disruptive power OXFORD STUDIES IN DIGITAL POLITICS Series Editor: Andrew Chadwick, Royal Holloway, University of London Expect Us: Online Communities and Political Mobilization Jessica L. Beyer The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power Andrew Chadwick Tweeting to Power: The Social Media Revolution in American Politics Jason Gainous and Kevin M. Wagner The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam Philip N. Howard Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring Philip N. Howard and Muzammil M. Hussain The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy David Karpf Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama Daniel Kreiss Bits and Atoms: Information and Communication Technology in Areas of Limited Statehood Steven Livingston and Gregor Walter-Drop Digital Cities: The Internet and the Geography of Opportunity Karen Mossberger, Caroline J. Tolbert, and William W. Franko Revolution Stalled: The Political Limits of the Internet in the Post-Soviet Sphere Sarah Oates Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics Zizi Papacharissi Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age Jennifer Stromer-Galley News on the Internet: Information and Citizenship in the 21st Century David Tewksbury and Jason Rittenberg disruptive power The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age taylor owen 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Taylor Owen 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file at the Library of Congress 9780199363865 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper “To: R & W” contents Acknowledgments ix 1. Losing Control 1 2. Disruptive Power 22 3. Spaces of Dissent 48 4. New Money 67 5. Being There 98 6. Saving the Saviors 122 7. Diplomacy Unbound 148 8. The Violence of Algorithms 168 9. The Crisis of the State 189 Notes 211 Index 245 acknowledgments This book represents the culmination of three meandering years exploring the intersection of digital technology and international affairs and is ultimately the product of many people’s work. It began as a lecture and working paper for the Trudeau Foundation in the spring of 2012, and I am appreciative of PG Forest giving me the chance to come back to the Foundation and try out some new ideas on the smartest (and most critical) crowd in Canada. At the time, the ideas presented were nascent, and represented my ini- tial explorations of what I increasingly saw as the profound ways technology was reshaping the international system. This essay became a larger research project funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant called International Relations in the Digital Age, a part- nership between the Canadian International Council and UBC. My friend and colleague Anouk Dey was critical as an RA on both of these initial stages. And my co-PI on the SSHRC research project, partner at the CIC and Open- Canada and close friend Jennifer Jeffs built the project and team with me. We had a great group of UBC journalism students helping out with a wide range of research, includ- ing Sadiya Ansari, Lindsay Sample, Kate Adach, Alexis Beckett, and Alexandra Gibb. acknowledgments For the year I spent focusing on researching and writing the book, I had the amazing good fortune of having two wonderful RA’s, Tanzeel Hakak and Cherise Seucharan. Both are wise beyond their years, and handled my ridicu- lous schedule and wandering (they would say vague) ideas with grace and persistence. Many of the ideas in this book are theirs as much as mine. While writing this book I was also working at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia with the ex- traordinary and tolerant Emily Bell. The incredible op- portunities that working with Emily on building the Tow Center afforded me, as well as the time she allowed me to binge write among the cramming undergrads in the Bodle- ian, made this book possible. As I have now learned, bringing a book into the world is a process. Three people made this one happen. First, Ethan Bassoff at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin took a chance on me, and got this book into the hands of New York publish- ers. Second, Angela Chnapko at Oxford University Press was supportive, encouraging, and incredibly helpful at every stage of the editing and publishing process. Finally, Blake Eskin agreed to dive in to the project as an utterly ruthless editor, and gave me the most educational writing experience I have ever had. Finally, and by far most importantly, I owe everything to my amazing parents and to my best friend, confidant, fiercest critic, partner and wife Ariel, and to our little man Walter. x disruptive power chapter one losing control Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. —Aaron Swartz In January 2012, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Scotland Yard, and intelligence agencies in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden created a task force to counter Anonymous. These countries saw the col- lective of activist hackers and its numerous offshoots as a national security threat. Anonymous—which is best defined as an Internet gath- ering with a loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directives1—came to prominence in 2008 when it mounted an attack on the Church of Scientology’s website after the church asked YouTube to take down a video interview with Tom Cruise. Anonymous saw the takedown as an act of censorship and said it wanted to completely remove the Church of Scien- tology’s presence on the Internet and to “save people from Scientology by reversing the brainwashing.” Since then, hundreds of digital actions have been undertaken in the 1 disruptive power name of Anonymous, ebbing and flowing in both scale and frequency. The group has inserted itself into political con- flicts in the United States and around the globe. In November 2011, at an Occupy rally against budget cuts and increased tuition at the University of California, San Diego, a riot police officer was filmed pepper-spraying a peaceful protestor. When video of the incident went viral on YouTube, Anonymous responded by leaking the police officer’s name, address, phone number, and email address. He received over 17,000 threatening emails, 10,000 text messages, and hundreds of letters. The group did the same to Arizona Department of Public Safety officials in response to the passage of Arizona Bill 1070, an anti-immigration bill widely seen as racist. This attack was part of the bigger operation called Anti-Sec in which Anonymous attacked many Western governments for reasons ranging from Inter- net censorship to racial profiling. During the Arab Spring, Anonymous worked in support of anti-government protestors in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, hacking into government websites, shutting them down with distributed denial-of service (DDoS) attacks, and releasing names, email addresses, and passwords of government offi- cials. In December of 2011, in the name of revealing corpo- rate and government corruption, Anonymous hacked into the US intelligence consultancy Stratfor, obtaining, among other data, 2.7 million corporate emails detailing often sen- sitive conversations involving current and former govern- ment officials and thousands of off-the-record sources. While these operations have many common objectives and use similar hacking tactics, Anonymous is hard to pin 2 losing control down. It has no fixed leadership and no national affiliation. Individuals loosely coordinate, then attribute their actions to Anonymous. As one hacker who participates in Anonymous told a Baltimore journalist, “We have this agenda that we all agree on and we all coordinate and act, but all act inde- pendently toward it, without any want for recognition. We just want to get something that we feel is important done.”2 Describing Anonymous is a challenge when writing a book. For an intelligence agency—and particularly one like the FBI, which has a history of combating perceived US threats ranging from the Communist Party to al- Qaeda—its amorphous structure, mandate, and tactics can cause much greater concern. The United States, which created the Inter- net as a defense research project, now considers cyberspace a “domain” or potential battlefield equal in importance to land, sea, air, and outer space. As a result, Anonymous and other groups involved in cyberattacks are seen as actors who need to be controlled. But Anonymous does not work like other political or military actors. It does not use accepted international conventions of protest— political marches, pe- titions, physical violence—to pursue its goals.