UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Updating civil disobedience Whistleblowing, anonymous hacktivism, and academic piracy Caycedo Casallas, C.B. Publication date 2019 Document Version Final published version License Other Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Caycedo Casallas, C. B. (2019). Updating civil disobedience: Whistleblowing, anonymous hacktivism, and academic piracy. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:24 Sep 2021 1 Cover image: Caycedo, B. 2019. No rights reserved. UPDATING CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE Whistleblowing, Anonymous Hacktivism, and Academic Piracy Carlos Bernardo Caycedo Casallas Ph.D. Dissertation, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis University of Amsterdam UPDATING CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE Whistleblowing, Anonymous Hacktivism, and Academic Piracy ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. ir. K.I.J. Maex ten overstaan van een door het College voor Promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel op dinsdag 17 september 2019, te 14:00 uur door Carlos Bernardo Caycedo Casallas geboren te Bogotá Promotiecommissie Promotor: dr. R. Celikates, Universiteit van Amsterdam Copromotor: prof. dr. B. Roessler, Universiteit van Amsterdam Overige leden: prof. dr. H.O. Dijstelbloem, Universiteit van Amsterdam prof. dr. L.M. Herzog, Technical University Munich prof. dr. H.Y.M. Jansen, Universiteit van Amsterdam prof. dr. E. Peeren, Universiteit van Amsterdam dr. W.J.C. Smith, Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen This work is part of the research program ‘Transformations of Civil Disobedience: Democratization, Globalization, Digitalization’ with project number 276.20.022, which is financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). This is for everyone. –Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee) July 27, 2012 Exactly what this politics of protest will involve is not easy to say, because it tends to develop out of a particular situation to fit that situation. But here are examples drawn out of actual incidents. –Howard Zinn, Disobedience and Democracy: Nice Fallacies on Law and Order, 1968 Acknowledgements First, I express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Robin Celikates for his invaluable advice and constant support, and to my co-supervisor Beate Roessler for her intellectual generosity and insightful questions. I am also thankful to my project partner and friend Natasha Basu, and the other members of the Philosophy and Public Affairs group at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. I presented parts of this thesis at seminars and conferences in which I received helpful feedback. I would like to acknowledge in particular the contributions of Balázs Bodó, Stefania Milan, Datactive, Esther Peeren, Bert van Roermund, Eraldo Souza dos Santos, Tamara van den Berg, Theresa Züger, Juan Camilo Betancur, Sebastián Dueñas, Carlos Arturo López, and Luis Fernando Sierra. I benefited greatly from the participation of Hisham Almiraat, Eric Boot, Marcel Oomens, Niels ten Oever, and Titus Stahl in the expert meeting I hosted on whistleblowing in 2017. I would like to thank the Amsterdam Center for Globalisation Studies (ACGS), the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG), the Dutch Research School of Philosophy (OZSW), the international network #BigDataSur, and the Centro de Internet y Sociedad de la Universidad del Rosario (ISUR) for offering me stimulating environments for research. None of this would have been possible without the support of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and funding from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). For those of us who migrate, friendship abroad is deeply significant; special thanks to Małgosia and the Briefjes, Uzma Abid Ansari, Peyman Amiri, Noortje de Leij, Daniël de Zeeuw, Vanessa Gómez, Alejandra Espinosa, Claudia Quelle, Eva Sancho, Gerrit Schaafsma, Edo Schets, Matthé Scholten, and Gijs van Donselaar. Thanks also to Peter Cousins, Eloe Kingma, and Loes ten Velden for their indispensable help during the process of writing and editing this thesis. I cannot name here all the friends who encouraged me during these years, just as I cannot express in words – let alone in English – my gratitude to my brother Juan Diego Caycedo. Most special thanks to the person who lovingly sustained me every time I felt overwhelmed by this project, Isabella Flisi. This thesis is dedicated to my mother; her example of gentle strength and resistance is a constant source of motivation. Table of Contents Introduction 3 Digitalized De-democratization 3 Narrowing Down Digital Disobedience – The Structure of the Thesis 4 Why These and not Other Cases? 6 Two Objections 8 Globalization and Democratization 10 On Thinking with a Colombian Background 12 Chapter 1. Disclosing Corporate Disobedience 14 1.1. On Corporate Whistleblowing 15 A Working Definition of Whistleblowing 16 Internal and Anonymous Whistleblowing? 18 A. WorldCom 18 B. Enron 20 C. Anonymous Leaking 21 Corporate Whistleblowing as a Moral and Political Phenomenon 23 1.2. Toward a Concept of ‘Corporate Civil Disobedience’ 25 The Rawlsian Definition of Civil Disobedience 25 Walzer on Corporate Disobedience 28 Corporate Civil Disobedience and the Question of Anonymity 31 1.3. The Perplexities of Government Whistleblowing 33 Snowden as a Civil Servant and a Private Employee 33 Three Standpoints on Snowden’s Disobedience 37 Conclusion 41 Chapter 2. Anonymous Civil Disobedience 43 2.1. Anonymous Fighting for Freedom! – and for the Lulz 43 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) 46 Two Exemplary DDoS Performed by Anonymous 48 Some of Anonymous’s Questionable Faces 51 2.2. Reviewing the Requirement of Accepting the Legal Consequences 55 Strategically Going to Prison 55 A. Slowly but Steadily Filling up the Jails 56 B. Soul-Force Goes to Jail 59 C. Allegiance to One’s Own Thinking 62 The Requirement of Risking Punishment 64 Does Anonymous Risk Punishment? 67 2.3. Growing Uncertainties 71 Individual Civil Disobedience? 72 Mixed Motives in Civil Disobedience? 73 Civil Disobedience by Non-Citizens? 74 Reactive and Episodic Civil Disobedience? 75 Civil Disobedience Without Self-Purification? 77 Anonymous Corporate Civil Disobedience? 79 Conclusion 82 1 Chapter 3. Opening up Access through Civil Disobedience 84 3.1. Illegal Open Access 84 Some Limitations of the Liberal Definition of Civil Disobedience 86 An Alternative Conception of Civil Disobedience 89 3.2. Some Arguments for Academic Piracy 91 Appealing to Individual Human Rights 92 Appealing to the Need for Open Access 94 Appealing to the Nature of Scientific Knowledge 95 Tackling Global Inequalities – An Illustrative Case 96 3.3. Communicative Civil Disobedience as Deliberative Participation 98 A Deliberative Theory of Civil Disobedience 99 Toward a Communicative Justification of Civil Disobedience 101 Sci-Hub and LibGen as Communicative Disobedience 104 Conclusion 107 Chapter 4. Incivility as Communication by Other Means 108 4.1. Accusations of Incivility 108 Accusations against Snowden 108 Accusations against Anonymous 110 Accusations against Sci-Hub and LibGen 114 4.2. On (In)Civility 118 Communication and Violence 119 On Violence and Nonviolence 122 Radical Democratic CiviC Disobedience 130 4.3. Constituent Communicative Civil Power 134 Performing Citizenship by Claiming Rights 134 Civil Disobedience as Constituent Power 138 The Revolutionary Spirit of Ordinary New Beginnings 141 Please Keep your Concepts Open for Updates! 146 Conclusions 148 Bibliography 152 Annexes Summary 171 Samenvatting 174 2 Introduction Digitalized De-democratization Under the current system of ubiquitous digital surveillance, it is ever more difficult to see the Internet as a means for democratization or as a forum for democratic debate. When I first started working on the digitalization of civil disobedience back in 2015, there was already growing concern about the potential harm done by digital surveillance to democracy, especially among activists and academics who were trying to understand the implications of Edward Snowden’s disclosures. However, it was with the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal that it became clear how corporate-owned, big data analysis, in conjunction with opaque attempts by states to exert political influence, can be used to exploit voters’ vulnerabilities. It is uncertain how ongoing developments in digital technologies will transform democratic processes and societies at large in the coming decades; moreover, it is dubious – to say the least – that existing conceptions of democracy would continue to