Terror and play or what was hacktivism

While certain potential acts of cyberterrorism absolutely have the possibility of inflicting actual physical damage there is the potential for economic damage and non-physical harm that could still be very damaging to a government or institution. Such acts are probably best seen as borderline cases of terrorism.

The actual level of threat of cyberterrorism is as controversial as its definition. Many computer security exports are skeptical of the claims that a computer hacker could potentially bring a country to its knees.

For example a persisting myth is that US military systems could easily be hacked when in fact they are actually kept air gapped from the internet Weimann.

This practice is employed not only in US military systems but many other vital systems that would in theory provide prime targets for terrorists like avionic systems or nuclear power plant controls Schneier. That being said there certainly remains a distinct potential threat of cyberterrorist attacks.

While many important systems are air-gapped and kept relatively well shielded from the threat of cyberterrorism that is not a viable solution for every single potential target of cyberterrorism and a number of potential scenarios have been suggested.

That CyberTerrorist will then perform similar remote alterations at a processor of infant formula. The key: the CyberTerrorist does not have to be at the factory to execute these acts. The key: the people of a country will lose all confidence in the economic system. Would a CyberTerrorist attempt to gain entry to the Federal Reserve building or equivalent?

Unlikely, since arrest would be immediate. Furthermore, a large truck remaining next to the building would be noticed. Destabilization will be achieved. So while the threat of cyberterrorism is exaggerated the possibility of a major cyberterrorist threat remains. As has been pointed out the etymological origins of both cyberterrorism and hacktivism contain hints to the loaded meanings that lurk beneath the words.

Cyberterrorism contains the word terrorism, a word that carries a tremendous amount of meaning in a century where stories of suicide bombings in the Middle East are common occurrences on cable news and the conspicuous absences of the Twin Towers on the New York City skyline have only just began to be filled by the new One World Trade Center.

Hacktivism is an evocative word itself. Hacking calls to mind images of dimly lit computer screens covered with walls of cryptic text like in the film The Matrix and activism the good intentioned idealism of the counterculture movement of 60s and 70s. When both these words carry so much potential meaning behind them the labels themselves when applied can shape the perspectives of the neutral observer. Of all the groups that are responsible for shaping and influencing public perception of hacktivism and cyberterrorism the media is by far the most important.

An example of this would be when a denial of service attack in took down a number of e-commerce websites such as eBay and yahoo, the media was quick to begin sowing the seeds of panic. The attacks on the e-shopping networks were quickly labeled as cyberterrorism in nature. Going by the established moral defining of terrorism these attacks would not qualify as terrorist attacks.

There was no physical use of force and the websites were only momentarily disrupted before going back online. Yet the media still utilized the cyberterrorist label because it would generate more buzz. Since the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th, the media began to shift from portraying hackers as simple criminals and tying them to terrorists exploiting public fear at the time. As can be seen from the graph below usage of cyberterrorism in the articles of major newspapers increased dramatically.

It negatively affects public opinion, which results in favorable conditions for passing laws and regulations that limit this alternative way of advocacy and political protest. As a society with access to the internet is made more aware of activist causes due to increased news and the constant presence of social media, hacktivism will continue to become a more popular solution for activists looking to draw attention to their issues. Recently hacktivists affiliated with Anonymous struck again, this time at the hate group the Klu Klux Klan.

Responding to threats made by the KKK against protesters in Ferguson, Missouri after the death of Michael Brown, Anonymous hacktivists hijacked the organizations twitter page posting an image of a unicorn and sunset and publically revealed the identities of a number of Klu Klux Klan members. Another recent cyberattack was directed at Sony Pictures. These recent attacks only add to the conversation surrounding hacktivism and cyberterrorism.

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You can change your cookie settings through your browser. Open Advanced Search. DeepDyve requires Javascript to function. Please enable Javascript on your browser to continue. Seuss , but a socially inept male adolescent addicted to technology. Consumed by access to and through gadgets, the nerd desires others who are like him, but he cannot interiorize them or assume their likeness or be assimilated by them as a like-minded group.

When nerds go online, they try to connect, with the help of prostheses aliases, pseudonyms, handles, avatars , to like-minded people, their connections crackling with the static of inhibition. But lame- footed Oedipus solved the riddle by subtracting and adding limbs.

The animal that has first four feet, then two, then three, and finally four again is man. Different ages in the history of writing are also figured by adding or subtract- ing a limb: from handwriting to ten fingers on a keyboard to dictation soft- ware and writing without hands. Once the riddle is solved, the monster is slain and carted off by a donkey, because once something is understood, any ass can handle it.

There are three stereotypical representations of oedipal desire in com- puter-mediated communication: phone phreaks seek to establish a free con- nection to the long distant, warez crackers revert intellectual property in software to a ruinous culture of the gift, and network hackers rescue the mother lode of information from the vaults of secrecy to which a centralized information society would consign it.

Nerds make machines work in a time frame that takes them toward the symptom. McLuhan hoped this would engender just that shock of unfamiliarity in the familiar that is necessary for the understanding of media culture. But this is once again investing media technology with an agency that disenfranchises and manipulates people.

The dispersed, decentralized nature of the Net need not sig- nify the dissolution of patriarchal order. The mythological reading in fact merely installs the group mascot of techno-culture as the neurotic upholder of cyber-protocol. Terror, Play It is to be strongly established, from the beginning, that the myth is a com- munication system, is message. As hacktivism ties into the cryp- tographic imaginary, its public image oscillates between terror and play. In this antinomy we may recognize a mythological formation.

The tyranny of closed systems is most unsettled by those who seek root, or radical access to its structure. Wherever hacktivism is being discussed, the antinomy of myth is invoked as a pivot for defining an otherwise completely dispersed phe- nomenon: it is terror or creative expression, in the interest of fear or freedom, expressing a need for greater homeland security or for enlightenment.

This story is as old as the hills—which is how myths communicate their appeal. Depending on how the myth joins the polar tensions of terror and play, its reception can be a passive or active engagement. Myths proliferate in oral cultures. Literacy complicates the transmission of sensi- tive information because writing could betray the message to anyone.

When Goody and Watt address the qualitative difference between orality and liter- acy, they bring the survival of oral societies into the twentieth century into focus. Version control, authen- tication, and data integrity are not among the core features of this structure: it is marked by hearsay, rumor, storytelling, which goes against the command- and-control efficiencies of the administration of power.

Critics of hacktivism admonished that the lack of a clear agenda made it a politically immature gesture, while conspiracy theorists hoped to see an attempt to precipitate a crisis situation online. In stories like those, it becomes evident that the media are also misusing the word journalist.

Any one who attempts to further his views by a system of coercive intimidation. One who enter- tains, professes, or tries to awaken or spread a feeling of terror or alarm; an alarmist, a scaremonger. Alarmist attitudes won the Cold War, and we currently experience an assault on the freedom of citizens to process information without the use of trademarked software programs that proffer only homeopathic doses of access and comprehension while effec- tively closing all systems.

In keeping with economies of surplus and scale, the greater the reach of a network, the lower its saturation with information; conversely, the more differentiated the information, the smaller its area of actual distribution. The more a medium correlates noise with profit and profit with noise even and especially at the highest levels of production Krapp Terror and Play, or What Was Hacktivism? While military, academic, and business communications achieve integrated networks of high information density, the general public is often shut out.

To consider the threats of cyber-terrorism is certainly not alarmist—but it is irresponsible not to distinguish between a Net sit-in and the failure of an ATM network, between conceptual Net art and attacks on a hospital genera- tor, between a cable TV outage and the potential damage by electromagnetic bombs, or between dragging down DNS servers and hijacking airliners.

To equate the security of airline Web sites with the vulnerability of air traffic control, or to lump the real importance and value of medical or credit information together with the mere loss of marketing opportunities is indeed to engage in coercive intimi- dation. Hacktivists are neither secret agents nor soldiers, neither terrorists nor netwarriors. Hacktivism aims to capture attention; it is calculated for maximum media effect, trying to raise the awareness of citizens regarding certain rights and liberties: free speech, privacy, access.

An act of hacktivism can involve many people or only one; it can forge links and coalitions between people whose politics may other- wise run the gamut. Essentially, hacktivism translates into the digital realm what disruptive or expressive politics have been using for centuries: demon- strations, sit-ins, labor strikes, and pamphlets.

Denial-of-service attacks exploiting the processing rhythms of certain system resources are nothing more or less than digital demonstrations. Hacktivists have generally taken care not to affect the Net at large. The point is that in singling out one server, it becomes apparent to the untrained eye, to the public who are not computer experts. This analysis of communications technology opposes the analytic mind-set of computer literacy with the formulaic state of mind of oral culture, just as Havelock and Ong did.

It will have been the task of media studies to inter- pret how much programming routines rely on an analytic frame of mind, yet so often seem to insist on putting everyone else into a formulaic state of mind.

No doubt the insistent techniques of concealment on the level of code will push users, as consumers or addressees of code, forever into trying to inter- rupt, disrupt, disperse the apotheosis of automation. McCaughey and M. Gunkel, Hacking Cyberspace Boulder: Westview, Dorothy E. See Ricardo Dominguez, ed. New York: Routledge, Roger C. Molander, Andrew S. Riddile, and Peter E. Not registered? Sign up. Publications Pages Publications Pages.

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