2 Ryan Cleary, a nineteen-year-old member: Details of Cleary’s arrest appear in Graham Cluley, “Ryan Cleary has Asperger’s Syndrome, Court Hears,” Sophos Naked Security, June 26, 2011, http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/06/26/ryan-cleary-aspergers-syndrome.
3 Anonymous’s breaches are typically followed by the exfiltration of data: For details on the Stratfor breach, see Richard Norton-Taylor and Ed Pilkington, “Hackers Expose Defence and Intelligence Officials in US and UK,” Guardian, January 8, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/08/hackers-expose-defence-intelligence-officials.
4 Neustar … surveyed IT professionals: Neustar reports on the impacts of DDOS attacks in Neustar Insights, “DDOS Survey: Q1 2012 When Businesses Go Dark,” http://hello.neustar.biz/rs/neustarinc/images/neustar-insights-ddos-attack-survey-q1–2012.pdf
5 The New York-based hacker and artist collective: Details of Electronic Disturbance Theatre’s use of DDOS attacks in support of the Zapatista movement are available in Coco Fusoco, “Performance Art in a Digital Age: A Conversation with Ricardo Dominguez,” The Hacktivist Magazine (2001), http://www.iwar.org.uk/hackers/resources/the-hacktivist/issue-1/vol1.html.
6 has likened them to picket lines: Evgeny Morozov argues that “under certain conditions … DDOS attacks can be seen as a legitimate expression of dissent, very much similar to civil disobedience” in “In Defense of DDOS,” Slate, December 13, 2010, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2010/12/in_defense_of_ddos.html. The potential of hacktivism as an agent of political change is discussed in Mark Manion and Abby Goodrum, “Terrorism or Civil Disobedience: Toward a Hacktivist Ethic,” in Internet Security: Hacking, Counterhacking, and Society, ed. Kenneth Einar Himma (Sudbury: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 2007). After the success of Operation: Tunisia, Reporters Without Borders reported that the solidarity action had the unintended consequence of the arrest of Tunisian bloggers and online activists; see “Wave of Arrests of Bloggers and Activists,” Reporters Without Borders, January 7, 2011, http://en.rsf.org/tunisia-wave-of-arrests-of-bloggers-and-07–01–2011,39238.html. Steven Murdoch writes about the “double-edged sword” of digital activism in “Destructive Activism: The Double-Edged Sword of Digital Tactics,” in Digital Activism Decoded ed. Mary Joyce, (New York: iDebate Press, 2010), 137–148.
7 Anonymous’s Operation Tunisia: Details of Anonymous’s launching of DDOS attacks on eight Tunisian government websites during the 2011 Tunisian uprisings are available in Yasmine Ryan, “Tunisia’s Bitter Cyberwar,” Al-Jazeera, January 6, 2011, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/01/20111614145839362.html. Anonymous attacks during the 2011 Egyptian uprisings are detailed in Paul Wagenseil, “Anonymous ‘Hacktivists’ Attack Egyptian Websites,” NBC News, January 26, 2011, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41280813/ns/technology_and_science-security/t/anonymous-hacktivists-attack-egyptian-websites/. In December 2010, Anonymous launched a DDOS protest against the website of the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF); see “Operation Zimbabwe Success,” AnonNews, December 29, 2010, http://anonnews.org/press/item/94/. In June 2011, Anonymous launched attacks on ninety-one websites, including fifty-one Malaysian government sites; see Niluksi Koswanage and Liau Y-Sing, “Hackers Disrupt 51 Malaysian Government Websites,” Reuters, June 16, 2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/16/us-malaysia-hackers-idUS-TRE75F06Y20110616. The Anonymous movement was split on the Libyan uprisings; see “Operation Reasonable Reaction,” Github, https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki/Operation-Reasonable-Reaction. The relationship between the Occupy Movement and Anonymous is detailed in Sean Captain, “The Real Role of Anonymous in Occupy Wall Street,” Fast Company, October 17, 2011, http://www.fastcompany.com/1788397/the-real-role-of-anonymous-at-occupy-wall-street.
8 is it wise to actually encourage DDoS attacks: Yochai Benkler explains why Anonymous should not be viewed as a threat to national security in “Hacks of Valor,” Foreign Affairs, April 4, 2012, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137382/yochai-benkler/hacks-of-valor.
9 One of the few to study this question in depth: Gabriella Coleman’s work offers a comprehensive history and analysis of Anonymous: Gabriella Coleman “Our Weirdness Is Free: The Logic of Anonymous – Online Army, Agent Chaos, and Seeker of Justice,” Triple Canopy (2012), http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/our_weirdness_is_free; and “Peeking Behind the Curtain at Anonymous: Gabriella Coleman at TEDGlobal 2012,” TED Blog, June 27, 2012, http://blog.ted.com/2012/06/27/peeking-behind-the-curtain-at-anonymous-gabriella-coleman-at-tedglobal–2012/.
10 MIT Museum Hack archivist: A history of MIT hacks is detailed in T.F. Peterson, Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011). See especially Brian Leibowitz, “A Short History of the Terminology,” in Nightwork, ed. T.F. Peterson. See also Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2010).
11 “… and the one used in the media”: Molly Sauter’s SXSW presentation on media portrayals of hackers is available at “Policy Effects of Media Portrayals of Hacktivists,” SXSW, http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP12520.
12 numerous examples of security research being stifled: The Electronic Frontier Foundation traces the chilling effects of the “anti-circumvention” provisions in the DMCA on research in “Unintended Consequences: Twelve Years Under the DMCA,” https://www.eff.org/wp/unintended-consequences-under-dmca/#footnoteref13_pdu4ggq. See also Marcia Hofmann and Katitza Rodriguez, “Coders’ Rights at Risk in the European Parliament,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, June 20, 2012, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/06/eff-european-parliament-directive-attack-information-systems.
15: TOWARDS DISTRIBUTED SECURITY AND STEWARDSHIP IN CYBERSPACE
1 Epigraph: H.G. Wells (1866–1946) was one of the most prolific authors in the English language. Although most well known for his works of science fiction, he also published many essays and books on history and politics. He was a proponent of world government along republican lines (“The New Republic”), and supported the League of Nations. He was also the principal author of the Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Man (1940), which was later superseded by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. H.G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1901).
2 “our central nervous system in a global embrace”: The quotation is from Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, page 3: “Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.”
3 “Internet Freedom in a Suitcase”: The phrase refers to the so-called Internet-in-a-suitcase project that was developed by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative, and funded by the U.S. Department of State. See James Glanz and John Markoff, “US Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors,” NewYorkTimes, June 12, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/12Internet.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
4 Faced with mounting problems and pressures: I developed the ideas in this chapter in prior articles and essays, including: “Protect the Net: The Looming Destruction of the Global Communications Environment,” in Mark Kingwell and Patrick Tunnel, eds., Rites of Way: The Politics and Poetics of Public Space (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2009); “Towards a Cyber Security Strategy for Global Civil Society?,” Global Information Society Watch (South Africa: APC and Hivos, 2011); and “The Growing Dark Side of Cyberspace (… and What To Do About It),” Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs 1, iss. 2 (2012). I first wrote about the importance of civil society taking seriously Internet design issues in “The Politics of Internet Design: Securing the Foundations for Global Civil Society Networks,” in ed. Stephen Coleman, The E-Connected World: Its Social and Political Implications (McGill University Press, 2003) and in “Deep Probe: The Evolution of Network Intelligence,” Intelligence and National Security, Volume 17, No 1, 200
4.
5 “negarchy” as a structural alternative: For more on distributed security, see Daniel Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
6 The first custodians of the Internet believed that it did: See http://www.cyberdialogue.ca/previous-dialogues/2012-about/papers/ for a collection of essays on the topic of for a collection of essays on the topic of “Stewardship in Cyberspace,” commissioned for the University of Toronto’s second annual Cyber Dialogue, March 2012.
7 Universities have a special role to play: For a discussion of the evolution of the university education system from an elite to popular institution, see Peter Scott, The Meanings of Mass Higher Education (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1995).
My inspiration for the role of the university in securing an open global commons of communication and information is primarily due to the ideas on the matter articulated by John Dewey. Dewey outlined the central importance of communications to democracy, and some of the problems that plague a viable communications sphere for the public, in The Public and its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1946).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have often said that the Citizen Lab is unique by nature of our worldwide collaborative partnerships. For making this book possible, I am extremely grateful to the following exceptionally talented Citizen Lab staff, fellows, associates, visiting fellows, et cetera, past and present, for their support, initiative, and ingenuity: Graeme Bunton, Michelle Levesque, Michael Hull, Jeremy Vernon, Jonathan Doda, Clayton Epp, Elias Adum, Eran Henig, François Fortier, Matthew Carrieri, Jakub Dalek, Robert Guerra, Seth Hardy, Saad Khan, Katie Kleemola, Sarah McKune, Helmi Noman, Irene Poetranto, Lidija Sabados, Adam Senft, Igor Valentovitch, Greg Wiseman, Ali Bangi and all of ASL19, Cherise Seucharan, Jennie Phillips, James Tay, Karl Kathuria, Brenden Kuerbis, Phillipa Gill, Eneken Tikk-Ringas, Christopher Bronk, Rex Hughes, Roger Hurwitz, Camino Kavanagh, Luis Horacio Najera, Jon Penney, John Sheldon, Chris Davis, Byron Sonne, Peter Wills, Morgan Marquis-Boire, John Scott-Railton, Nart Villeneuve, and Greg Walton. Special thanks to the Citizen Lab research manager, Masashi Crete-Nishihata.
The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) has been a ten-year partnership between the Citizen Lab and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and, for a period of time, the Oxford Internet Institute, and the University of Cambridge (later, the SecDev Group). Included in ONI’S extended community are regional research networks, such as OpenNet. Eurasia, OpenNet. Asia, and the Cyber Stewards project. Thanks to all of my colleagues in these networks, and in particular to Rafal Rohozinski, John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, Robert Faris, Jillian York, Rebekah Heacock, and Tattugul Mambetalieva.
The Koobface, GhostNet, and Shadows reports were undertaken under the auspices of the Information Warfare Monitor, a collaboration between the Citizen Lab and the SecDev Group, from 2002–2011. Thanks to Steven Adair of the Shadowserver Foundation, who collaborated with us on Shadows in the Cloud.
Special thanks to the Tibetan community worldwide, especially Lhadon Tethong, Students for a Free Tibet, the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, and the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Research funding for the Citizen Lab has come from the generous support of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, IDRC, and Google Inc. Special thanks to Eric Sears, Laurent Elder, Matthew Smith, and Bob Boorstin.
The Citizen Lab’s success is, in part, attributable to the strong base of support we have enjoyed at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and the Department of Political Science. Thanks in particular to my colleagues Janice Stein, Lou Pauly, David Cameron, and President David Naylor for their support, and to Franklyn Griffiths for suggesting that I create a lab in the first place. I am very grateful to the Munk School staff, especially Margaret McKone, Wilhelmina Peter, Miriam McTiernan, Vanessa Johan, Lucinda Li, and Sean Willett.
I am particularly grateful to Vanessa van den Boogaard and Marianne Lau for outstanding research assistance.
Thanks to Doug Pepper and Jenny Bradshaw at McClelland & Stewart, and to Michael Levine.
I am exceptionally grateful to my editor, Ken Alexander, from whom I have learned immeasurably over the process of writing this book. In addition to being an exceptional editor, Ken has been a cheerleader, coach, and friend. His tireless attention to detail and enthusiasm about the craft of writing are truly inspiring. I benefited directly from his many careful interventions and thoughtful feedback, as well as his informal guidance and advice.
Special thanks to Mark Zacher at the University of British Columbia, who showed me the value of working collaboratively, of paying constant attention to principles, and of appreciating the responsibilities that come with being a professional scholar.
Thank you to my children – Emily, Rosalind, Ethan, and Michael – for showing pride and interest in all things related to the Citizen Lab, and for caring about making the world around you a better place.
Finally, I would like to thank and acknowledge my wife, Jane Gowan, who has supported me throughout not only this book project, but through all of my professional activities. By the example she sets with her own art and work, I’ve learned from her what loving dedication to a craft really means. Thank you, Janie.
Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace Page 30
