Re: is this the work of hactivists?

[batz <batsy@vapour.net>]

[: hacktivism :]

On Thu, 28 Oct 1999, maggie knowles wrote:

:i was wondering if you considered Ulla Roder, Ellen Moxley and Angie
:Zelter to be hackers.  they are the three old ladies (ages something
:like 47, 53 and 61) charged with malicious damage to and theft from the
:barge "Maytime", a floating laboratory on Loch Long in Scotland which
:provides operational support for Trident submarines.

It's an interesting question. They recognized that their protest
needed to be against the mechanisms and importantly the systems
that support and control their object of protest. 

Though they may not have used computers or IT to accomplish 
their goal, they did focus their protest from rhetoric to
strategy. One of the key differences between hackery and
crackery is that almost by definition, cracking a system
involves violating trust between two or more objects.
They could be anything from proceses on a machine to 
the information flow of a corporation, to the democratic
process of a nation. 

>From the buffer overflow to social engineering, the 
attacker is discovering the basis of trust in the 
system they are trying to subvert for their own
purposes.  

These 3 women, however they may have found it, discovered
that this labratory was trusted and not as protected as
the rest of the infrustructure supporting the submarines. 

They exploited it, allegedly caused harm to the system,
and got busted. 

If they were hackers, they weren't very good. 

Interesting that good hackers don't get caught, yet 
getting caught is a big part of conventional 
activism. 

Is it within a hacktivists mandate to get caught? 

If you wave a sign and yell, you get pepper sprayed
and spend the night in jail. If you crack a network, 
it's 5-10years and your livelyhood is taken 
from you if/when you get out. 

I think maybe an interesting discussion could be 
had about the difference between activism, awarenesss
/ education and terrorism, revolution and warfare. 

Warfare is no longer just violence directed at a people or 
an army, it's against economies, their supply
chains and quality of life. 

If messing with the ability of an entities ability to 
deliver services to a marketplace is a legitimate form
of warfare, where does that leave direct action?

Just some musings.
--
batz
Chief Reverse Engineer 
Superficial Intelligence Research Division
Defective Technologies



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