14 April 2013
Hacktivists as Gadflies
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/hacktivists-as-gadflies/
Hacktivists as Gadflies
By PETER LUDLOW
Peter Ludlow is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. His most
recent book is The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics.
The Stone -- The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues
both timely and timeless.
Around 400 B.C., Socrates was brought to trial on charges of corrupting the
youth of Athens and impiety. Presumably, however, people believed
then as we do now, that Socrates real crime was being too clever and,
not insignificantly, a royal pain to those in power or, as Plato put it,
a gadfly. Just as a gadfly is an insect that could sting a horse and prod
it into action, so too could Socrates sting the state. He challenged the
moral values of his contemporaries and refused to go along with unjust demands
of tyrants, often obstructing their plans when he could. Socrates thought
his service to Athens should have earned him free dinners for life. He was
given a cup of hemlock instead.
The government is treating hackers who try to make a political point as serious
threats.
We have had gadflies among us ever since, but one contemporary breed in
particular has come in for a rough time of late: the hacktivist.
While none have yet been forced to drink hemlock, the state has come down
on them with remarkable force. This is in large measure evidence of how poignant,
and troubling, their message has been.
Hacktivists, roughly speaking, are individuals who redeploy and repurpose
technology for social causes. In this sense they are different from
garden-variety hackers out to enrich only themselves. People like Steve Jobs,
Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates began their careers as hackers they
repurposed technology, but without any particular political agenda. In the
case of Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak, they built and sold blue boxes,
devices that allowed users to defraud the phone company. Today, of course,
these people are establishment heroes, and the contrast between their almost
exalted state and the scorn being heaped upon hacktivists is instructive.
For some reason, it seems that the government considers hackers who are out
to line their pockets less of a threat than those who are trying to make
a political point. Consider the case of Andrew Auernheimer, better known
as Weev. When Weev discovered in 2010 that AT&T had left
private information about its customers vulnerable on the Internet, he and
a colleague wrote a script to access it. Technically, he did not
hack anything; he merely executed a simple version of what Google
Web crawlers do every second of every day sequentially walk through
public URLs and extract the content. When he got the information (the e-mail
addresses of 114,000 iPad users, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Rahm
Emanuel, then the White House chief of staff), Weev did not try to profit
from it; he notified the blog Gawker of the security hole.
For this service Weev might have asked for free dinners for life, but instead
he was recently sentenced to 41 months in prison and ordered to pay a fine
of more than $73,000 in damages to AT&T to cover the cost of notifying
its customers of its own security failure.
When the federal judge Susan Wigenton sentenced Weev on March 18, she described
him with prose that could have been lifted from the prosecutor Meletus in
Platos Apology. You consider yourself a hero of
sorts, she said, and noted that Weevs special skills
in computer coding called for a more draconian sentence. I was reminded of
a line from an essay written in 1986 by a hacker called the Mentor: My
crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for.
When offered the chance to speak, Weev, like Socrates, did not back down:
I dont come here today to ask for forgiveness. Im here
to tell this court, if it has any foresight at all, that it should be thinking
about what it can do to make amends to me for the harm and the violence that
has been inflicted upon my life.
He then went on to heap scorn upon the law being used to put him away
the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law that prosecutors used to go
after the 26-year-old Internet activist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide
in January.
The law, as interpreted by the prosecutors, makes it a felony to use a computer
system for unintended applications, or even violate a
terms-of-service agreement. That would theoretically make a felon out of
anyone who lied about their age or weight on Match.com.
The case of Weev is not an isolated one. Barrett Brown, a journalist who
had achieved some level of notoriety as the the former unofficial
not-spokesman for Anonymous, the hacktivist group, now sits in federal
custody in Texas. Mr. Brown came under the scrutiny of the authorities when
he began poring over documents that had been released in the hack of two
private security companies, HBGary Federal and Stratfor. Mr. Brown did not
take part in the hacks, but he did become obsessed with the contents that
emerged from them in particular the extracted documents showed that
private security contractors were being hired by the United States government
to develop strategies for undermining protesters and journalists, including
Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for Salon. Since the cache was enormous, Mr.
Brown thought he might crowdsource the effort and copied and pasted the URL
from an Anonymous chat server to a Web site called Project PM, which was
under his control.
Just to be clear, what Mr. Brown did was repost the URL from a Web site that
was publicly available on the Internet. Because Stratfor had not encrypted
the credit card information of its clients, the information in the cache
included credit card numbers and validation numbers. Mr. Brown didnt
extract the numbers or highlight them; he merely offered a link to the database.
For this he was charged on 12 counts, all of which pertained to credit card
fraud. The charges against him add up to about 100 years in federal prison.
It was virtually impossible, Mr. Greenwald, wrote recently in
The Guardian, his new employer, to conclude that the obscenely excessive
prosecution he now faces is unrelated to that journalism and his related
activism.
Other hacktivists have felt the force of the United States government in
recent months, and all reflect an alarming contrast between the severity
of the punishment and the flimsiness of the actual charges. The case of Aaron
Swartz has been well documented. Jeremy Hammond, who reportedly played a
direct role in the Stratfor and HBGary hacks, has been in jail for more than
a year awaiting trial. Mercedes Haefer, a journalism student at the University
of Nevada, Las Vegas, faces charges for hosting an Internet Relay Chat channel
where an Anonymous denial of service attack was planned. Most recently, Matthew
Keys, a 26-year-old social-media editor at Reuters, who allegedly assisted
hackers associated with Anonymous (who reportedly then made a prank change
to a Los Angeles Times headline), was indicted on federal charges that could
result in more than $750,000 in fines and prison time, inciting a new outcry
against the law and its overly harsh enforcement. The list goes on.
In a world in which nearly everyone is technically a felon, we rely on the
good judgment of prosecutors to decide who should be targets and how hard
the law should come down on them. We have thus entered a legal reality not
so different from that faced by Socrates when the Thirty Tyrants ruled Athens,
and it is a dangerous one. When everyone is guilty of something, those most
harshly prosecuted tend to be the ones that are challenging the established
order, poking fun at the authorities, speaking truth to power in other
words, the gadflies of our society.
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