With the recent strings of hactivism from Anonymous and others, especially "in a fight against government and oppression," do you believe that they are a force for good?
Don't you believe that Government (esp. US + EU + China) is bad? I can't think of anything else. Sure, sometimes comes a law or a change that actually helps people. But most things are a) more money for the rich or b) more influence of the country. I think that hacking itself is a bad thing. But if some people do it for good... why not, god damn it. But i won't do it myself. Ofc.
If you are going to say X government is bad, then you need to make a detailed list of all the laws of regulations that are passed and figure out how many of them are actually bad. Unless you do that, you have an unfounded opinion. Science (psychology notably) tells us humans are entirely useless at properly giving equal weight to ideas we hear, as we have a strong tendency to favor items that support our belief. This is reason enough to consider everything that you think is true, but you have absolutely no clue about, is possibly completely wrong. But that is irrelevant -- the issue is whether hacktivism on its own has had a positive impact in the Real World. The costs are obvious -- people and organizations get attacked, potentially on a collateral basis. The intended effect, of course, is to make changes in laws and regulations to make for a better place to live. Now, you'll have to tell me -- what has hacktivism actually accomplished? As far as I can see, pretty much nothing. SOPA was only defeated because Google, Wikipedia, and other large organizations intervened, but otherwise hacktivist organizations, when having stood alone, have been woefully useless. It's also arguable if the causes that hacktivism works for are even legitimate (while I do believe a number of them are, this is a discussion of the process). Anonymous in particularly itself is not democratic, as the issues that it fights for are largely controlled by a small group of people who have an exceptionally strong voice. People pretty much blindly listen to them like they listened to the government (do you think people read the SOPA bill? or researched deeply into the MegaUpload case? of course not), so what have we accomplished? People are being brainwashed just like they always have been, but now it's with a new figurehead. And frankly, most people are pretty damn clueless beyond belief about the things they have opinions on. A lot of people, for example, have this crazy idea that the American founding fathers thought that people should have ultimate power, but this is definitely not true. Do you think the electorate system was created for no reason? Did you know think senators were always elected by the people? Have you noticed how difficult it is for a regular person to get a law changed or added? This was all by design to prevent "tyranny of the majority," and the idea was to buffer power in a group of elite (whether this idea is appropriate is another discussion). If you weren't aware of what I just told you, (and you thought opposite), you are the precise reason why they didn't want regular people having the ultimate vote, and why we can't have nice things. Read more books. So in summary: Nothing gets changed. People still blindly follow a leader. People are dumb as a rock.
Just to clarify: 1. USA, EU and China are the main influence in the global competition of "who has the biggest balls" (e.g. capitalism) which leads to less human rights and more injustice. 2. Wikileaks did achieve something. They got much inside information about corrupt government/company activities and showed it on the internet for free. 3. Why do we have to read the Sopa bill? Or Acta? If most of the people you know and trust are against it, you don't read it. 4. I'm not aware of what your founding fathers actually did (because i'm german and this isn't common knowledge to me), but i understand everything you said about it. People shouldn't have the power because most of them are dumb as ****. Democracy is cool 'n' shit. I agree.
In my opinion, hacking is a tool. The 'good' or 'bad' in hacking is dependent on the intention of the hacker. A hack is like a gun. It is a tool designed for a specific purpose, it can easily be abused or misused, but its good or bad really comes down to the intention of the user. A gun can be used to commit a crime or prevent one, and a hack can be used the same way.
What are we going to do about it? Competition is human nature. Identifying a problem is one thing, proposing a solution is another. I don't consider WikiLeaks hacktivism. There have always been whistle-blowers, and WikiLeaks is nothing new. WikiLeaks just happened to be an easier way to submit information over trying to contact a reporter. Because by not encouraging people to read the source information themselves, you can control people. You only bring up the issues relevant to your interests, frame the entire debate as something everything "we" believe in, and people take up like sheep. Most of the people someone might know never read it too, nor did most of their friends, nor did most of their friends, yet somehow everyone has the same opinion. This is why propaganda works so well; people just believe it because their friends do too, except no one realizes they are all fed the same information. Besides that, if we accept that most people simply don't have the knowledge and framework to properly analyse a situation, how can we just take what they say as truth?
That's a matter of trust. I don't know why i believe that what, for example, my gf knows about anatomy or food is right, just because she is a dietitian. I just do, because i trust her. If you would tell me that we all have to install a .exe which would trigger a virus... how many % of all the people on here would click on it without thinking about it? People want to take the way of the lowest resistance. Because it is the first that comes to our mind. I don't like it, but i catch myself many times doing it. Last time was Kony 2012. That is just bullshit, but for a day i had hope in humanity. If i don't trust other people, what would i become? To #1. Adding more social programs and taxing the shit out of the rich is a good start to balance out effort vs. "born with a golden dildo in the ass".
I think "hacktivism" is wrong and right because you can prove the security of your network, it's wrong because it can go into peoples privacy and deprive it. That is all.
I am the biggest fanboy of that one French philosophe Descartes. His main teachings about logical reasoning were that you should always question everything you know. You have to study both sides of a debate until you're completely sure that the opinion you oppose is in fact false. e.g. it irks me when my die-hard atheist friends criticize Christianity, but they don't know the first thing about what the bible actually taught. If you don't know why you support a certain side of a debate, you have to research it. Otherwise you're hopping onto yet another bandwagon of whatever belief is popular. I can't say what I think about the positive or negative aspects to hacktivism, because I haven't researched both opinions much yet. Luckily this thread has prompted me to do so. And I'm proud to say that I am someone who did read the SOPA and PIPA bills. I researched it enough so that I could see the intent behind the bills, and it was noticeable that the supporters of it really thought it was a just and constitutional proposition. The only problems were that they didn't understand how the internet worked, and what kind of damage the bills would do to it. tl;dr Always research a matter yourself before forming an opinion on it, preferably using primary sources to learn about it. If you're just taking your friend's word on the issue, then that only adds mass to a blindly rolling bandwagon.
I was going to say stuff but I would be repeating the topics that sk89q and pigrocket already hit so I leave this. KONY 2012! >.>
