The Ethics of Hacktivism





"To Hack or Not to Hack, that is the question"





This week's readings described the practice of "Hacktivsm."  Much like the discussion on Trolling from a few weeks ago, I've found that Hacktivism is a broad term that can be generalized to many different kinds of ambiguous activities, each with varying degrees of severity or intent to "harm" the target.  From Tom Downey, in his New York Times article China's Cyberposse: Human-Flesh Search Engines in China, comes probably the most clear semblance of a definition for Hacktivism: an activity "performed online but intended to cause real world consequences."  But it would seem that, to truly add the "activism" to Hacktivism, whatever the activity is, it must incite others to follow, take part in, or at least pay attention to the message that you, the Hacktivist, is trying to generate.   Again, like Trolls, Hacktivists, or at least the ones that seem to get mentioned, are the ones who either legally or illegally, incite rebellious and even hateful behaviors and actions from fellow "Netizen Hacktivists."

I looked specifically at the case of retaliation against a Chinese online user named Diebao that Downey illustrated in his Cyberposse article.  Diebao, a student living in Sichuan Province was chastised on a popular forum website for a particular comment she made about the government exploiting a great tragedy to "promote nationalist sentiments" (she is referencing the 2008 earthquake that struck the country.)  Many people disagreed with her and initiated a "human flesh search" of her to "teach her a lesson" for what she said.  Hacktivists searched through public records to dig up any information they could find written from Diebao online and what they did find only spurred more anger toward her.  Hacktivists found blog posts written by Diebao referring to her feeling good and excited when the earthquake happened and that she thought that more people should've died.  They then took a trollish turn by posting negative, even hateful remarks against Diebao.  Her University even expelled her based on the urging of hacktivists who discovered who she was. 

Overall, I think the Hacktivists achieved what they set out to, which was to go after Diebao and make her life a hell for a while, but I don't think that the reason behind it warranted their actions.  Perhaps it is because we Americans are used to the idea of free speech, whether we like it or not sometimes, but I don't think that Diebao's comments would have lead to such an all out viral manhunt in America.  Granted, her comments were completely insensitive and downright disturbing, but she wasn't really "hurting" anyone with her comments.  The information that Hacktivists found on Diebao was all in the public domain-blog post, school records-so I wouldn't say that anything downright illegal occurred at least in the gathering of information.  It is clear that Diebao was harassed, so much so that she was expelled from her University, and that I think should be against the law.  Sometimes, people say stupid things, and regardless of what she said or wrote, she didn't do anything to warrant the punishment she received, whether we like what she said or not.  According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as established by the United Nations:

Article 3.

• Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.  

Article 5.

• No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment

I would have to say that in Diebao's case, I think that the Hacktivists violated her right to security of person by writing threatening posts and subjected her to cruel punishment by getting her expelled.  All in all, the Hacktivists became what they claimed Diebao was, "not human" by violating her rights.  Establishing laws to help protect people can only go so far in the online world.  It can be nearly impossible to punish harassers if they can easily remain anonymous to authorities.  Unless something is done to the target in the real world, or they do something blatantly illegal, I don't think it will be easy to stop the practice of Hacktivsm from occurring into the future.
______________________________________________________________
cited works: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml