From Noobguides to #Opkkk: Ethics of Anonymous' Tactical Technical Communication

Technical Communication Quarterly

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From NoobGuides to #OpKKK: Ethics of Anonymous’ Tactical Technical Communication

Jared S. Colton, Steve Holmes & Josephine Walwema

To cite this article: Jared S. Colton, Steve Holmes & Josephine Walwema (2017) From NoobGuides to #OpKKK: Ethics of Anonymous’ Tactical Technical Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly, 26:1, 59-75, DOI: 10.1080/10572252.2016.1257743 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2016.1257743

Published online: 07 Dec 2016.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=htcq20 TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 2017, VOL. 26, NO. 1, 59–75 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2016.1257743

From NoobGuides to #OpKKK: Ethics of Anonymous’ Tactical Technical Communication

Jared S. Coltona, Steve Holmesb, and Josephine Walwemac aUtah State University; bGeorge Mason University; cOakland University

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Tactical technical communication research suggests its application to social Anonymous; care; Cavarero; justice. However, beyond a general advocacy of anti-institutional activity, de ethics; tactical technical Certeau’s notion of tactics provides no detailed ethical framework for communication ethically justifying tactics. In acknowledgement of this gap, this article foregrounds the ethical thought of feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, particularly her concept of vulnerability, as a supplement for those employing tactics for social justice causes. The authors examine the technical documents produced by the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

Introduction A growing number of technical communicators have engaged de Certeau’s(1984) “tactics” via Kimball’s(2006) definition of tactical technical communication (Ding, 2009; Rice, 2009; Seigel, 2013; Towner, 2013). In brief, tactics describe the various ways in which often individuals who are marginalized can appropriate strategies of control to suit their own ends. In employing tactics, consumers who were once passive of dominant or mass culture shift to active producers, thereby blurring the lines for technical communicators between the composition of formal technical documents and informal or do-it-yourself (DIY) modes, genres, and styles. Although such inroads represent excellent starting places, the use of de Certeau (1984) by technical communicators is complicated by several factors, including the need to consider the ways in which we evaluate the ethics of a given set of tactical practices. Building on Kimball’s research, Ding (2009) notes that de Certeau ideally hopes that tactics will be a kairotic “art of the weak” in which technical communicators learn to observe when “the precise instant of an intervention is transform[ed] into a favorable situation”, p. 39). Tactics “vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of” dominant power structures (p. 37). Nevertheless, as we demonstrate below, de Certeau’s writing (1980, 1984) does not offer a fully developed ethical framework beyond a generalized defense of autonomous initiatives. As an example, consider his definition of an ethic of tenacity as “refusing to accord the established order the status of law, a meaning, or a fatality” (p. 26). In an observation we in no way mean as dismissive of his important contributions, de Certeau (1980, 1984) does not clarify in detail how individuals might employ the ethic of tenacity to differentiate ethical from unethical established orders beyond echoing his general dislike of capitalist institutions. Furthermore, the ethics of tactics as an art of the weak is made even more complicated by the increasing interconnection of tactical technical communication with social justice, social media, and hacking practices. The hacktivist collective Anonymous, for instance, circulates many forms of tactical technical communication on behalf of the weak such as a Self-Defense Handbook (Anonymous [Defense Front], 2014), which recently surfaced in the 2015 Ferguson, Missouri, protests (OpFerguson). Among other practices, the Self-Defense Handbook instructs users how to

CONTACT Jared S. Colton [email protected] Department of English, Utah State University, 3200 Old Main Hill, Logan, UT 84322. © 2017 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing 60 J. S. COLTON ET AL. create DIY gas masks out of 2 liter soda bottles to protect themselves against police tear gas. Anonymous also has created a large number of hybrid technical documents that “doxx” (short for “dropping documents”), or publicize the private information of individuals associated with a targeted groups. As part of their 2015 OpKKK initiative that followed OpFerguson, Anonymous released an informational memo that offered users a brief rationale for the purpose of the document as well as the addresses and phone numbers of the White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and Stormfront. In a confirmation of the ethical ambiguity of doxxing as a tactical practice, Anonymous previously threatenedtodoxxtheschoolscheduleoftheteenagedaughterofJohnBelmar,thepolicechiefof Ferguson, Missouri. Anonymous’ goal was to force Belmar to release the names of the officers who had shot Michael Brown, the African American victim whose death was the catalyst for the 2014 protests, by potentially exposing a tangentially related target to the threat of physical harm, stalking, or other forms of online and offline harassment. Simply put, we suggest that there is nothing inherent in a given technical document that supports tactical practices or that functions tactically in itself that makes a tactic ethical or unethical in all scenarios. To be clear, de Certeau (1980, 1984) does not explicitly make this claim even if the largely leftist political bent that animates his thinking strongly implies it. As a result, technical communicators’ interests in de Certeau (1984) can benefit from further considerations of when a given set of tactical technical communicationpracticessuchasAnonymous’ are ethical, even when they claim to be operating in the name of “the weak.” This article suggests that one helpful starting place lies in a body of thought called the “ethics of care,” and, in particular, the thinking of the feminist philosopher Cavarero (2011). Rather than looking for a correct universal ethical principle through the categorical imperative, such as Kant’s (1969) absolute prohibition against lying, an ethics of care recognizes moral value in the reciprocal and singular relations of caring between individuals that ensures one another’s well-being. Cavarero’s unique approach to care ethics is through her development of the concept of “vulnerability.” She posits that vulnerability is an ontological characteristic of being human, which, for Cavarero, makes human relationality—one human’s existence exposed to another’s—already per- meated with ethicality. Because no individual can escape vulnerability, each human body is “irremediably open” to relations of “caring or wounding” (p. 20). Each and every living human being is always in a vulnerable relation to others, but the degree to which that relation is one of caring or wounding depends upon on localized and concrete factors, such as materiality, age, time, space, and power. For Cavarero, wounding and caring do not correspond to a basic binary (e.g., wounding = bad, caring = good). Rather, these terms offer a set of fluid ratios to allow us to characterize the totality of relations of those affected by a given tactical action, and, in turn, to attribute ethical behavior which, in some cases, will involve wounding certain individuals to help ensure our collective ability to ensure an ethics of care for the most vulnerable. To illustrate this extension of de Certeau (1984), we analyze the ethics of three of Anonymous’ recent technical communication genres that demonstrate an ambiguous ethical status. First, we examine two instructional guides for hacking, the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b) and the Twatter Reporter Guide (Anonymous, 2015c), and, secondly, we examine the OpKKK doxx memo (Anonymous [Defense Front], 2014) that released the private information of alleged White suprema- cists. We have selected these three examples because they are representative of the types of technical documents that Anonymous has employed over the past decade. Anonymous has circulated multiple versions of the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b) and Twatter Reporter Guide (Anonymous, 2015c)on the Internet alongside various “Ops” (operations). In fact, the particular documents that we examine in this article surfaced in OpISIS and OpParis to encourage users to initiate tactical forms of resistance against The Islamic State of Iraq’s (ISIS) online presence. Similarly, doxxing represents a pervasive tactic. Anonymous has released or has threatened to publish memos that doxx various groups or individuals as part of countless past Ops. Furthermore, unlike some early Anonymous trolling practices, such as ordering pizzas for someone without his or her knowledge, signing up a targeted individual to receive junk mail, or Rickrolling, all three tactical technical documents share some TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 61 relationship to exigencies of social justice (e.g., securing a voice for the unrepresented). As a result, technical communicators will be able to gain additional insight from our analysis into how Cavarero’s (2011) ethical approach can inform discussions of tactical technical communication as well as support our field’s resurgent interest in social justice.

De Certeau and social justice in tactical technical communication Recently, social justice has emerged as a key term and topic of interest in the field of technical communication. This emergence has taken various forms, such as paying more attention to localization in our research practices (Agboka, 2013b), shifting our efforts toward intercultural sites (Agboka, 2013a, 2014; Dura, Singhal, & Elias, 2013; Savage & Agboka, 2016; Walton, Price, & Zraly, 2013), interrogating the relationship of technical communication and social justice (Leydens, 2012), and pushing for teaching social justice in higher education technical communication programs and classrooms (Colton & Walton, 2015; Savage & Mattson, 2011). Considered broadly, this surging interest in social justice asks technical communication practitioners and scholars alike to take into account (local and global) violations of human rights and neglect of under-resourced users and stakeholders (Haas, 2012; Walton & Jones, 2013; Jones & Walton, forthcoming). Even though Kimball’s(2006) work on de Certeau (1984) is not explicitly in dialogue with social justice, it is has been taken up in relationship to these concerns in ways that are connected to cultural critique and social justice (see, e.g., Ding, 2009, whom we discuss briefly below). Although scholars may be quick to align tactical technical communication with concerns of social justice because of its anti-institutional ethic of tenacity (de Certeau, 1984), such an ethical motive of social justice, equality, or politics broadly construed is not necessarily inherent in tactical technical communication practices. Although not discounting all forms of social justice achievable within institutions, de Certeau (1984) is specifically interested in a wide range of practices of resistance that occur in nonprogrammatic and noninstitutional spaces against institutional hierarchies. To offer a brief summary of his thinking, strategies are logics, rules, or systems for organizing knowledge, genres, spaces, or bodies. They can range from the benign and pragmatic (street signs, cross walks, grammar rules) to the manipulative (prohibitions on certain activities by certain people in certain spaces such as segregation). By contrast, tactics call attention to the unsanctioned or unpredictable communicative activities that users caught up in these strategic systems can manifest as forms of everyday resistance. As with strategies, tactics can be relatively nonpolitical or explicitly political in nature. Of the former, de Certeau (1984)providesan example of an office secretary who composes a love note during her scheduled employment hours. By contrast, he describes more explicitly political tactics such as when a cabinet maker borrows a lathe from his employer without permission to make a piece of furniture at home for his or her personal use (p. 25). In the latter example, de Certeau (1984) locates the nascent threads of a specifically anti-capitalist form of resistance because the use of the tool is not directed toward producing profit for the owner (p. 25). As technical communicators have engaged his work, there are several ways tactics fit into technical communication documents, which are helpful to outline because similar elements are also evident in Anonymous’ technical documents (2015a, 2015b, 2015c). Although Kimball (2006) gestures toward a broad range of texts, practices, technologies, and issues, he primarily explicates tactical technical communication by examining narrative-based instructables to DIY manuals related to car repair. In his first example, Kimball characterizes several elements of how Muir’s(1969) How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive! DIY car repair manual enacts a tactic:

(1) personal narrative: “Accordingly, the manual avoided a traditional anonymous or institutional viewpoint, speaking instead through the author’s subjective narratives and idiosyn- cratic voice” (p. 75). Muir included personal testimonies that “humanized technology and 62 J. S. COLTON ET AL.

situated the reader in a local, personal relationship with the car as its maintainer and master, rather than in an institutional relationship making the reader merely an operator” (p. 76). (2) bricolage (“an arrangement made with the ‘materials at hand’”): the type of procedures that Muir’s manual describes how to conduct are not those that the car manufacturer would recommend (de Certeau, 1984, p. 174). Rather, the materials, spaces, and technologies that Muir describes are all aimed at enabling primarily nonsanctioned or unofficial forms of car repair with whatever tools are at the owner’s disposal.

Although there is more overlap with Kimball (2006) than divergence, additional characteristics from Ding’s(2009) subsequent discussion of tactical technical communication are useful to consider as well. Building in part on Kimball’s essay, Ding (2009) examined what she called extrainstitutional channels that contest the power structure in times of crisis (p. 329). Through these channels tactical technical communicators

(1) create resistance (2) attract and sustain attention to a cause (3) demand and, in some cases, succeed in obtaining redress.

In the context of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak and risk communication research (Grabill & Simmons, 1998), Ding (2009) explored an issue particularly appropriate to our case study, the “rhetoric of proclamation, which was used by anonymous rhetors who made short, dramatic, decontextualized, and often exaggerated proclamations to large, attentive, and receptive audiences. The content of these proclamations was often unverified, and the anonymous rhetors used guerrilla media to communicate them” (p. 331). Similar to Kimball (2006), Ding examined how the style of personal (informal) narratives are interspersed within these proclamations. Kimball (2006) did recognize that some tactical technical communication may be a dangerous form of extrainstitutional practice (p. 84) and Ding (2009) found that complications associated with tactics border on “ethical decision making and civic action” (p. 344). Thus, though public participation is lauded and civic engagement encouraged (Simmons, 2007), the line between ethical and unethical tactics can easily be blurred. With the example of the secretary’s love letter as a case in point, it is clear that a tactic always exists in opposition to a strategy. However, does it follow that writing a love letter on a company’stimeis automatically an ethical good, solely because the act opposes a strategy? Ethics and politics undeniably motivated de Certeau’s(1980) thinking. Indeed, he explored tactics because they demonstrate possibilities foreverydayresistanceoutsideofprogrammaticorofficial political institutions. Given his references to Foucault (1995), it is clear also that de Certeau (1980) privileged the general expression of autonomy against systems of control with the ostensible goal of reconfiguring power differently (in Foucault’ssense[1995]).1 This push for autonomy is built into de Certeau’s(1980) ethic of tenacity as we noted in the Introduction section to this article; nevertheless, his discussion still leaves readers to question how and in what way such autonomy automatically equates to an ethical good for all involved or affected by a tactic. Consider the following passage from de Certeau (1980):

[T]he . . . effective order of things . . . is subverted by just such “popular” tactics for their own ends, without any illusions as to their ultimate practical effects. Where dominating powers exploit the order of things, where ideological discourse represses or ignores it, tactics fool this order. . .. Thereby the institution one is called to serve finds itself infiltrated by a style of social exchange, a style of technical invention, and a style of moral resistance—that is, an economy of the “gift” (generosities . . .), an aesthetic of “moves” or “strikes,” and an ethic of tenacity (ways to deny the established order any legitimacy). (p. 4) A repressive “order” means a specific, dominant political framework (e.g., capitalist, anti-individual autonomy) to de Certeau (1980). Yet, to play devil’s advocate, an order’s degrees of repressive- ness or oppressiveness can mean something entirely different depending on the perspective of the participants. For example, the type of libertarian autonomy demanded by the tactics of the 2015 to TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 63

2016 White militia occupation of a Burns, Oregon, Land Management Bureau Office could also be considered a tactical form of resistance. The various militia actors viewed the U.S. Government as a dominating power that was exploiting (e.g., by owning and controlling) land that should have been owned by private citizens. Hence, the militia’s tactical activities included the appropriation of federal property in the name of individual autonomy. The militias even created tactical technical communication documents such as procedural guidelines to regulate a so-called kangaroo court to put the U.S. Government on trial (following Joaquin Mariano DeMoreta-Folch, a Tea Party activist’s procedures for holding secret citizen panels to create indictments for government officials; Quinlan, 2016).

Complicating tactical technical communication with an ethics of care To reiterate our motives in writing this article, we do not mean the previous comparison as a direct criticism of de Certeau’s(1980) work. Rather, our goal is to highlight the need to push on his thinking to better account for such situations, as he tends to presuppose an ideal of resistance to dominant strategies to be of a Marxian or—at least—progressive character. As a result, our belief is that de Certeau’s(1980) thinking can benefit from supplementation with ethical frameworks that are at once respective of the diversity of tactical responses, though nevertheless addressing more clearly how and when a given tactic might be justified as an ethical good and when it may be ethically questionable. In this section, we advocate for a particular ethical framework—care ethics—to supplement tactical technical communication toward an end that enables technical communicators to find and think about moral justification in their tactical practices. We then follow this section with an ethical analysis of Anonymous’ particular brand of tactical technical communication. Although some attention has been paid to ethics of care in technical communication scholarship (Dombrowski, 1999; Lay, 2004; Markel, 2001), related fields, such as rhetoric and composition, engaged with care ethics most prominently at the end of the 20th century (see, e.g., Kirsch & Ritchie, 1995) and continues to see the application of care ethics with other frameworks in the writing classroom today (Henning, 2011). By extension, we suggest considering the ethical thought of the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero (2011), whose particular emphasis on the concept of vulnerability helps to further these conversations through a renewed interest on the body, materiality, and we argue, digital tactical technical communication. Cavarero’s(2011) contribution to care ethics is less a heuristic for determining exactly what are right and wrong actions and more a lens for questioning how one ethically justifies certain actions in relation to others. Key to understanding Cavarero’s idea of care is her concept of vulnerability, which for Cavarero is an ontological characteristic of being human. By this she means that no human can escape vulnerability and that our vulnerable relation to others continually shapes who we are and those with whom we come in contact. From birth to death, each of us is always vulnerable to physical, mental, and emotional harms and cares from others, though this vulnerability differs in degree depending upon a variety of kairotic factors affecting our relational exposure to others, such as one’s age, health, and the social and material conditions in which the relation is embedded— whether more traditional “physical” environments or those of a digital nature. This ontological category of vulnerability is always important to ethics because our relations to each other are never neutral and never limited to social factors such as familiarity or collegiality. Particularly important to ethical considerations is the fact that inscribed in our ontological vulnerability with others (all others) are two alternative responses: caring and wounding (Cavarero, 2011, p. 20). Just as we cannot avoid our own vulnerability, no human can escape responding to those with whom she or he is in a relation. Unlike more traditional notions of care (see, e.g., Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 1984), in which the relationship focused on was often familial or personal, Cavarero (2011) maintains that vulnerable relations extend to anyone with whom we come in contact, whether through intentional or unintentional action. All relationality with others 64 J. S. COLTON ET AL. produces a response of either care or wounding, and sometimes both, as these two poles are less a binary and more of a spectrum. Whether one consciously decides to care for or wound another, our ethical responsibility is already present in the fact of the relation. For example, in many relations “the arresting of a violent hand is not enough” (Cavarero, 2011, p. 24), as even “letting be” could be a form of wounding, depending upon the degree of vulnerability of the person with whom one is in a relation. Our ethical responsibility emerges in the fact that the relation even exists. Cavarero’s(2011) notions of caring and wounding via the recognition of vulnerability complicates tactics in multiple ways, perhaps most tellingly in the realizations that no relation to others is neutral, that our relations to others may not be the result of intentional action, and that the same act may be one of wounding in one relation and one of caring in another, depending upon the degree of vulnerability of those in the relation. An ethic of care supplemented by Cavarero’s notion of vulnerability would recognize that the various modes of tactics—appropriating dominant strategies, moving from consuming to producing, employing the unpredictability of personal narrative and bricolage as informal modes of production to resist an oppressor—each may be directed toward wounding an oppressor and caring for the weak, but such tactics do not necessarily only affect those toward whom the tactic is directed. To revisit the Oregon Militia’s response, we might agree that their aims were tactical. However, in occupying the Land Management Bureau, the federal government—a body the militia intended to wound—is not the only body of people affected by the militia’s actions. The militia’s armed presence, which disrupted the daily operation of public schools, by contrast, caused the very local citizens who, in part, the militias claimed to be speaking on behalf of, to fear for their lives. In addition, the tactics of the militia took place on lands a Paiute tribe uses for sacred religious and cultural ceremonies. The Guardian (Williams, 2016) reported that the 41-day occupation left simmering tensions with various people and groups in the aftermath. Besides the refuge itself, a wildlife sanctuary and native sacred land now desecrated is being designated a crime scene, well over 70% of the residents are employed by the Bureau, which means their livelihood was in jeopardy (Williams, 2016). At least on a local level, the militia seemed to have wounded more than it helped to sustain conditions under which individuals can enact care for one another. By many accounts, they failed to account for the actual desires of the most vulnerable people in relation to its actions. Cavarero (2011) noted, “Having established that vulnerability is a permanent status of the human being, whereas finding oneself helpless—except for in infancy and, sometimes, extreme old age—depends on circumstances, it should be added that the circumstances may vary widely” (p. 31). Especially in the age of digital networks, we can neither assume that the only beings affected by our actions are those to whom are actions are directed, nor can we suppose that the various people in relation to a single act have the same degree of vulnerability. In other words, the effect of an action toward one person is not necessarily the ethical equivalent to the effect that action has on a different person in relation to that action. The tactics of the militia, though directed at the federal government, took place within multiple relations of vulnerability—militia/federal government, militia/ public schoolchildren, militia/Paiute tribe, to name a few. Of course, it is possible to go even further than Cavarero’s(2011) human interest and consider elements such as the militia/environment relation. Each of these relations exposes different degrees of vulnerability. Each, therefore, requires different considerations of care. One way to determine the ethics of a given tactic is discern whether it ultimately stems from a move away from or toward what Cavarero (2011)called“horrorism.” She argued that each individual’s vulnerability stems from his or her uniqueness or absolute singularity as a corporeal body. Each of us has different beliefs, bodies, attitudes, histories, and ways of knowing the world. As a result, our bodily actions gain meaning in relationship to other bodies. The singular self is constituted by its exposure to the other. What we perceive as social forms of existence are dependent upon this exposure since, by definition, this relation demonstrates our uniqueness. By contrast, horrorism seeks to destroy this uniqueness by disfiguring bodies (“dismemberment”). Simply put, horrorism exists when strategies of control—to use de Certeau’s(1980) phrase—are predicated upon the disregard for, denial, or lack of TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 65 recognizing this exposure to others. In the publicized torture scenes of Abu Graib prison, for example, the American guards’ actions toward their Afghani and Iraqi prisoners were not dependent upon making themselves vulnerable to the judgment of others (their prisoners). An ethics built upon vulnerability is precisely this recognition that humans are mutually vulnerable and dependent upon one another for survival. As a result, vulnerability functions as one way in which we can understand whether a given tactic cares for an individual’s singularity and maintains vulnerability or, instead, works toward horrorism and the denial of singularity, the worst examples of the latter being extreme dehumanization through genocide or torture. As we demonstrate below, one of the advantages of a care ethics informed by Cavarero’s(2011) notion of vulnerability is that we do not have to decide in advance whether a given tactic (doxxing, for example) is a universally ethical or unethical tactic. Rather, her thought enables us to evaluate the ethics of tactics via vulnerability on a case-by-case basis with singularity and horrorism as evaluative indexes (not unlike Aristotle’s golden mean in virtue ethics). In other words, tactics are neither ethical nor unethical in totality, and, by extension, not all wounding is unethical or all caring ethical. As technical communicators desire to practice tactics, they must consider those who are affected by their practices, recognizing that an act of care for one may be an act of wounding another. In recognizing that no act, especially when in relation to social justice, is never neutral and potentially taking part simultaneously in caring and wounding, technical communicators should be able to justify such actions in those terms. To sum up, identifying a technical communication practice as tactical does automatically equate to moral justification. Particularly because the former cannot be equated to the latter, it is paramount to supplement the use of de Certeau’s(1980) thinking with ethical considerations such as Cavarero’s(2011).

Tactical technical communication and ethics of anonymous Although ambiguous at times, the effects of tactical technical communication can be far reaching. Discussing tactics, Rice (2009)stated,“In the rhetoric of new media, ‘hacking’ is the most easily applied word in such conversations when we consider information organization” (p. 232). Although many of Anonymous’ (2015a, 2015b, 2015c) practices can be identified as tactical because they appear to be an art of the weak and are tenacious in the context of resisting an oppressor, evaluating the ethical value of the tactical technical communication of Anonymous is not an easy task. It is true that certain elements of the hacktivist collective’s methods appear to fit the genre of tactical technical communication, and its practicesembodydeCerteau’s(1980) ethic of tenacity; however, it would seem there are certain examples of its tactics that technical communicators would be more in favor of endorsing, where others definitely urge one toward worry, hesitance, and even ire—instances where certain tactics intentionally wound an oppressor and care for the marginalized but neglect perhaps the most vulnerable in relation to those tactics. Although we wish it were otherwise, the uses of personal narrative and bricolage in designing manuals toward the defeat of ISIS and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) are not inherently ethical or unethical in totality simply because using them creates moments of resistance, attracts attention to a cause, or demands redress; these practices are not inherently ethical because they avoid relying upon forms of control and predictability so prevalent in institutional strategies. As a result, applying an ethic of care to these situations can help one find moral justification in or at least expose the ethical complexity of such tactical practices in which the lines seem blurred. Anonymous (2015a, 2015b, 2015c) offers an excellent test case for tactics precisely because they have no unified political ideology or institutional motive. Anonymous (2015a, 2015b, 2015c) defies any simple classification and description because its members’ various practices are so wide ranging in nature (Coleman, 2014). Despite existing in years previous, July 29, 2007 marked its appearance to American audiences due to its members’ response to negative Fox News coverage (so called hackers on steroids) (Coleman, 2014, p. 1). At times Anonymous is motivated by what proverbially seems like “trolling for the sake of trolling.”“Doing it for the ‘lulz,’” to invoke one of their unique idioms, refers to a deviant style of human communication designed to satirize any individual who takes 66 J. S. COLTON ET AL. himself or herself too seriously on the internet. When the soda Mountain Dew tried to promote brand awareness through the Internet in its Dub the Dew contest to name the new flavor, members of Anonymous along with other troll collectives voted en masse on the online voting poll to the point where “Diabeetus,” a name designed to satirize the unhealthy nature of the sugary soda product, was the most tallied vote. Lulz was achieved as Mountain Dew was forced to abandon the competition entirely (Rosenfeld, 2012). Yet, as the anthropologist Coleman (2014) has ably documented through her pioneering ethnographic study of the group, Anonymous (2015a, 2015b, 2015c) eventually shifted from apolitical trolling to political exigencies via “Ops” (operations), with the recent #OpKKK in Fall 2015 being only one of the latest manifestations. Famous Ops in the past include hacking the Tunisian government in January 2011, supporting Spain’s indignados, and the Occupy WallStreet movement. 2008 marked their infamous battle with the Church of Scientology, and 2010 was when Anonymous Operations, or AnonOps, started Operation Avenge Assange in support of exiled Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (Coleman, 2014). Despite Anonymous’ (2015a, 2015b, 2015c) recent support of various progressive causes, Coleman (2014) wisely has warned against attributing their motives in a given Op or series of Ops to any programmatic cohesion or unified ideological position. Coleman stated, “beyond a foundational commitment to the maintenance of anonymity and a broad dedication to the free flow of information, Anonymous (2015a, 2015b, 2015c) has no consistent philosophy or political program” (p. 3). In this sense, most if not all of Anonymous’ political efforts could be considered tactics, as they have no dominant or overarching strategy that they consistently target with the goal of developing a formal political institution or regularized set of practices akin to a strategy (in de Certeau’s[1980]sense). As Rice’s(2009) use of Latour in relation to tactics reminds us, there is no revolution or tactical activity without networks, and networks are composed, among other things, by tactical procedural manuals that instruct individuals on how to participate in tactics. As one example, Anonymous (2015a, 2015b, 2015c) found its efforts to spam the Swedish company Sulake’s Habbo Hotel social media platform encumbered by the network’s spam filters. In response, Anonymous (2015a, 2015b, 2015c) and their allies quickly drafted and circulated a set of procedural instructions on the 4Chan bulletin board to help spammers continue their attacks, which were motivated by user accusations that the (White) system administrators were disproportionately banning users with African American avatars (Bakioglu, 2009). Similar supporting documents are also evidence of Anonymous’ (2015a, 2015b, 2015c) tactical activity. Despite the fact that Anonymous utilizes tactical technical communication across many of its activities, there is a larger difference in political stakes between spamming Sulake’s Habbo Hotel on unproven allegations of racism and creating technical manuals to support Ferguson, Missouri, protesters. The Anonymous Defense Front (2014), for example, posted the Self Defense Handbook (which we mention in the Introduction) to their Facebook and Twitter profiles to help Ferguson protesters learn how to convert 2-liter soda bottles (bricolage) into DIY gas masks to protect against police tear gas. Our contention in this essay, of course, is that Cavarero’s(2011) ethical philosophy can provide us with a series of evaluative frameworks to help differentiate how wounding and caring manifest for various tactics. Over the past few decades, Anonymous (2015a, 2015b, 2015c) has authored a series of so-called NoobGuides, which are basic instructional guides for hacking a range of Internet and social media platforms, from creating basic Twitter spam bots to authoring more complex forms of Internet sabotage (discussed below). In addition to releasing different or new iterations of various hacking guides or manuals, Anonymous (2015a, 2015b, 2015c) frequently publishes simple instructions for non-technology literate social media users. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, for example, OpParis specified the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as a target of interest for Anonymous affiliates. Following the November 2015 Paris Massacre, Anonymous rereleased a group of three related manuals specifically devoted to DIY hacking of ISIS’s social media presence, including the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b) and Twatter Reporter Guide (Anonymous, 2015c). Each is posted to a particular type of website text-sharing platform called Pastebins or Ghostbins. These guides called for collective action against ISIS for the Paris Massacre. A brief summary and ethical analysis of each follows. The objective of these manuals is encapsulated in the image below. TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 67

The NoobGuide

As we indicated in the Introduction section, multiple iterations of the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b) exist online. We selected the version in Figure 1. because it was recently circulated in the context of OpISIS and OpParis in 2015 to ostensibly encourage tactical action against ISIS. Called a “simplistic and minimalist reference guide” by the anonymous authors, the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b)instructsa nonexpert audience on some of the general fundamentals of hacking. Not to be confused with the term newb (e.g., a beginner with a desire to learn more about a given subject), a noob refers to an individual who has no wish to gain any skill in higher-level programming or hacking abilities (Urban Dictionary, 2007). The NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b) offers a very broad-based introduction to the types of knowledges that a user would need to carry out a variety of hacking tasks, including OS Picking, Wireless Cards, Anonymity, Password Cracking Tools, Man in the Middle Attacks, Website Scanning, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), and All In All. The NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b) also endeavors to help users ensure their online privacy while hacking (within the realm of possibility) through using Tor browsing and virtual private networks (VPNs) . It also instructs the users how to locate various tools and other manuals for more advanced knowledge. Along the lines of de Certeau’s(1980) tactics, the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b) subverts various formal technical genres to resist dominant logics about acceptable and unacceptable forms of coding. An illustration of this point lies in a comparison between Anonymous (2015b) and the W3Schools (2016), a free online programming education website that offers potential codes countless instructional webtexts to learn virtually any coding language. The W3Schools offer certification programs for a wide range of marketable industry skills related to software development. For example, when a user learns the R coding language, a statistical modeling language often used by digital humanities scholars for data visualization (among other processes), the W3Schools’ instructional modules contain examples that help the user calculate and visualize statistics for a hypothetical accounting firms in a simulation of industry needs. W3Schools also follows typical legitimation practices, such as copyright and creating login information. By comparison, W3Schools users will find no readings or lessons assigned that utter the NoobGuide’s (Anonymous, 2015b) phrase:

it is important for you to understand that “hacking” is a broad term. There are many aspects to it, most of which require several programming skills, but that shouldn’t stop you from using the tools made available by the internet for you to take advantage of.

Figure 1. The Anonymous NoobGuide (2015b) for the people willing to learn how to hack. 68 J. S. COLTON ET AL.

Neither will W3Schools recommend “password hacking” as a specialization emphasis for its user base. In a sense, W3Schools teaches practices that enable individuals to attain legal success in business contexts, while the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b) defines formalized coding literacy as a dominant strategy to resist. W3Schools trains users to help social media companies build and maintain their networks, whereas the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b) teaches users how to destroy these same networks. With respect to training users how to destroy networks, Cavarero’s(2011) thinking is useful to help determine when a tactical action enabled by the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b) can be considered an ethical activity. When we think about vulnerability in general, a tactical guide that teaches individuals tactical practices would seem to confirm that the vulnerable party would be the social media or other network hosts that a noob hacker might target and damage (wound). By contrast but alongside such considerations, Cavarero’s(2011) framework demonstrates that one of the foremost vulnerable parties at issue in this particular document is the noob user. For example, the guide warns the user that hacking is an illegal act that might land a reader in legal trouble. On the one hand, this element is consistent with Dragga and Tebeaux (2015) who write that technical instructions should be clear, complete, and contain adequate warnings. The warnings are meant to help the potential hacker safeguard against being identified. On the other hand, Anonymous (2015b) here recognizes the extreme vulnerability—in Cavarero’s(2011) sense—of the “noob” hacker and provides warning language to dissuade the user from engaging in practices that may expose this vulnerability to those who can harm him or her:

if anybody tells you to use tools such as LOIC, XOIX, HOIC or any other similar tools [describe what kind of tools these are], do not listen to them since they obviously are not aware of the incredibly high risks of getting caught when using them. (Anonymous, 2015b, para. 8) Although Anonymous provides no mechanism of control or predictability for following up with or monitoring noob users, as one might see in institutional strategies such as W3Schools, the authors of the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b) recognize that refraining from providing such warnings would be akin to an act of deliberately exposing the noob users to harm. Such an act of refrain in other contexts, with more experienced hackers, for example, would not be seen as an act of wounding, as more experienced hackers would have a lesser degree of vulnerability, at least in the context of hacking. Our interest in the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b) also stems from the fact that it prompts us to remember Cavarero’s(2011) main claim: vulnerability is not just a generalized description of any and all individuals who might suffer some type of harm or require care in response to a tactical action—hacking or otherwise. An ethics of vulnerability does not authorize universal claims such as all forms of tactical hacking are ethical or unethical. Rather, vulnerability in relationship to tactical actions is contingent and relational. The noob user who takes hacking guidelines and elects to start stealing credit card numbers from online multinational shopping vendors such as Amazon.com or Ebay.com puts his or her efforts into wounding even if he or she couples it with an anticapitalist agenda, much as the Oregon militia occupiers couch their tactical efforts as antigovernment. Although an ethical framework such as utilitarianism may see the possibility of justification for wounding through a measurable assessment of the sum total of harms that a given tactical appropriation enacts, Cavarero (2011) makes no such claims. For her, we can only determine the results of using a tactical technical document like the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b) as an ethical good on a case-by-case basis. The ethics of various tactical practices that the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b) helps to produce will depend entirely upon the localized relations of whether such practices work toward acknowledging the reciprocity of vulnerability or work toward horrorism.

Twatter Reporter Guide

How horrorism functions in relationship to technical documents that instruct users how to wound online institutions that seeks to protect the integrity of their functioning networked systems can be TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 69 seen by examining the Twatter Reporter Guide (Anonymous, 2015c). According to Urban Dictionary (2007) and other social media wikis, the term Twatter loosely refers to individuals who post an overwhelming number of nonsensical Tweets.2 Accordingly, the Twatter Reporter Guide (Anonymous, 2015c) instructs users on how to set up a reporter bot to identify suspicious ISIS- related account IDs (e.g., to report ISIS “twatters”). A reporter bot is an automatic software program that can be installed through Twitter’s app platform. It keeps track of a user’s Twitter ID, the primary unique key associated with an account, rather than user names (@username), which thereby allows the reporter bot to monitor users with several usernames. In brief, installing the bot allows a user’s newly anonymous Twitter account to continually check the updated list of Twitter IDs to then (in turn) report ISIS users to system administrators. The automated tools generated from these instructions assure mass reporting of suspected accounts. By some measure, the Twatter Reporter Guide (Anonymous, 2015c) has enjoyed success in disabling over 5,000 ISIS-related accounts by reporting ISIS accounts to Twitter and Facebook and through illegal DDoS attacks, which are designed to flood an ISIS user’s IP address (Anonymous [OpParisOfficial], 2015). As with the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b), Twatter Reporter (Anonymous, 2015c) reflects and yet appropriates some of the formal recommendations for composing technical documents. For example, the writers’ utilize sequential and uniform numbering of the lists of actions to be enacted, as seen in the Figure 2. below. Quite unlike the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b), which mixes verb tenses and second-person addresses, each numbered step in the Twatter Reporter Guide (Anonymous, 2015c) employs imperative language and active voice. Furthermore, above the list, the authors offer clearly labeled download links to the corresponding files or lines of code identified in each step. Yet, because the end result of running the reporter bot is actually to disrupt other users’ abilities to effectively use Twitter for social media purposes, the Twatter Reporter Guide (Anonymous, 2015c) is ultimately another species of tactical technical communication. In response, Cavarero’s(2011) thinking helps to add a layer of ethical complexity to the analysis of the tactics that the Twatter Reporter Guide (Anonymous, 2015c) enables. Anonymous’ (2015c) attempts to create chaos for ISIS’s online presence definitely carry an ethico-political exigency to prevent violence, and this would seem to imply ethical justification of care for potential victims of ISIS. Inasmuch as Anonymous presupposes some causal or correlative link between ISIS’s use of social media for propaganda or recruitment and the group’s documented violent activities, then its activities are designed to damage ISIS members to protect others’ networked vulnerability. Nevertheless, from the perspective of ISIS, the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b) and the Twatter

Figure 2. A “reporter guide” (Anonymous, 2015c) explaining how to deploy and set up a Twitter bot for unmasking ISIS accounts. 70 J. S. COLTON ET AL.

Reporter Guide (Anonymous, 2015c) enable, promote, and perpetuate acts of wounding the members of ISIS. In Cavarero’s sense, halting or at least slowing down ISIS’s communication strategy is definitely not an act of care because its motive is not to support the health of the hacker-ISIS Tweeter relationship but to eliminate the ISIS Tweeter’s ability to function within the communicative system at all. At the same time, can we agree that this act of wounding is ethical? Perhaps. In the attempt to prevent the kind of communication that enables ISIS to carry out violent acts, one may identify such acts of wounding as ethical, or at least ethically justified in their attempt to care for innocents who are vulnerable to ISIS’s practices. Cavarero (2011) stated:

As a body, the vulnerable one remains vulnerable as long as she lives, exposed at any instant to vulnus [wound]. Yet the same potential also delivers her to healing and the relational ontology that decides its meaning. Irremediably open to wounding and caring, the vulnerable one exists totally in the tension generated by this alternative. (p. 30) One’s potential for receiving care is always in tension with an openness to wounding, just as one’s ability to care for another is tied up in the opportunity to wound. Assessing the ethics of these tactical practices requires a delicate balance of adjudicating the relative vulnerability of individuals to be protected from wounding, even if that means that the perpetrators (ISIS) end up with their own similar wounds as well. Although certain actions of wounding or caring may be completely subjective, depending one’s perspective, Cavarero (2011) considers certain elements beyond subjective qualification: when someone potentially takes part in an act of terror or horror. The former takes part in driving bodies into motion, into fleeing for their lives. She described how “terrorized masses flee from natural cata- strophes like earthquakes, floods, or hurricanes” (p. 5), whereas

the physics of horror has nothing to do with the instinctive reaction to the threat of death. It has rather to do with instinctive disgust for a violence that, not content merely to kill because killing would be too little, aims to destroy the uniqueness of the body, tearing at its constitutive vulnerability. What is at stake is not the end of a human life but the human condition itself, as incarnated in the singularity of vulnerable bodies. (p. 5) Not only are the tactical practices of the Twatter Reporter Guide (Anonymous, 2015c) designed to circumvent ISIS’s abilities to enact horror, they are promoted with the vulnerable populations that ISIS targets in mind. Finding ethical justification in producing and sharing this document lies precisely in the attempt to undermine a dominant social media strategy of recruiting more individuals to participate in acts of terror, acts of horror, acts that deny others and themselves relations of vulnerability. Furthermore, it is not as if wounding ISIS users in this sense actually denies their vulnerability as humans. Hacking ISIS Twitter accounts presupposes a different commitment to the targets of a tactical activity’s vulnerability than when the U.S. military drops bombs into ISIS- occupied territory. Indeed, along these lines, Cavarero (2011) enables us to think about the ethics of a tactic in terms of the practices of a strategy that a given tactic seeks to end—horrorism in particular —as well as the degrees to which the group wounded through a tactic still remains a vulnerable human. In fact, as we demonstrate in the next section, it is this final point that helps us to begin to identify when the ethics of a tactical technical documents should be questioned.

OpKKK

To reiterate, our contention in this article is that placing Cavarero’s(2011) thinking in relationship to de Certeau (1980) also helps to differentiate unethical from ethical tactics. In this section, we suggest that Anonymous’ (2015a, 2015b, 2015c) doxxing tactics are rarely ethical in Cavarero’s specific sense. Although Anonymous (2015a, 2015b, 2015c) has employed this tactic in many instances, we want to examine a technical document produced specifically for the OpKKK HoodsOff 2015 campaign, which claimed to contain private information such as phone numbers and home addresses of current members of the KKK (see Figure 3). TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 71

Figure 3. Screen grab of OpKKK Doxx memo (Anonymous, 2015a).

OpKKK emerged in response to the KKK’s circulation of flyers in Ferguson in which they threatened protesters with physical violence (Anonymous Official, 2014; Associated Press/CBS St. Louis, 2014). As with the previous two genres that we have analyzed, the OpKKK doxx memo (Anonymous, 2015a) at once blends formal and informal modes of technical communication genres. For example, this memo differs from traditional memos by not identifying a particular set of readers. It does, however, embody more formal elements of an informational memo intended for a broad audience. The body of the memo establishes details necessary for the reader to understand the context of the doxxed information. Several body paragraphs (Anonymous, 2015a, para. 1-9) sum- marize the ideology of the KKK before describing a contemporary example of its ongoing acts of terror in ex-KKK leader Glenn Miller’s mass shooting at a the Overland Park Jewish Retirement home in Kansas, Missouri, on April 13, 2014. Anonymous establishes trust in its readers by detailing the composition, aliases, and operations of the KKK and by creating identification with the KKK’s shared economic struggles and distrust for authority. By the same token, Anonymous distances itself from the KKK’s racial ideology by fronting its own efforts to defend the free speech of people of color, thereby justifying the doxxing act—an ethical presupposition that this section will unpack in greater detail. In contrast to hacking ISIS via instructions from the NoobGuide (Anonymous, 2015b)orTwatter Reporter Guide (Anonymous, 2015c), OpKKK (Anonymous [Defense Front], 2014) better exposes the ethical problems of unquestioningly privileging tactical technical communication as an ethical good. At first glance this memo’s goals seem similar to the other Anonymous instruction manuals: it intentionally wounds some with the intent of caring for others. Within the context of the Ferguson protests, Anonymous (2015a) used the OpKKK memo to expose the KKK for its continued (rather than only historic) activity and identify a number of people as current members of the secret organization. In the attempt to care for the Brown family and in solidarity with various activists, this memo’s intent is obviously to hurt the credibility of these various individuals, many of whom were in positions of power in several senses. First, the memo named allegedly active KKK members who were currently serving as police officers around the country, a proposed symbolic blow against the same police structures perceived to be supporting inequality in Ferguson. Secondly, releasing the information was indeed a calculated act of harm. Ostensibly, Anonymous (2015a) hopes that public knowledge will lead toward these individuals becoming ostracized, fired, or, at minimum, better monitored in terms of their public and, especially, official activities toward non-White peoples. Thirdly, the memo also hurts the authority of those who hid the details on the Michael Brown 72 J. S. COLTON ET AL. killing, and who, by conscious act or willful inaction, participated as part of the structure that enabled this and other similar shootings. Basically, the memo makes the argument that Anonymous’ (2015a) only recourse is to make public this information in a vigilante sense because public officials involved with monitoring the KKK’s role in society have failed in their duties. The memo as a tactical device serves no small degree of epideictic satire or shaming both for various public actors and the publics who voted or assigned them into different positions. Even those who may not entirely agree with the strategy of publicly outing KKK members may at the same time at least appreciate that this memo exposes the conflict of interest inherent in law enforcement personnel who pledge allegiance to a group dedicated to denying the civil rights of some racial groups. Doxxing is by no means an unproblematic activity, and by no means free of criticism. Nevertheless, the court of public opinion seems to allow this as more permissible when the affected parties appear to be people in power (i.e., less vulnerable) who have abused their power in some way and, especially, when the doxxed group’s ideology is not popular among mainstream Americans. There was relatively little public outcry (even from reading a cursory number of tweets surrounding #OpKKK and the memo’srelease [Anonymous, 2015a]), especially in comparison to a different example, as the KKK were not the only doxxed individuals in the year-long Ferguson saga. Prior to releasing this memo, Anonymous threatened (The Anon Message, 2014) on Twitter on August 12, 2014 to expose the details of a person much more vulnerable: the daughter of the Ferguson, Missouri, police chief Jon Belmar. Although Anonymous did not specify the possible results of acting on this threat, one may reasonably infer that releasing her high school class schedule would subject her to stalking, harassment, and even potential physical violence. Likely as a result of the public’s negative response to this declaration, Anonymous did not ultimately act on this threat, which was designed to prompt Chief Belmar into releasing the name of the officer responsible for shooting Michael Brown. A Gawker article posted by 4:46 pm the same day chronicled part of the backlash from Twitter users who tweeted their disapproval at the @TheAnonMessage (Weistein, 2014). The contrast between doxxing the KKK and the police chief’s daughter is instructive for thinking about the doxxing memo as an ethical form of tactical technical communication. At first glance, the doxxing of the KKK may seem to be ethically justifiable to certain audiences, or at least less ethically problematic than doxxing the police chief’s daughter. Through this technical document, Anonymous (2015a) hopes that wounding the KKK has some semblance of preventing the acts of horror the KKK has been known to perpetuate. The perception of Chief Belmar’s daughter is that she is, as a young woman with no police training and no obvious position of authority, a more vulnerable subject of a tactic such as doxxing, than would be a White male target from the KKK. Thus, one act would seem much worse than the other, no matter how one views doxxing. The aforementioned comparison, however, actually highlights the complexity of Cavarero’s (2011) understanding of vulnerability in contrast to a basic or common sense binary between wounding and caring. Cavarero’s ontological commitment to vulnerability requires us to recognize that both doxxing events deny or disregard the singularity of those in relation to the doxxing tactic, and that, according to Cavarero’s framework, both acts of doxxing have one primary consequence: exposing the individuals to acts of horror or at least the threat of horror. Anonymous could have easily employed a wide range of tactics to challenge the KKK, including, for example, creating memos that facilitated counter-protests or demonstrations. As a point of comparison, consider a situation in which a broader American public may not already contest the ideology of a targeted group. This anecdote could easily swap the KKK for “feminists,” such as the feminist Game blogger Anita Sarkeesian who was also doxxed and harassed by antifeminist GamerGaters (Yomato, 2016). Although the authors were hard pressed to find a past actual example of doxxing that preserved the vulnerability of all parties affected, it is not to say that leaking private information as a tactical response to, say, the military-industrial complex in the cases of Private Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden is always unethical. However, because doxxing seems primarily bound with exposing individuals’ bodies and domestic spaces to relations that can hardly be recognized as relations of care—to say nothing of the questions of the effectiveness of these TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 73 tactics in actually accomplishing a political goal—it is at best a tactical practice that must be evaluated through a consideration of the sum total of vulnerable relations involved. Here, even if doxxing is ostensibly designed—like targeting ISIS through TwitterBots—to subvert unethical or dangerous ideological strategies, Cavarero (2011) still enables us to suggest that certain manifestations of tactics are more ethical than others. In turn, one of the main issues with doxxing hacked information in the first place is the question of accuracy and credibility and, in turn, inciting others to wound based upon unsubstantiated information. Prior to the release of the official OpKKK doxxing memo (Anonymous, 2015a), an individual, @Anon6k (Lewis, 2015) who claimed to be part of Anonymous, released another hybrid memo which falsely identified Lexington, Kentucky, mayor Jim Gray (who self-identifies as a gay Democrat) as a KKK affiliate. In response, Gray facetiously declared that he would be ecstatic if this information were true because it would be a sign of the emergence of progressive thought in the KKK (Musgrave, 2015). Anonymous’ official Twitter account (eventually) officially disavowed @Anon6K’s leak. However, the structure of hacking-doxxing-inciting violence that @Anon6K provoked is not nearly as far removed from Anonymous’ own history of doxxing. Simply put, Anonymous’ audience remains in the difficult ethical situation of having to take the group at its word. Unlike leaks of actual military documents that can in fact be substantiated (and were, in fact, by Pentagon officials in the Snowden and Manning examples), Anonymous offers no evidence in this memo that enables us to verify the accuracy of the information provided. In such a case when the vulnerability of the affected parties (the KKK and the falsely doxxed) is so blatantly disregarded, it is clear that a tactical practice in this particular situation requires a virtue of patience to ensure that the information is accurate and that the actions individuals might take with respect to it work toward the care of vulnerable relations and not horrorism.

Conclusion Because tactics are an art of the weak meant to appropriate, subvert, and resist the strategies of (in some cases, oppressive) institutions, we believe that a technical communicator who is interested in issues of social justice may be drawn toward applying tactics to his or her political cause. Although wholeheartedly seconding this interest, we also hope to have brought light to some of the ethical complexities of tactics as extra-institutional technical communication practices. Referencing once more Kimball’s(2006) call to “examine not just the safe cases” but also the “dangerous ones” (p. 84), we have examined some of the hacktivist group Anonymous’ (2015a, 2015b, 2015c) tactical documents. Through the application of care ethics, particular Cavarero’s(2011) notion of vulnerability, we have worked to show that tactical technical communication can benefit from supplementation. To sum up, we believe that Cavarero’s(2011) contribution to care ethics offers advantages in attempting to evaluate the ethics of tactical technical communication practices precisely because ethics emerge out of localized and concrete relations among beings rather than out of universal, a priori principles or absolutes. Thus,wepreservedeCerteau’s(1980) desire not to delimit in advance what practices might count as tactical and lead toward broader forms of resistance to oppressive orders, while also being able to better pinpoint not only how we determine if an opposed strategy is ethical or unethical, but if the very tactical means brought to oppose it are as well through relations of wounding and caring in avoidance of horrorism. Even if Cavarero may not offer technical communicators a rigid or basic set of universal rules for the ethics of tactical technical communication, she nevertheless provides us with a framework to begin exploring these questions across the diverse actors and networks that are necessary to propose and enact tactics.

Notes

1. We agree with the philosopher May (2008) in that Foucault’s political thought actually needs some sort of normative ethical presupposition to clarify how various forms of power are ethical. 2. We want to acknowledge our understanding that the original use of the term Twatter carries unfortunate sexualized overtones, even if the use of this term in the context of Twitter seldom seeks such an explicit usage. 74 J. S. COLTON ET AL.

Notes on contributors Jared S. Colton is an assistant professor of technical communication and rhetoric at Utah State University. He has published research on topics such as ethics, social justice in technical communication, pedagogy, disability, and technology and rhetoric.

Steve Holmes is an assistant professor of English (digital rhetoric) at George Mason University and codirector of Mason’s Gaming Education and Research Lab (GEAR). He has published research on a variety of topics related to digital rhetoric, including politics, videogames, and software code.

Josephine Walwema is an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at Oakland University. She has published research on topics related to technical writing, professional writing, as well as rhetoric and digital media.

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