perception that
''political forces which could not take on the United
States in conventional military terms stand a better
chance on an electronic battlefield,'' said Mr. Vatis,
deputy assistant director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
A Forbes article [1] at about the same time profiled Electronic
Disturbance Theater's Ricardo Dominguez and Brett Stalbaum, and
described EDT's "biggest event," a "simultaneous attack on Zedillo's web
site (again), the Pentagon and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange":
But this time, the protestors were attacked in their
own right. Stalbaum suspects that Pentagon programmers
detoured FloodNet traffic into a hostile applet of its
own, which caused browsers to crash. "They even called
their applet 'hostile applet,' " says Stalbaum, who
dissected it.
Dominguez loves the intrigue. "As a person of the
theater, I couldn't have created a better script--the
drama, the conflict."
Forbes called this an "art project" and quoted Dominguez describing his
actions as "electronic civil disobedience."
You still hear about "hacktivism"--this summer, for instance, there was
an attack on Estonian servers, presumably originating in Russia. But in
the wake of Sept. 11, and amid concerns that al Qaeda may employ
"cyber-terrorism" as well as the offline kind, this all seems a lot less
cute than it did in the innocent days of 1998.
Yet Dominguez not only is unrepentant but actually complained, in a 2004
interview with the Gothamist [2], that when he attacked the Pentagon, he
was the victim:
Take for example the Department of Defense. They attacked
EDT during the September 9th, 1998 VR Sit-In we did during
the Ars Electronica Festival, in Linz, Austria--the DOD
used a counter-hostile Java applet against FloodNet, which
is the first offensive use of information war by a government
against a civilian server that we know of.
We believe we should be protected from such actions, that
the government cannot attack civilians using any kind of
software or hardware. What has become apparent is the
kind of violence that these information war systems are
now implementing against civilians to control whatever
public space there is.
Dominguez is trying to have it both ways: When he attacks the
government's computers, it is an act of nonviolent "civil disobedience";
when the government responds in kind, it is "violence ... against
civilians."
Real civil disobedience--think Gandhi or Dr. King or Rosa Parks--is in
effect a dare: You defy an unjust law and, in doing so, defy the
government to punish you for it, thereby underscoring its injustice. But
there's nothing unjust about laws protecting government computer systems
from electronic vandalism.
And how have Dominguez and Stalbaum been punished for their actions?
With tenure. Dominguez is an assistant professor and Stalbaum a
"lecturer with security of employment" on the visual arts faculty of the
University of California, San Diego, a state institution. Real civil
disobedience is a dangerous act of idealism; Dominguez and Stalbaum's
"hacktivism" was a risk-free act of self-promotion.
[1]: http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml
[2]:
http://gothamist.com/2004/11/29/ricardo_dominguez_artist_and_electronic_
civil_disobedience_pioneer.php
--
It is simply breathtaking to watch the glee and abandon with which
the liberal media and the Angry Left have been attempting to turn
our military victory in Iraq into a second Vietnam quagmire. Too bad
for them, it's failing.