Molly Sauter on ‘The Coming Swarm’
A discussion of hacktivism trends, and the evolution of different flavors of attacks over the years. Where do you draw the line between censorship and speech, how do you fix broken cyber laws? What’s the proper punishment for internet protests in a democratic free country?
Pay particular attention to the Q&A conversation at the end, when someone asks about where the line is on censorship, and think back to when Anonymous did not like what was being said here and DDOS’ed this site.
The key things that come to my mind in this discussion are the comparisons to direct action, and the levels of personal commitment, and when disruption becomes destruction, when subversion becomes fraudulent.
Early on the Seattle WTO demonstrations come up, and that’s apt. Because there were anonymous black blockers in Seattle who were performing destructive rather than disruptive acts. J ust as when sometimes Anonymous joins the COTW (cause of the week) and ends up with four or five people trying to fraudulently appear as many more while performing acts that are destructive rather than disruptive. (Is it somehow more righteous when Anonymous astroturfs instead of the Kochs? Before you answer that, think about terms of resources - both Anonymous and the Kochs have enormous resources that they can call on that the average person does not. Anonymous achieves their resource levels through technical acumen, while the Kochs get theirs from money.)
While you can argue that nothing on the internet is permanent, and therefore no action can be permanently destructive, there are acts where Anonymous users subvert the resources of many people who don’t agree with them, and at its heart that seems destructive of democratic principles. (one person, one demonstrator, one voice.,) You can then look from there to the point where they are doxing an individual and then the swarm becomes the bully swarm. I’m all for anonymous protest, but there’s a line over which it can become more evil than that which they protest.
What is the role of the internet in political activism and speech? Is there any room for nuance between “hacking” and “cyber-terrorism?”
Molly Sauter — research affiliate at the Berkman Center and author of “The Coming Swarm: DDoS, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet” — discusses the history, development, theory, and practice of distributed denial of service actions as a tactic of political activism.
More info on this event here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2014/10/thecomingswarm