What is the use of having right on your side if you have not got might?
—Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People 1
It was billed as simply “The Fight.” It sold out Madison Square Garden’s nearly 21,000-seat capacity a full month in advance and featured premium tickets at then record-setting prices of $150. 2 It left some A-list celebrities, like former vice president of the United States Hubert Humphrey and best-selling recording artist of the 20th century Bing Crosby relegated to the “cheap seats” or out in the cold, respectively. 3 It featured two undefeated boxing icons, each guaranteed $2.5 million—setting another record at the time as the largest purse for any entertainer or athlete. 4 And, on March 8, 1971, the much anticipated matchup between former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali and current titleholder Joe Frazier drew a worldwide audience of 300 million viewers, glued to radio and television broadcast networks that offered updates between each of the 15 rounds 5 —among them security guards at an FBI satellite office in Media, Pennsylvania, distracted by the perfect smokescreen for a nondescript team of eight to execute the perfect crime.
Months of meticulous planning had preceded their moment, set into motion by a pivotal question that would alter the direction of each of their lives and that of one of the world’s largest intelligence agencies: “What do you think of burglarizing an FBI office?” 6 When the group’s leader, an unassuming physics professor named William Davidon, began selectively floating the controversial question in late 1970 amidst a backdrop of a politically and racially charged America, with mounting opposition to the Vietnam War and civil rights injustices reaching a fever pitch, it was outrageous, even for the most committed activists of the time. The FBI was untouchable, widely regarded as the touchstone for integrity. It was also under the direction of its original leader of nearly 50 years, J. Edgar Hoover, who held the rare distinction of retaining his position as bureau chief when presidents of both political parties extended his service, regardless of his growing age and tenure. 7 Despite his lauded public persona, Hoover also had a private reputation of extreme intolerance toward any threat, foreign or domestic, against his agency’s existence. His own boss, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, resigned in 1966 due to Hoover’s resentment of being told to operate his agency within the limits of the law. According to Katzenbach, Hoover
ruled the FBI with a combination of discipline and fear and was capable of acting in an excessively arbitrary way. No one dared object. . . . The FBI was principality with absolutely secure borders, in Hoover’s view. 8
While Hoover governed with an iron fist behind closed doors, Katzenbach admitted, “There was no man better known or admired by the general public than J. Edgar Hoover.” 9 So, any intelligent human being with regard for his personal freedom would have rebuked Davidon’s question outright—burglarizing the nation’s prime federal law enforcement agency and challenging the dominating force at its helm would come at the certain price of prison, if not ruin the lives of those involved.
But Davidon had weighed these consequences carefully. He and his band of cohorts had followed the prescription for activism of their day: peaceful protests, picketing, marching, and petitioning, to name just a few. Exasperated by their seeming lack of results, Davidon and his cadre faced a crisis of conscience. They believed the government, specifically the trusted and revered FBI, was spying on Americans and trampling their sacred constitutional right to dissent. 10 If they were right, this was a crime they were morally compelled to stop—at any cost. And, they knew that simply asserting their allegations without tangible proof would be met with disbelief and reproach. As Keith Forsyth, one of the eight, would reveal decades after the crime,
When you talked to people outside the movement about what the FBI was doing, nobody wanted to believe it. There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their [the FBI’s] handwriting. 11
And so, the group of eight initiated their audacious plan, each playing to their unique strengths. In addition to leader Davidon, there was Bonnie Raines, who, weeks before the crime, cased the location by posing as a college student seeking to interview the agent in charge about job opportunities for women in the FBI. She took great care to conceal her identity through her reconnaissance mission, removing any physical trace of her existence through extreme measures: “What (the agent) didn’t notice during the whole interview was that I never took my gloves off.” 12 Her investigation proved fruitful, emboldening the group’s confidence they had the right target in the Media, Pennsylvania, office when no trace of a security system was found inside. 13
There was Forsyth, the designated locksmith, who had developed a skill of picking locks by taking a correspondence course, and remained calm under pressure upon diverting the team’s break-in to a side entrance when confronted with an impenetrable deadbolt at the planned main entry. 14 Also among them was Raines’ husband, John, a professor of religion at Temple University at the time and the chosen getaway driver, transporting the group and the more than 1,000 FBI documents they scored in their heist to a Quaker farm outside of town. 15 There, the team painstakingly pored over their bounty, carefully inspecting each document for evidence that would confirm their suspicions.
In examining the contents, the group, which would ultimately self-identify with the anonymous yet descriptive moniker of the “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI,” claimed only one percent of the files involved investigation of organized crime. 16 In contrast, 40 percent of the documents dealt with some form of political surveillance, according to the team’s analysis. With deliberate scrutiny, the group selected 14 of the most incriminating documents and mailed them to several newspapers and two congressmen. 17
This was a watershed moment in media history. Journalists were presented with an interesting dilemma: does one publish papers that proved the nation’s domestic intelligence and security agency was targeting political groups—particularly antiwar and civil rights activists—beyond justifiable means of surveillance, even if the proof in question was itself illegally obtained? With mounting pressure from Attorney General John N. Mitchell urging publications in receipt of the pilfered copies to refrain from publishing them on grounds that “disclosure of this information could endanger the lives or cause other serious harm to persons engaged in investigative activities on behalf of the United States,” 18 one journalist, Betty Medsger of The Washington Post, disregarded the warning and ran the story. Other news organizations, including The New York Times, followed suit. 19
The damning evidence provided a rare and chilling behind-the-scenes glimpse of Hoover’s FBI. As proof of Hoover’s disdain for dissidence, one 1970 memorandum recovered in the raid encouraged agents to intensify interview efforts of antiwar activists and black student groups, stating:
[Doing so] will enhance the paranoia epidemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox. 20
But, it would be an internal routing slip, dated in 1968, with simply one mysterious word, “Cointelpro,” that would serve as the most incendiary proof of how far Hoover’s FBI would go to maintain the peace. At the time, there was no further context to Cointelpro to give the term meaning. It wasn’t until several years later, when a journalist obtained more files from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act, that the American people would fully understand what the agency’s Cointelpro—short for Counterintelligence Program—entailed. The program, initiated in 1956, was an extensive campaign to surveil civil rights leaders, suspected Communists, and political organizers. Among the most reprehensible revelations was the agency’s blackmail intimidation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., threatening to expose the civil rights leader’s extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide. 21
In the aftermath, an investigation into the FBI’s surveillance efforts led by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, resulted in greater congressional oversight of the FBI and other US intelligence agencies. The Church Committee’s final report did not mince words when describing the extent of the FBI’s abuses, “Too many people have been spied upon by too many government agencies, and too much information has been collected.” 22
Hoover’s FBI would never be the same, and it all stemmed from the act of one group, completely fed up with the overreach of a government they believed needed to be held to account. Hoover’s maniacal focus on locating the perpetrators absorbed hundreds of agents’ time but, with thousands of potential suspects, the agency was overwhelmed to find the proverbial needles in the haystack within the five-year statute of limitations. 23 All eight walked free, never speaking of the crime again, and carrying on downright ordinary lives, some writing books, others driving the kids’ carpool. 24 They maintained their silence for decades, choosing to come out of the shadows at a time when the US Government would once again find itself in the maelstrom of a shocking scandal and history would repeat itself.
Déjà vu
On March 13, 2013, Edward Snowden came across a news story that hardly appeared newsworthy at all. But, one comment in the piece would sufficiently incense Snowden to a point of making his own headlines the world over. The report recounted James Clapper’s testimony in front of a Senate committee in which the director of national intelligence asserted that the National Security Agency (NSA ) did “not wittingly” collect information on millions of Americans. 25 Snowden, a 29-year-old infrastructure analyst, with NSA contractor Booz Allen was afforded unique security clearance in his position of cyberwar espionage, namely, in accessing the NSA’s surveillance capabilities both domestically and abroad. In his role, Snowden was exposed to the inner workings of the NSA and Clapper’s comment struck an uncomfortable chord. Increasingly, the once staunch government advocate who joined the armed forces as the war in Iraq was heating up in 2004 had become disillusioned by what he perceived to be the government’s overreach into the privacy of its citizens. Clapper’s public assertion to the contrary was the flint that lit the spark that would reveal, if not permanently alter, the complexion of national security once again.
Over his short tenure with both the CIA and the NSA, Snowden had quickly risen through the ranks as an adept technology specialist, acquiring more exclusive security rights with each move and holding a privileged backstage pass to the government’s most sensitive secrets and plans. He first began questioning his government on the very cause that excited him to enlist—that is, he had difficulty rationalizing the government’s conduct in the Iraq War . According to Snowden,
This was the Bush period , when the war on terror had gotten really dark. We were torturing people; we had warrantless wiretapping. 26
He contemplated becoming a whistleblower but opted against the controversial move when Barack Obama entered office. Snowden believed the new president would change course on the war and correct other mistrusts he had about his employer and government. Instead, his disenchantment grew. He witnessed drone attacks obliterate human beings into human body parts. He became privy to controversial NSA practices, including the regular passing of raw private communications, to Israeli intelligence—complete with the personally identifiable information from e-mails and phone calls of millions of Arab and Palestinian Americans. 27 He learned that his employer would spy on the pornography-viewing habits of targeted political radicals, with the intent to use these “personal vulnerabilities” to destroy the reputations of government critics who were not otherwise involved in terrorist plots. 28
Snowden was increasingly reaching his breaking point as his cyberwarfare gig with Booz Allen revealed the US Government’s overstep in hacking civilian infrastructure, such as foreign universities and hospitals, in addition to select government and military targets. The last straw came when he gained access to a new cyberwar program under development, codenamed MonsterMind, which would automate the process for discovering and responding to foreign cyberattacks. To do so, MonsterMind would look for traffic patterns to identify and thwart potential foreign cyberattacks—a dated and readily defensible practice for even Snowden himself. However, MonsterMind offered the additional capacity to automatically retaliate against a suspected threat with a commensurate cyberstrike, a much more difficult feature for the information technology (IT) guru to accept, particularly given his understanding of how such cyber exploits can mask the true enemy behind an innocent target. The possibility for an unfettered game of chicken among the world’s superpowers, with blameless nations as potential collateral damage, gave Snowden considerable pause.
These attacks can be spoofed. You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we [the US government] end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next? 29
And, to be effective in detecting patterns of possible attack, MonsterMind would require government surveillance of virtually all private communications between overseas and domestic connection points. Like the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI before him, Snowden was confronted with a crisis of conscience. In his mind, such extreme monitoring by the US Government would necessarily trample the constitutional rights to privacy endowed to every American. And so, it was no longer a matter of if Snowden would become the next whistleblower to expose misgivings about his employer but when. That moment of truth coincided with Snowden’s outrage at Clapper’s assertion that the NSA did not knowingly collect information on millions of Americans.
Of course, Snowden had flirted with the possibility of exposing his employer before. Much the same way the Media plot was set in motion by a question, Snowden’s explosive scandal initiated with a suggestion to Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, in which the whistleblower simply offered, “I’ve got some stuff you might be interested in.” 30 Greenwald initially ignored the message, given such suggestive proposals are par for the course in the life of a journalist. But, Snowden was persistent, engaging Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras several more times before unloading the thumb drives he had surreptitiously collected. The trio rendezvoused in Hong Kong where the secret exchange was made. It wasn’t until Greenwald and Poitras were on the flight home, in air space they were confident was free from potential government spying, that the duo realized the extent of Snowden’s disclosure. Combing through the many thousands of top secret files, Greenwald was overwhelmed by the evidence of the NSA’s eavesdropping practices and sensed yet another watershed moment in American journalism history.
I couldn’t sleep one second for the next 16 hours because the adrenaline made that impossible. We essentially couldn’t believe what it was that we had. And that was really the first time, I think, I fully understood that this was going to be unlike any other story—really ever—in American journalism or politics. 31
The Guardianexposed Snowden’s government secrets in an explosive story that revealed a court order requiring communications provider Verizon to release information on all telephone calls in its system, both within the United States and between the United States and other countries, to the NSA on an “ongoing, daily basis.” 32 In an effort to look less Orwellian, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest stressed the limits of the order, clarifying that it did not “allow the government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls.” 33 President Obama resurrected an age-old debate in defending the government’s actions, emphasizing that the United States would have to “make some tough choices between balancing privacy and security to protect against terror.” 34
In what would ensue as a case of death by a thousand paper cuts, one story after another followed, revealing more secrets from Snowden’s stash. While the Verizon court order didn’t entail the government “listening in” on private conversations, another top-secret data mining program codenamed Prism offered NSA access to e-mails, chat logs, and other data directly from the servers of nine Internet companies—including the contents of their messages. 35 The American public would learn of all the moral conflicts with which Snowden wrestled as he learned of what his government was capable: the attacks on civilian infrastructure, the spying on government radicals, and the virtually limitless monitoring of just about any form of domestic communication—all without warrants or probable cause—an outcome assured never to happen when the government was reeled in during the Media investigation, yet forewarned by Church in his committee’s final report:
The NSA's capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. 36
The media blitzkrieg reignited decades-old concerns of government overreach. The man at the center of the storm, Snowden, was simultaneously extolled as a hero by privacy advocates and vilified as a traitor by government supporters. Greenwald found himself in the heat of the conflict, drawing criticism from Clapper for accused “hyperbole” and a “rush to publish” when leaking the initial documents. 37 As if channeling Attorney General John N. Mitchell more than four decades earlier, Clapper offered the following sentiment:
For me, it is literally—not figuratively—literally gut-wrenching to see this happen because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities. 38
The similarities between the Media break-in and the Snowden leaks more than 40 years later are uncanny. Both cases involved individuals acting in accordance with their consciences, despite personal or national consequences. Both tested the boundaries of ethics in journalism, making history by putting the very US Government on trial in the court of public opinion. Both exposed shocking evidence of the pervasiveness of the government’s reach. Both ignited vociferous debate about the balance of personal privacy against national security. And, both made heroes and villains of the perpetrators and the journalists who broke their stories.
Of course, there were also striking differences between the cases. The Media heist involved a group of outsiders making history in a few precious hours under the shroud of a boxing match. Snowden was an insider who meticulously and clandestinely absconded with evidence over a prolonged period of time. The Media team lived in the shadows of their crime for decades before revealing their identities. Snowden brazenly came forward as the NSA leaker soon after Greenwald broke the story. And, while each case involved the theft of more than a thousand government documents, the Media gang was relegated to extracting their haul the old-fashioned way—in suitcases lugged in the back of a getaway car. Snowden’s method was decidedly technical in its approach. He claims to have left a trace of digital breadcrumbs in his wake to reveal to his former employer the extent of his theft and, in so doing, attempt to prove his motive entailed adhering to his principles rather than exposing government secrets to national enemies. 39 This last point is particularly important to avoid one of the most serious offenses available to government prosecutors, that of “aiding the enemy,” of particular concern to Snowden who had witnessed an eerily similar case of a government official leaking sensitive documents and barely dodging this bullet himself.
Leaking Secrets
On October 1, 2007, a 19-year-old new recruit of diminutive 5’2” stature named Bradley Manning stepped on the scene of Maryland’s Fort Meade military base. Manning joined the military for several reasons—to escape a troubled upbringing, to qualify for scholarships that would fund his education, even to attempt to rid himself of a gender identity disorder. 40 He could hardly have imagined that six years to the day of arriving as an idealistic recruit, he would find himself once again on the same base, donned in fatigues, this time awaiting sentence for the biggest leak in US military history. 41
Like Snowden, Manning had grown increasingly disenchanted with the military’s actions in Iraq. In what his defense claims was an effort to expose what he perceived as wrongdoings and save lives as a result, Manning deliberately leaked some 250,000 State Department cables and another 470,000 Iraq and Afghanistan battlefield logs to WikiLeaks, 42 a nonprofit journalist organization that provides a platform for secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. Among the most shocking pieces of evidence in Manning’s arsenal was a video showing a US helicopter attack on what was later discovered to be an unarmed group of civilians in Iraq, killing 11, including two Reuters journalists. 43 He was arrested in May 2010, after being sold out to the FBI by a hacker who had conversed with Manning in online chats. 44
Manning would receive a 35-year prison sentence for his crime. Although the most extreme charge of “aiding the enemy” was ultimately dropped, Snowden witnessed the aftermath of consequences thrust upon the soldier as he contemplated a leak of his own. Though the parallels between Manning and Snowden are obvious, Snowden was hardly billed as a Manning also-ran. Instead, his crime drew more outrage from government officials claiming that while Manning offered a behind-the-scenes glimpse of “what” the government does when assuming no one to be watching, Snowden offered the far more valuable “how” of the government’s secret sauce in its surveillance practices, giving enemies the formula to alter their behavior and remain under the radar.
In light of the very public fate of Manning and given the extent of knowledge released in his own leak, Snowden immediately sought asylum from US law enforcement in other sympathetic countries. But, it would be more than the parallel paths that would link Manning and Snowden to an elite, if not infamous, club of government leakers. Snowden’s eventual safe harbor in Russia came at the advice of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who had crossed paths with Manning just a few years prior, when he provided the army leaker with the global stage upon which to divulge the military secrets he had acquired. And, in another strange twist that demonstrates just how far ideologues will go to protect a cause, another group of hacktivists made their voices known when WikiLeaks inspired adversaries of its own.
A Legion Joins the Fight
It’s difficult to fight an army that can’t be identified, especially when the enemy has no named soldiers, let alone established leaders calling the shots. There is only a headless, amorphous group of mask-donning fighters, committed to taking on any establishment that threatens the values the collective holds dear. How does such an army wield its power? First, allow anyone to join the ranks, without requiring those pledging their allegiance to also disclose their identity. Next, let the group of unnamed volunteers democratically determine their next target through an Internet Relay Channel (IRC) , where conversations can be obfuscated and anonymity of participants protected. If the group is feeling especially charitable toward its next victim, it may come out with a declaration of war—anonymously, of course—to compel the target to repent from its undesirable ways. If the prey ignores the warning or if the behavior is so objectionable that a warning is undeserving altogether, launch the attack through software that allows each fighter to volunteer his or her computer’s processing power toward the cause—and strike with unforgiving and concerted force to take down the target’s web sites via distributed denial of service (DDoS ) attacks, essentially paralyzing its web properties under the crushing volume of repeated requests via the volunteer army of drone computers. Lather, rinse, repeat, and you have one of the most punishing and effective hacktivist groups of our day, known fittingly and only as “Anonymous.”
When Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, called on Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal to withdraw support for WikiLeaks by refusing to process donations to Assange’s nonprofit journalist organization, Anonymous unleashed its fury in a mission known as “Operation Payback ”—a campaign that initially targeted the recording industry for its antipiracy stance but was expanded to include WikiLeaks detractors adhering to the government’s request to thwart further dissemination of Manning’s leaks. In an effort to galvanize its volunteer troops and issue fair warning to possible targets, Anonymous posted the following message to broaden the scope of Operation Payback:
We will attack any organization which seeks to remove WikiLeaks from the internet or promote the censorship of the masses. Join us. TARGET THESE IP's [List of IP addresses for targeted WikiLeaks critics followed] 45
Anonymous spokespeople are few and far between—after all, anonymity is at the core of the group’s identity. However, at least one representative of the collective, known only as Coldblood, clarified that Anons (as individual members of the group are known) did not necessarily support the data that was distributed by WikiLeaks but vehemently disagreed with any form of censorship on the Internet. 46 Targeted organizations that found themselves crosswise with this ideology found their web sites disabled under Anonymous’ punishing surge—some for minutes, others for hours—with one victim, PayPal, reporting losses of £3.5 million (more than $5.5 million). 47
It may be reassuring to assume that the “typical” company would largely be immune from some hacktivist takedowns. After all, how many companies were even remotely engaged in something as sensational as the WikiLeaks scandal? Assuming a hacktivist attempt as an isolated occurrence destined for the Goliath-sized firms that inadvertently find themselves on a hacktivist group’s hit list is a comforting thought. Unfortunately, hacktivists are expanding their aperture of targets to wreak havoc more indiscriminately. Take web site defacement as a tried-and-true attack vector—a form of virtual vandalism that seizes control of and manipulates a company’s web site. As an example, the entire site can be taken down and replaced with one of the hacker’s choosing. Or, the hacker may inject code to add images or messages to the page, hijacking a company’s loyal online followers to promote a message of one’s own.
Web site defacement dates back to the early days of the Internet. In 1995, Attrition.org, a nonprofit Internet security site staffed by volunteers committed to exposing the latest cybercrime trends, began displaying web site defacements as fair warning to early businesses putting out their virtual shingles. By 2001, the group announced it would no longer report on web defacements due to their crippling volume on the organization’s altruistic volunteers. Upon releasing its statement in 2001, Attrition.org reported:
What began as a small collection of Web site defacement mirrors soon turned into a near 24/7 chore of keeping it up to date. In the last month, we have experienced single days of mirroring over 100 defaced web sites, over three times the total for 1995 and 1996 combined. 48
At the time, the group’s decision was met with little fanfare from the industry. After all, the hackers behind web site defacements were criticized as having too much time on their hands to launch benign attacks, all for personal ego. With Attrition.org no longer reporting on these pranksters’ efforts, there would be less limelight for their self-serving interests. Today, web site defacement is far more popular-according to firms that track such vandalism (much the way Attrition.org did back in the day), there have been well over one million reported incidents per year since 2010. No longer the work of pranksters, hacktivists readily use defacement as a weapon in their arsenal. In the most insidious cases, web defacement moves beyond publicly embarrassing a company to covertly inserting malicious code to infect the site’s unsuspecting visitors.
Still think the bell won’t toll for thee? In 2015, the FBI warned of Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS) hacktivist sympathizers exploiting a vulnerability for web sites using WordPress. 49 WordPress was easily the most popular blogging and content management system used by web sites at the time. How popular? By 2015, 25 percent of all web sites across the Internet used WordPress 50 -a huge target for hacktivists looking to deface digital properties on a massive scale, small and large organizations alike.
A Second Thought
Perhaps the quintessential story of the heart of an activist comes from a 19th-century Norwegian playwright named Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen literally used the stage through his plays in exposing what he believed to be the moral hypocrisy of his time. Using the pen as his sword, he debuted his seminal play An Enemy of the People in 1882 , where the protagonist is an activist who takes on the most threatening adversary of all-his entire community. Thought to be Ibsen’s metaphorical middle-finger salute to critics who excoriated the playwright for his previous works where controversial topics like incest, marital infidelity, and sexually transmitted diseases were brazenly dramatized on the theatrical stage, Enemy took the audience on a very different excursion where fighting on the side of “right” could result in very “wrong” consequences. In the fictional play, Ibsen’s “hero,” Dr. Thomas Stockmann, blows the whistle on his town’s source of tourism-its natural springs, widely promoted as healing waters, which Stockmann comes to discover are actually toxic. Believing he would be exalted for his discovery, our hero is ceremoniously ostracized by his community, left to stand alone in his principles, and facing an uncertain, if not perilous, future as the curtain falls.
So describes the fate awaiting most activists. While some are applauded for exposing a wrongdoing, the vast majority find themselves in an uphill battle, defending their actions to those they intended to protect. Perhaps that explains why almost all internal activists-the whistleblowers, for example-say they would not do it again. 51 But, whether the shape of activism comes in the form of these internal whistleblowers compelled to turn on their employers in spite of personal ramifications or a nameless, faceless legion of hackers bent on punishing organizations that act against the collective’s moral compass, the mind-set of the activist is core to his value structure. In some cases, the values are readily understood. In others, the ideology may be diametrically opposed to one’s own cultural values, landing the target directly in the crosshairs of one or many crusaders prepared to take decisive and, in their minds, corrective action.
Whether the cause in question for an activist is noble or malicious is up for debate in every case. Our point is not to evaluate the merits of an activist’s principles but to understand the incentives driving his actions. Activists believe their efforts will inspire change for the better (in this case, “better” is in the eyes of the activist himself). However, what has been fairly clearly communicated through cultural examples dating as far back as Ibsen’s Enemy is that heroes are rarely born from such efforts, providing cautionary tales to other motivated individuals willing to take on a fight that the mission must be worth the consequence. It’s one of the reasons hacktivism is such an insidious threat to unsuspecting organizations-in some cases, the hacktivists are on the right side of the fight, even if their ends cannot justify their means. And, given that hacktivists seek glory for their cause, not themselves, they will relentlessly pursue any target which they believe to be on the wrong side of the battle in their ideological war.
Since self-bravado and financial greed are not their end pursuits, hacktivists follow a decidedly different playbook than the “traditional” hacker. Look no further than the examples of activists cited in this chapter for individuals professing unwavering commitment to their cause-even at the potential expense of personal freedom. Each chose to shine the spotlight of fame upon their mission, rather than stand in it for their own glory. The Citizens’ Commission remained in the shadows for decades before coming forward. In the words of John Raines, “We didn’t need attention, because we had done what needed to be done.” 52 Despite Snowden’s controversial choice to reveal his identity, he has gone on record as saying, “I don’t want the stage. I’m terrified of giving these talking heads some distraction, some excuse to jeopardize, smear, and delegitimize a very important movement.” 53 And, Anons deliberately conceal their identity, not simply to avert personal repercussions but as a part of their movement to showcase causes, not celebrate individuals. According to Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist at McGill University and avid researcher of Anonymous, “There are surprisingly few people [within Anonymous] who violate the rule [against attention-seeking]. Those who do . . . are marginalized.” 54
When the cause is worth more than personal sacrifice and change is the ultimate reward, the probability (P) for a hacktivist attack can be summed up with the same familiar equation, though with a very different interpretation:
Incentive is the amount of change the hacktivist hopes to mobilize. The stronger the ideological principle, the greater the incentive for attack. Incentive also pertains to the notoriety available in the planned attack, but, in this case, the glory is for the cause itself, not for individual fame. Larger targets, such as the multiple leaks for the US Government by both insiders and outsiders, afford a much bigger stage for hacktivists to share their message. Importantly, the availability of pervasive media vehicles, whether in the form of traditional journalists like Betty Medsger or nontraditional outlets like WikiLeaks, provides hacktivists the audience through which to make their cause known.
Opportunity deals with how accessible, or vulnerable, the target is. While the Media break-in offered tremendous incentive for eight determined activists, the opportunity to easily penetrate such an office required months of measured planning. Likewise, some targets online will be more accessible than others-whether in vandalizing sites or readying more effective DDoS strikes against weaker defenses.
Finally, risk is the potential for being discovered and reprimanded. The higher the risk, the lower the probability; however, hacktivists arguably have the highest risk tolerance of all cybercriminal breeds. When principles are in play, personal motives fall by the wayside, causing the fiercest and most committed hacktivists to take extreme risks in support of their philosophies. Where the financially motivated criminals are driven by the dollar, hacktivists are compelled by change. Where “typical” cybercriminals dwell in the shadows, leveraging time to their advantage as they surreptitiously steal from their victims, hacktivists welcome the bang, not the whimper, when outright promoting their crusades. And, while cyberthieves focus their energy on deriving maximum profit along the path of least resistance, hacktivists seek the loudest microphone to vocalize their principles regardless of effort in finding it, creating a very different public relations challenge for their victims.
While activist causes are certainly nothing new, hacktivism brings with it unbelievable leverage in the hands of a motivated few. Consider the analogy of protesting in the streets for a cause. A dozen highly spirited people would do little more than attract fleeting attention from passersby for their mission. The chance of long-term reform with such practices is possible, but also potentially lengthy and exhausting as the Media activists found with their own traditional methods of petitioning and protesting. Before hacktivism, those same motivated individuals would be forced to resort to extreme lengths (and risk) to effect radical change, if their patience for traditional activist methods ran dry. Today’s hacktivist movements do not require armies of thousands. While it’s true that groups like Anonymous rely upon others to volunteer their computers to a botnet army, enlistees can more readily donate idle compute processing power to a cause than engage in more time-consuming pursuits of traditional activism, like marching in the streets. In the end, it only takes a few hacktivists to topple a target in a highly asymmetrical battle. As Tim Rogers, a reporter who took an inside look at Anonymous, describes:
As with the animals on Orwell’s farm, all Anonymous are equal, but some are more equal than others. It’s hard, obviously, to get a reliable estimate on the number of those elite Anons who are channel operators . . . it could be a few dozen. When those—don’t call them leaders—change the topic of an IRC channel, all the LOIC [Low Orbit Ion Cannon ]-armed computers [volunteer computers in the botnet army] linked to that channel will automatically fire at the target. That’s when embarrassing things happen to ill-prepared companies (and governments, too). 55
Yes, activism is as old as organized government itself. But radicals have been losing steam, if not inspiration, in recent decades. Recruiting the masses to one’s cause is time-consuming and requires significant commitment. Hacktivism puts the power back in the hands of a few, with the ability to quickly enlist sympathizers to their purpose, for significantly less time and trouble. As one former Anonymous member and spokesperson for the group puts it,
The full-time professional activists from the ‘80s and ‘90s didn't really have a strategy. I don't think there's been anything effective or worth taking part in since the late ‘60s. 56
But, thanks to the Internet and social media and the borderless capabilities they afford, a new kind of activist, no longer content to sit on the sidelines, is connecting to movements that otherwise may have suffered the same apathy that plagued those nonstrategic missions in the latter decades of the first millennium. Indeed, any inspired person can join a cause to expose a perceived wrongdoing, freely, anonymously, and easily-either in lending her coding talents or volunteering her computer’s processing power to a botnet army-all in the fight for principles in The Second Economy.
Notes
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International Boxing Hall of Fame, “The Fight of the Century,” www.ibhof.com/pages/archives/alifrazier.html , accessed May 19, 2016.
Michael Silver, “Where Were You on March 8, 1971?,” ESPN Classic, November 19, 2003, http://espn.go.com/classic/s/silver_ali_frazier.html , accessed May 19, 2016.
Ibid.
Carrie Johnson, “The Secret Burglary That Exposed J. Edgar Hoover's FBI,” NPR Oregon Public Broadcasting, January 7, 2014, www.npr.org/2014/01/07/260302289/the-secret-burglary-that-exposed-j-edgar-hoovers-fbi , accessed May 19, 2016.
Betty Medsger, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI (New York: Vintage Books, 2014).
Federal Bureau of Investigation, www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/directors/hoover , accessed May 20, 2016.
Medsger, note 6 supra.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Mark Mazzetti “Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows,” The New York Times, January 7, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/burglars-who-took-on-fbi-abandon-shadows.html?_r=2 , accessed May 20, 2016.
Michael Isikoff, “After 43 years, activists admit theft at FBI office that exposed domestic spying,” NBC News, January 6, 2014, http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/06/22205443-after-43-years-activists-admit-theft-at-fbi-office-that-exposed-domestic-spying?lite , accessed May 20, 2016.
Mazzetti, note 11 supra.
Ibid.
Isikoff, note 12 supra.
Betty Medsger, “Stolen FBI Documents Analyzed,” The Washington Post, May 9, 1971, p. 5, https://media.proquest.com/media/pq/hnp/doc/157384922/fmt/ai/rep/NONE?ic=1&hl=fbi&_s=oxwFIxEsu3ieyd5Lc5258iwEyUM%3D , accessed May 20, 2016.
Betty Medsger and Ken W. Clawson, “Thieves Got Over 1,000 FBI Papers,” The Washington Post, March 25, 1971, p. A1, https://media.proquest.com/media/pq/hnp/doc/144553582/fmt/ai/rep/NONE?ic=1&hl=fbi&_s=dA7dL8ii17JkoeGPKrXmkbFQRNs%3D , accessed May 20, 2016.
Ibid.
Mazzetti, note 11 supra.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Johnson, note 5 supra.
Ibid.
James Bamford, “Edward Snowden: The Untold Story,” Wired, August 22, 2014, www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden/ , accessed May 21, 2016.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Jason M. Breslow, “How Edward Snowden Leaked “Thousands” of NSA Documents,” PBS Frontline, May 13, 2014, www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-edward-snowden-leaked-thousands-of-nsa-documents/ , accessed May 21, 2016.
Ibid.
Glenn Greenwald, “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily,” The Guardian, June 6, 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order , accessed May 21, 2016.
Dan Roberts and Spencer Ackerman, “Anger swells after NSA phone records court order revelations,” The Guardian, June 6, 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/obama-administration-nsa-verizon-records , accessed May 22, 2016.
Ian Black, “NSA spying scandal: what we have learned,” The Guardian, June 10, 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/10/nsa-spying-scandal-what-we-have-learned , accessed May 21, 2016.
Ibid.
Greenwald, note 32 supra.
Barton Gellman, Aaron Blake, and Greg Miller, “Edward Snowden comes forward as source of NSA leaks,” The Washington Post, June 9, 2013, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/intelligence-leaders-push-back-on-leakers-media/2013/06/09/fff80160-d122-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html , accessed May 22, 2016.
Ibid.
Bamford, note 25 supra.
Paul Lewis, “Bradley Manning trial revealed a lonely soldier with a troubled past,” The Guardian, August 21, 2013b, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/21/bradley-manning-lonely-soldier-childhood , accessed May 22, 2016.
Ibid.
Paul Lewis, “Bradley Manning given 35-year prison term for passing files to WikiLeaks,” The Guardian, August 21, 2013a, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/21/bradley-manning-35-years-prison-wikileaks-sentence , accessed May 22, 2016.
Brad Knickerbocker, “Bradley Manning trial closing arguments ask: Why did he do it?,” The Christian Science Monitor, July 25, 2013, www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2013/0725/Bradley-Manning-trial-closing-arguments-ask-Why-did-he-do-it , accessed May 22, 2016.
Lewis, note 42 supra.
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Brian Krebs, “FBI Warns of Fake Govt Sites, ISIS Defacements,” KrebsonSecurity, April 7, 2015, http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/04/fbi-warns-of-fake-govt-sites-isis-defacements/ , accessed June 1, 2016.
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Richard Lacayo and Amanda Ripley, “Persons of The Year 2002: The Whistleblowers,” Time, December 30, 2002, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,1003998-3,00.html , accessed May 24, 2016.
Mazzetti, note 11 supra.
Bamford, note 25 supra.
David Kushner, “The Masked Avengers,” The New Yorker, September 8, 2014, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/masked-avengers , accessed May 24, 2016.
Tim Rogers, “Barrett Brown Is Anonymous,” D Magazine, April 2011, www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2011/april/how-barrett-brown-helped-overthrow-the-government-of-tunisia?page=2 , accessed June 1, 2016.
Ibid.
Kushner, note 54 supra.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Rogers, note 55 supra.