There's a hazy line between hackers and activists. According to hacktivism expert Annaliza Savage, it's growing hazier every day.

Annaliza Savage, producer and director of the 1995 documentary Unauthorized Access, took an insider's look at the computer cracker underground. The film, which featured hacktivists in the United States, the Netherlands, and Germany, was well-received in the hacker community.

Savage has also written for Wired News, the London Guardian, and various other US, English, and Japanese magazines. Currently, she produces ZDTV's Extended Play and has contributed as a features producer for CyberCrime. In this month's column, Savage explores hacktivism, or hacking as a means of activism.

The politics of hacking
In my experience, most hackers are apolitical. They are interested in technology itself, such as the hardware, the configurations, and how to get into systems. Hacking is generally not about what can be done with information once it is collected or once the hardware is hacked.

In my travels, however, I've come across a few exceptions to the rule. During Serbia's ethnic cleansing campaign in Sarajevo, German hacker group FoeBuD set up an electronic bulletin board system (BBS) in the war zone to improve communications and promote peace. FoeBuD has also distributed encryption tools to the public to improve online privacy in Europe.

The now defunct Dutch group Hack-Tic had roots in the anarchist BBS scene and was constantly involved in projects of social relevance. Cypherpunks — whose cryptography expertise benefits political activists, privacy-savvy consumers, and businesses that incorporate offshore — have always advocated alternatives to corporate dominance, and Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600 magazine is a modern-day Abbie Hoffman. Then there's the Cult of the Dead Cow, whose Situationist antics have led the Chinese government off the trail of Hong Kong Blonde. I'd say more, but then they'd have to kill me.

Conventional wisdom had it that as technology became more accessible, hackers would become activists. Instead, activists are becoming hackers.

In East Timor, freedom fighters hacked into Indonesian websites to protest the treatment of the Timorese by the Indonesian army. You can see a mirror of the hack at attrition.org.



In southern Mexico, indigenous peoples in the impoverished state of Chiapas demanded the rights to health care, schooling, and independence. The Zapatista uprising went largely unnoticed until, with the help of Internet hackers and mainstream groups such as Greenpeace and Ammesty International, Zapatista leader Subcommandante Marcos got the word out on the Web. Today the Zapatista movement is an international cause célébré and the Subcommandante has become a modern day Che Guevara, almost a mythological figure.

Other grassroots groups like Labor.net, Peace.net, and Green.net have seized the networks to spread their political messages. Anarchist groups are all also over the place. So, however, are Nazi groups, hate groups, and the far Right.

Ultimately, the movement so many activists are hoping for may not come from the streets of Seattle, DC, Philadelphia, or LA. It may come from a World Wide Web near you. It's called "hacktivism" and it's striking fear into the hearts of governments and corporations even as you read this. Hacktivism doesn't mean hacking your way into a site just to live a graffiti-like "I r00lz" tag behind, it means blurring the lines between hackers and activists, in the dangerous and essential task of challenging the powers that be.