University of Leicester From the SelectedWorks of Athina Karatzogianni Fall September 1, 2015 Firebrand Waves of Digital Activism 1994-2014: The Rise and Spread of Hacktivism and Cyberconflict (Prepublication Copy) Athina Karatzogianni This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY-NC-SA International License. Available at: https://works.bepress.com/athina_karatzogianni/25/ [Please note: This document was the original manuscript submitted to Palgrave Macmillan in January 2015 and is shared here openly. The published book is copyedited, has alterations, amendments and corrections, and has undergone a standard production process, therefore is considerably different to this bepress document. The book Karatzogianni, A. (2015) Firebrand Waves of Digital Activism 1994-2014: The Rise and Spread of Hacktivism and Cyberconflict, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-137-31793-3 can be bought online on ebook or hard/paperback here: http://www.palgrave.com/la/book/9780230242463. If you choose to reference this document and not the published book, please reference appropriately by using the bepress link]. Firebrand Waves of Digital Activism 1994-2014: The Rise and Spread of Hacktivism and Cyberconflict Athina Karatzogianni Associate Perofessor Media and Communication University of Leicester E: [email protected] or [email protected] Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction: Four Phases of Digital Activism and Cyberconflict Chapter One: Origins and Rise of Digital Activism (1994-2007) 1.1 First Phase (1994-2001): The Origins of Digital Activism 1. 2 Second Phase (2001-2007): The Rise of Digital Activism Chapter Two: The Third Phase (2007-2010): Spread of Digital Activism 2.1 Russia-related Cyberconflicts 2.2. China-related Cyberconflicts Chapter Three: The Fourth Phase (2010-2014): Digital Activism Invades Mainstream Politics 3.1 WikiLeaks: Ideological and Organizational Tensions 3.2 WikiLeaks: Impact on communication and IR scholarship 3.3 The “Arab Spring” Uprisings 3.4 The Snowden Affair Chapter Four: The Future of Digital Activism and Its Study 4.1 Definition of Digital Activism and Cyberconflict as an Area of Study 4.2 The Agency Problematique 4.3 The Structure Problematique 4.4 The Affect Problematique Bibliography 1 Preface and Acknowledgements The research for this book was conducted between 2007 and 2014, in what was a period of intense encounters of the cyber with the global political arena: proliferation of sociopolitical activist networks; social-media enabled political protests and mobilizations leading to social or political change; increased resistance to surveillance and censorship of global communications, including leaks from government employees uncovering significant problems in the use of ICTs both by states and corporations. This book brings together my work specifically relevant to media movements and radical politics and the interaction between states and corporations with these movements. In engaging with this work, I have incurred many intellectual debts. Lasting thanks I would need to extend to all my colleagues at Hull and then Leicester, who often in corridors I stop, interrupt uninvited and talk to between writing sessions. My list of gratitude for stimulating intellectual exchanges over the years include Noel O’ Sullivan, Andrew Robinson, Michael Schandorf, Christiana Gregoriou, Gillian Youngs, Cony Beyer, Phoebe Moore, Bev Orton, Mike Brayshaw, Adi Kuntsman, Korina Patelis, Petros Ioannidis, Popi Aggeli, Ming-Yeh and Gary Rawnsley, George Michaelides, Christos Sideras, Eugenia Siapera, Anthimos Tsirigotis, Artur Alves, Michel Bauwens, Zizi Papacharissi, Geert Lovink, Gabriella Coleman, Martin Gak, Patricia Clough, Rafael-Cohen Almagor, Richard Aldrich, James Zborowski, Maria Karanika, Marie-Helene Bourcier, Mayra Rodrigues Gomes, Simon Willmetts, Peter Wilkin, James Connelly, David Lonsdale, Peter Young, Luke O’Sullivan, and Panagiota Tsatsou. Inevitably, I need to extend my gratitude for inspiring conversations also to my students. I have benefitted from material support from the EU FP 7 MIG@NET project http://www.mignetproject.eu/. I am grateful to this body for enabling me to travel widely for research, as I am to the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of São Paulo for inviting me to visit and engage with staff and students. I am also grateful to the University of Hull, for allowing me research leave, and the University of Leicester for continuous support. Further, to mention the ESRC grant The Common Good: Ethics and Rights in Cyber Security [ERCS], which supported my research into the Snowden affair. I must also thank all the publishers and editors who have supported my work over the years and the editorial team for this book. And yet, no book on digital activism should omit thanks to online friends who are too numerous to mention! Lastly, this book is dedicated to my family in Greece, my son Sebastian and his dad, Tim Hawkins, who is still tolerant of my frequent absent-mindedness, travelling, and smashing of kitchenware. Leicester, January 2015. 2 Introduction: Four Phases of Digital Activism and Cyberconflict This book introduces four waves of upsurge in digital activism and cyberconflict. The rise of digital activism started in 1994, was transformed by the events of 9/11, culminated in 2011 with the Arab Spring uprisings, and entered a transformative phase of control, mainstreaming and cooptation since 2013 with the Snowden revelations. Digital activism is defined here as political participation, activities and protests organized in digital networks beyond representational politics. It refers to political conduct aiming for reform or revolution by non-state actors and new sociopolitical formations such as social movements, protest organizations, and individuals and groups from the civil society. The latter is defined as social actors outside government and corporate influence. Cyberconflict is defined as conflict in computer mediated environments and it involves an analysis of the interactions between actors engaged in digital activism to raise awareness for a specific cause, struggles against government and corporate actors, as well as conflict between governments, states and corporations. The rationale for these phases is solely based on political effects, rather than technological or developmental determinants. The first phase examined here are the years 1994 to 2001 and this is understood as the Origins of the two phenomena. With the invention of the World Wide Web in 1991 by Tim Berners Lee, the digitization of the 1980s meant that global production could be finally networked, and many-to-many broadcasting was no longer a far-fetched reality. The optimism of the early 1990s about how digitality would bring an economic, sociopolitical and cultural revolution ended at the last years of that decade with the dot.com bubble, which caused a rethink. Nevertheless, Consumers were able and thirsty to interact, create and participate in the creative process and this was changing the relationship between existing industries, technologies, audiences and markets. McLuhan’s global village (1989); De Sola Pool’s (1983) argument about the artificiality of media separation based on political economy not characteristics of the technologies; Rheingold’s (1994) first take on the power of virtual communities; and Jenkins’ (2006) convergence theory explaining the shifting of balance with the interwining of grassroots and corporate media and Castells’ (2000) network society effectively described the communication landscape of the 1990s. Activism during that period included examples, such as the alternative peer produced Linux operating system by Linus Torvalds in 1991 (the road was opened by Richard Stallman’s free software in the 1980s); the transfer of ethnoreligious conflicts online (i.e. 1999 Falungong in China, Shri Lanka, the Kosovo war and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts); the use of ICTs by social movements and protests, such as the Zapatista movement in Mexico in 1994 dropping guerrilla war in favor of cyber, the birth of Indymedia with the antiglobalization movement in Seattle in 1999, and the overthrow of Estrada with the use of mobile phones in 2001. Digital activism in all its facets was effectively born. The second phase proposed here is from 9/11 onwards to 2007. It starts from the end of 2001, because the Al Qaeda network’s attack on the twin towers in the U.S. had a profound impact on several areas of importance, such as news coverage (the internet’s audience skyrocketed and the media industry was transformed), as well as the political transformations taking place due to the event both at home in the U.S. and at 3 the global level – the war on terror, the crackdown on civil liberties, securitization and militainment aspects are a few of those transformations. The subsequent Afghanistan and Iraq war and the first impact of internet politics on the global public sphere deem 9/11 the start of a second phase in digital activism and cyberconflict. The major digital activism in this period involved the anti-Iraq war mobilizations, in which ICTs were used to accelerate the speed of the movement’s organization, while the Iraq war was deemed the first Internet war, because the digital revolution ensured that independent voices and new media actors were able to offer an alternative narrative and challenge the overall narrative of the war on terror. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars dominate digital activism and cyberconflicts of that period, with other notable examples the sociopolitical