Digital civil disobedience: tactics, tools and issues

Digital civil disobedience: tactics, tools and future issues

(Republished with translation from: Beatrice Martini – blog, “Digital civil disobedience: tactics, tools and future threads”, June 3, 2015, Author Beatrice)

Protests, uprisings, and riots are essential elements of freedom of expression, helping to shape the shape of society and public discourse throughout our history.
Over the centuries, individuals and groups have adopted countless tactics to assert their rights and fight for justice – changing over time, adapting their strategies to different historical and political circumstances.

What is the current situation today? What are the tools adopted by protesters for awareness-raising, unrest and mobilization?
Technology has entered the world of activism and we can recognize various forms of protest that combine both offline and online elements, as well as expressions of dissent that operate exclusively in the digital space.
This article aims to provide an overview of what digitalciviltoday, observing what tactics are in use and examining the possible path for the development of future tools that will help global citizens claim their rights.

What is digital civil disobedience?

Speaking aboutciviland digital civil disobedience equally requires recognizing the controversies and debates that influence activists' actions and the theorists' studies related to them.

In this context, Robin Celikates describes civil disobedience as “a deliberately illegal and principled collective act of protest (as opposed to both legal protest and “simple” criminal offenses or “unmotivated” acts), which (as opposed to conscientious objection, which is already protected in some states as a fundamental right) has as its political purpose the change of specific laws, policies or institutions”.

Civil disobedience has adopted a variety of approaches over the centuries, in an attempt to increase the impact of protestor mobilization and the effectiveness of their actions. Among the most popular tactics adopted are: demonstrations, sit-ins, workplace occupations, blockades, strikes, tax resistance, conscientious objection, sabotage.

Focusing on the most recent decades, we can estimate that the advent of the internet has had the most dramatic impact on a growing number of countries. Since the early 1990s, the internet has become an increasingly (though not universally) accessible network (it is estimated that from less than 1% in 1995, today about 40% of the world's population is online/has access). This has profoundly affected a multitude of components of the lives of global citizens, including the mechanisms of modern civil disobedience, and has led to the emergence of a whole new way of expressing opposition, in what is generally called disobedience .

The concept of digital civil disobedience is not exactly something we can define directly – not yet, at least.
The diversity of activist groups that have used technology to organize and deploy digital tools and online actions, and their values ​​and goals vary greatly – so much so that even within the same group, a variety of positions can emerge simultaneously. A fascinating snapshot of different versions of history and currents of thought is offered by the discussion “Hacktivism, or Fifty Shades of Grey Hat”, featuring Gabriella Coleman, Stefania Milan and Frank Rieger, hosted by Oxblood Ruffin (May 2015).
Digital civil disobedience is not a transfer of familiar practices of civil disobedience to a digital space. Networking technologies have their own characteristics, capabilities and limits and provide the opportunity for the creation of new infrastructures, tools and processes for expressing dissent and political action.

re:publica 2015 – Hacktivism, or Fifty Shades of Gray Hat

by re:publica
Published on May 7, 2015
Learn more here.

The history and practice of hacktivism is a complex undertaking. Where does it come from, who does it, and why does it matter? Or is the whole discussion completely over-biased? You can join a conversation with some people who have thought about hacking and online political confrontation. And come prepared to question what you hear.
Oxblood Ruffin
Frank Rieger
Gabriella Coleman
Stefania Milan
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

Forms of protest in the digital space

The tools, infrastructures, and plans available to protesters operating in the digital space are numerous and growing. Some operate exclusively online, some amplify the potential of actions that occur simultaneously in the real (analog) world, some are driven by networks of anonymous actors, some are empowered by individuals and groups who share their identities and stories publicly with the public.

Drawing on the analyses carried out by Molly Sauter (“The Future of Civil Disobedience Online”) and Zeynep Tufekci (“Online social change: easy to organize, hard to win”, TED talk) on the different expressions of digital civil disobedience, it is possible to highlight the most prominent characters of contemporary digital-activist disobedience on a global level.

Information distribution

An act of information dissemination is related to the acquisition and release (public dissemination) of hidden or secret information. This can present itself as:

• a whistleblowing isconsidered illegal, dishonest or incorrect, carried out within a public or private organization
• a data exfiltration–the illegal transfer of data
• doxing of personal information about a person online
• crowd-sourcedsurveys.

These practices can be used to expose injustice, corruption and rights violations, to restore justice in cases or situations where politics and institutions seem to have failed (at least in the eyes of those protesting). Public media is the key player that can strategically help to publicize and disseminate newly acquired data.
To fully understand these methodologies, it is also important to note that they can also be adopted with criminal intent by individuals and groups, aiming to harm vulnerable individuals, such as in cases of online harassment through doxing. Such criminal actions may focus solely on violating someone’s privacy and security, unrelated to other applications of these practices that seek recognition of rights, transparency and accountability. However, it is essential not to dismiss these practices as exclusively dangerous and harmful: as with almost any new tool in history – from fire to electricity to the internet itself – depending on their purpose, human beings can use whatever is at their disposal to build or to destroy. The dividing lines, as is so often the case, are not clear.

Acts of information sharing have been adopted by many individuals and groups over the past decades. Referring to our more recent history, it is characteristic and essential to remember groups like WikiLeaks and whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Chelsa Manning, William Binney, Annie Machon.

A still from Exposing the invisible.currencyis information” – with Paul Radu. Tactical Tech Collective. Watch the film (video duration 00:16:57).

Disruption

Disturbing the status quo by disrupting the normal flow of information can help draw attention to a cause. Among the most popular techniques for achieving this effect are:

• website defacements – attacks that change the visual appearance of a web page or website
• distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks – attacks sent by two or more people or bots with the aim of making a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users

The potential of this practice lies in the recognition of the action by a wide audience (possibly through the mainstream media), so it is limited, consequently, by the difficulty of creating the desired awareness about an issue if the media ultimately does not report the attack.

Disruptive tactics have been adopted since the mid-1990s by countless groups such as Electronic Disturbance Theater, the Strano Network , and more recently, Anonymous.

Mobilization

Digital networking technologies allow communities to connect, organize, and mobilize more effectively than ever before in history.

Of course, due to limitations caused by cost, connectivity and law, mobile phones, e-mails and social media are not accessible to everyone and under regimes and dictatorships the use of networking technologies needs to be upgraded with the adoption of enhanced anonymization and privacy protection technologies (see below in the paragraph on Infrastructure).

But even taking into account the aforementioned variables, digital network technologies are noticeably increasingly available to global citizens and can be seen as game-changing tools for activists who need to use alternative communication loops.

They can greatly help in:

• circumvent media blackouts by sharing information in another way in a regime that maintains silence with the government and state-controlled media
• facilitate the formation of a collective identity supportive of the protest and mobilization to maximize the impact of the actions
• record and expose injustices and violations, also allowing transmission beyond national borders.

It is important to note that these tools have both advantages and disadvantages.
For example, Twitter can be a great tool for organizing efforts, promoting awareness, and sharing support (hashtags can be very effective, as recently demonstrated with #Ferguson or #BlackLivesMatter). At the same time, however, as Jillian York recently highlighted during her talk on “The cost of digital civil disobedience” (as part of the Civil disobedience beyond the state II), many activists have begun to prefer WhatsApp over it, for various reasons: some find it more suitable for avoiding random online harassment, some find it better protects their personal safety, others find it more efficient.

A still from Do not track, “Episode 4: The spy in my pocket”– starring Harlo Holmes, Nathan Freitas, Julia Angwin, Kate Crawford, Rand Hindi. From Upian, the National Film Board of Canada, Arte, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Radio-Canada, RTS and AJ+.
Other episodes from the series: S01E01: “Morning Rituals”, S01E02: “Breaking Ad”, S01E03: “Like Mining”, S01E05: “Big Data: Inside the Algorithm”

Infrastructure

When existing infrastructures are compromised by government- or corporate-led data collection practices, activists may decide to build new, uncompromising infrastructures. One of the most notable examples of infrastructure destruction today is mass surveillance. While justified by governments and businesses as necessary to protect national security, combat terrorism, and child pornography, it is also a practice that can violate privacy rights, limit civil and political rights and freedoms, and even be illegal in some legal systems. It is no coincidence that the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC ) appointed a Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy .

Some examples of the tools and infrastructure built to protect citizens' privacy in various ways are:

• Tor ' privacy and freedom and their ability to conduct confidential communication without their Internet activities being monitored
• dispora * – a free personal web server implementing a distributed social networking service, based on the core values ​​of decentralization, freedom and privacy
• Open Whisper Systems apps – various communication apps, including: RedPhone, a free and open source Android app that provides end-to-endencryptionfor phone calls, Signal, a free and open source iPhone app that uses end-to-end encryption, allowing users to send messages and make calls while keeping their communications secure.
• Alternative VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) – alternative network connections, for example, are often provided to communities facing state control and censorship of communications from activists from other countries (in fact, using a VPN is now recommended as a necessity for all people who simply use the internet today)

The tricky part here is that: these tools often require significant operational effort on the part of the user to function, and only a limited number of citizens and activists around the world currently know about them and how to use them. It makes sense: this whole scenario is very new and constantly changing. Therefore, it is very important for developers, capable technology makers, and educators to work together on knowledge dissemination and training efforts and with technical developments to provide global citizens with the most effective tools to make their voices heard and fight for their rights.

What's next? A possible route

This article has provided a brief overview of the tactics and tools of digital civil disobedience. However, even in its concise form, it makes clear that this new space of practice is becoming increasingly important for raising awareness of rights violations on both a global and local scale and for fighting for positive changes in legislation, policies and institutions.

However, as already mentioned, knowledge of these tools and practices is not yet widespread, and even the most digitally equipped activists often struggle with operational limits and challenges.
So what’s the next step?

This question is often debated at the moment, and at the recent Civil Disobedience Beyond the State II, Gabriella Coleman proposed a case that sounds particularly interesting.
She suggested that we look at other historical examples to see if there was any learning curve we could take from the past to understand how to move forward.
The example she chose was notable: the history of free software.

In a very brief recap: in 1983, in response to the emergence of proprietary software (which to varying degrees prevents users from studying, modifying, and sharing the software), Richard Stallman, of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, started the GNU Project, a collective effort to create an operating system that respects freedom. The following years saw the advent of the term “free software” (its official definition was published in 1986) and the Free Software Foundation.
(see Free as in Freedom (2.0): Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution and Free Society – Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman)
The concept of free software was revolutionary – it gave end users complete freedom to use, study, share, and modify software. But its potential would not be translated into new and popular infrastructures and tools overnight.
It took many years of work, by hundreds of programmers, most of them volunteers, to develop this operating system. In 1991, Linux, the free kernel written by Linus Torvalds, was developed, and gradually began to attract media attention – Today, the combination of GNU and Linux is used by millions of people around the world. The late 1990s became an exciting time for the world of free software. The programmers of that era were “the heirs of an older hacking culture that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, when computers were still young, a community that believed that software should be shared and that everyone would benefit as a result. […] Thanks to the advent of relatively low-cost but powerful personal computers and the global wiring of the Internet, the new hackers [were] incomparably more numerous, more productive, and more united than their ancestors. They were bound together by a goal-command: to write great software, and by a code-command: that this software should be freely available to everyone.” Their achievements have proven resilient over time.

What we can learn from this is that when we think about the difficulties we experience today with the tools that aim to preserve freedom of expression and the right to protest, we can remember that it is worth allowing more time for these new infrastructures to develop. End-to-end encryption ( i.e. ensuring that the message has been converted into a secret message by the original sender and its decoding is possible only by its final recipient) is a powerful tool at our disposal, an ever-increasing number of developers are working every day (as was done with free software, often as volunteers) to create new tools to protect the rights of citizens around the world, as the sudden availability of advanced and relatively low-cost devices made a big difference to the development of emerging technologies in the 1990s, something similar could potentially happen in the near future. All of this will help diversify the tools available to today’s protesters in the digital space – and this will be key to the effectiveness of their actions, since, as proven by centuries of (offline) civil disobedience, being equipped with a variety of tactics provides you with stronger support and makes it harder for law enforcement (both legitimate and illegitimate) to suppress protests.

In conclusion

Civil disobedience is an act of protest that will always be fundamental to the collective capacity to express dissent. At the same time, new digital media and tactics present a remarkable opportunity for the future of civil rights. Alongside already existing forms of expression of dissent, they provide global citizens and activists with the means to be able to compete with the structures created by the institutions against which they protest and offer the possibility of increasing the impact of their actions, in the name of rights and justice.

Understanding, adopting and improving these new practices are essential for the defense of global civil liberties, and only through a collective effort will we understand, adopt and improve this opportunity, to be able to contribute to the creation of responsible and just societies around the world.

References/bibliography:

• Civil Disobedience - Between Symbolic Politics and Real Confrontation – Robin Celikates , Critical Legal Thinking (July 2, 2012)
• Hacktivism, or Fifty Shades of Gray Hat – panel discussion with Gabriella Coleman, Stefania Milan, Frank Rieger, moderated by Oxblood Ruffin (May 7, 2015)
• The Future of Civil Disobedience Online – Molly Sauter, io9 (June 17, 2013)
• Whistleblowing: A case for Civil Disobedience – Manohar Kumar
• Doxing: an etymology – Megan Garber, The Atlantic (March 6, 2014)
• The history of DDoS attacks as a tool of protest – Joseph Cox, Motherboard (October 1, 2014)
• LOIC will tear us apart': the impact of tool design & media portrayals in the success of DDOS attacks – Molly Sauter, American Behavioral Scientist (March 15, 2013)
• Online social change: easy to organize, hard to win – Zeynep Tufekci, TED talk (October 2014)
• What Happens to #Ferguson Affects Ferguson: Net Neutrality, Algorithmic Filtering and Ferguson – Zeynep Tufekci, Message (August 14, 2014)
• Why I refrained from joining Twitter all these years…but joined in the end nonetheless – Maria Xynou (May 13, 2015)
• Witness' library of free resources for video activists, trainers and their allies – the resources can be sorted by by issue, content type, user type and topic and most of them are available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, French.
• How we can use livestreaming apps to promote justice – Sam Gregory, Wired (May 10, 2015)
• If you use the Internet, you need a VPN. Here's why – Kashmir Hill, Fusion (May 15, 2015)
• The Info-Activism how-to guide – Digital tools – Tactical Technology Collective
• Me & my shadow – Tactical Technology Collective
• Activist or protester? How to keep you and your communications safe wherever your campaigning takes you – Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Human rights defender? Recipes for organizations who need to keep safe from government eavesdroppers – Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Surveillance in the South: human rights defenders under threat – Renata Avila
• Freedom of expression, encryption and anonymity – World Wide Web Foundation, in partnership with the Center for Internet and Human Rights at European University Viadrina, Oficina Antivigilância at the Institute for Technology and Society — ITS Rio, Derechos Digitales.
• Do Not Track – a personalized documentary series about privacy and the web economy, by Upian, the National Film Board of Canada, Arte, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Radio-Canada, RTS and AJ+.