Table Of ContentFirebrand Waves of Digital Activism 1994–2014
Firebrand Waves of Digital
Activism 1994–2014
The Rise and Spread of Hacktivism and
Cyberconflict
Athina Karatzogianni
University of Leicester, UK
© Athina Karatzogianni 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-0-230-24246-3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Karatzogianni, Athina.
Firebrand waves of digital activism 1994–2014: the rise and spread of
hacktivism and cyberconflict / Athina Karatzogianni.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Internet – Political aspects. 2. Cyberspace – Political aspects.
3. Hackers. 4. Political activists. 5. Political participation – Technological
innovations. I. Title.
HM851.K367 2015
303.48′34—dc23 2015015586
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Four Phases of Digital Activism and Cyberconflict 1
1 Origins and Rise of Digital Activism (1994–2007) 5
1.1 First phase (1994–2001): the origins of digital activism 5
1.2 Second phase (2001–2007): the rise of digital activism 15
2 The Third Phase (2007–2010): Spread of Digital Activism 25
2.1 Russia-related ethnonational digital activism
and cyberconflicts 25
2.2 China-related cyberconflicts, dissidents, and nationalist
hackers 41
3 The Fourth Phase (2010–2014): Digital Activism
Invades Mainstream Politics 66
3.1 WikiLeaks: ideological and organizational tensions 66
3.2 WikiLeaks: impact on communication and
International Relations scholarship 72
3.3 The ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings 90
3.4 The Snowden affair 106
4 The Future of Digital Activism and Its Studyy 121
4.1 Definition of digital activism and cyberconflict
as an area of studyy 121
4.2 The agency problematique 123
4.3 The structure problematique 126
4.4 The affect problematique 128
Bibliographyy 142
Index 167
v
Preface and Acknowledgements
The research for this book was conducted between 2007 and 2014, in
what was a period of intense cyberactivism in the global political arena:
proliferation of socio-political activist networks; social-media-enabled
political protests and mobilizations leading to social or political change;
and increased resistance to surveillance and censorship of global
communications, including leaks from government employees uncov-
ering significant problems in the use of ICT by both states and corpo-
rations. This book brings together work specifically relevant to media
movements and radical politics and the interaction between states and
corporations with these movements.
In engaging with this work, I have incurred many intellectual debts.
I extend my lasting thanks to all my colleagues at Hull and Leicester, who
I often stopped in corridors to talk to between writing sessions. My list of
gratitude for stimulating intellectual exchanges over the years includes
Noel O’Sullivan, Andrew Robinson, Michael Schandorf, Christiana
Gregoriou, Gillian Youngs, Cony Beyer, Phoebe Moore, Bev Orton,
Mike Brayshaw, Adi Kuntsman, Korina Patelis, Petros Ioannidis, Popi
Aggeli, Ming-Yeh, Gary Rawnsley, George Michaelides, Christos Sideras,
Eugenia Siapera, Anthimos Tsirigotis, Artur Alves, Michel Bauwens, Zizi
Papacharissi, Geert Lovink, Gabriella Coleman, Martin Gak, Patricia
Clough, Rafael-Cohen Almagor, Richard Aldrich, James Zborowski,
Maria Karanika, Marie-Hélène Bourcier, Mayra Rodrigues Gomes, Simon
Willmetts, Peter Wilkin, James Connelly, David Lonsdale, Peter Young,
Luke O’Sullivan and Panagiota Tsatsou. In addition, I extend my grati-
tude to my students for many inspiring conversations.
I have benefited from material support from the EU FP 7 MIG@NET
project (http://www.mignetproject.eu/). I am grateful to this body for
enabling me to travel widely for research; as well as to the University
of Illinois in Chicago and the University of São Paulo for inviting me
to visit and engage with staff and students. I am also grateful to the
University of Hull for allowing me research leave, and to the University
of Leicester for continuous support. I am thankful for the ESRC grant
The Common Good: Ethics and Rights in Cyber Security (ERCS), which
supported my research into the Snowden affair. I must also thank all the
publishers and editors who have supported my work over the years and
vi
Preface and Acknowledgements vii
the editorial team for this book. And no book on digital activism should
omit thanks to online friends, who are too numerous to mention!
I have published parts of the case studies included in this book over
the past seven years (Karatzogianni, 2010; 2012a; 2012b; 2012c; 2013;
Karatzogianni and Michaelides, 2009; Karatzogianni and Robinson,
2014; 2016), and I am grateful to colleagues, editors and publishers for
permission to use the material again. I have indicated in the text when
this is the case and where the relevant study originally appeared. In doing
so, I am opening my modest and often inadequate research vault in the
hope that scholars of digital activism and cyberconflict might discover
continuities, patterns and discontinuities, as well as paradoxes to aid the
analysis of future cases, for they are virtually certain to emerge.
This book is dedicated to my family in Greece, my son Sebastian
and his dad, Tim Hawkins, who is still tolerant of my frequent absent-
mindedness, travelling and smashing of kitchenware.
Introduction: Four Phases of Digital
Activism and Cyberconflict
This book introduces four waves of digital activism and cyberconflict.
Digital activism began in 1994, was transformed by the events of 9/11,
peaked in 2011 with the Arab Spring uprisings and then entered a trans-
formative phase of control, mainstreaming and co-optation, accentu-
ated by the Snowden revelations in 2013. Digital activism is defined
here as political participation, activities and protests organized in digital
networks beyond representational politics. It refers to political conduct
aiming for reform or revolution by non-state actors and new socio-po-
litical formations such as social movements, protest organizations and
individuals and groups from the civil society, that is by social actors
outside government and corporate influence. Cyberconflict is defined
as conflict in computer-mediated environments and it includes interac-
tions between actors engaged in digital activism to raise awareness for
a specific cause and struggles against government and corporate actors,
as well as conflicts between governments, states and corporations. The
rationale for distinguishing these phases is based solely on political
effects, rather than technological developments.
The first phase, covering the years 1994–2001, encompasses the origins
of two phenomena. With the invention of the World Wide Web in 1991
by Tim Berners Lee, the digitization of production in the 1980s could
finally be networked, and many-to-many broadcasting was no longer a
far-fetched reality. The optimism of the early 1990s that digitality would
bring an economic, socio-political and cultural revolution ended in the
last years of that decade with the bursting of the dot.com bubble, which
caused a rethink.
Nevertheless, consumers were able and eager to interact and participate
in the creative process and this was changing the relationship between
1
2 Firebrand Waves of Digital Activism 1994–2014
existing industries, technologies, audiences and markets. The commu-
nication landscape of the 1990s was effectively described by McLuhan’s
‘global village’ (1989); De Sola Pool’s (1983) argument about the arti-
ficiality of a media separation based on political economy rather than
technological characteristics; Rheingold’s (1994) first take on the power
of virtual communities; Jenkins’ (2006) convergence theory explaining
the shifting of balance with the intertwining of grassroots and corpo-
rate media; and Castells’ (2000) ‘network society’. Activism during that
period included the alternative peer-produced Linux operating system
started by Linus Torvalds in 1991 (the road had been opened by Richard
Stallman’s free software in the 1980s); the online transfer of ethnoreli-
gious conflicts (the Falun Gong in China, the Tamil in Sri Lanka, the
Kosovo war, the Israel-Palestine conflict); the use of ICTs by social move-
ments and protests, such as the Zapatista movement in Mexico, which
dropped guerrilla war in favour of digital engagement in 1994; the birth
of IndyMedia during the anti-globalization protests in Seattle in 1999;
and the overthrow of Estrada through the use of mobile phones in 2001.
By the first year of the new Millennium, digital activism was a global
force to be reckoned with.
The second phase is from 9/11 to 2007. It starts with 9/11, because the
Al Qaeda network’s attack on the Twin Towers in the US not only had a
profound impact on news coverage (the internet’s audience skyrocketed
and the media industry was transformed) but also prompted political
transformations both in the US and at the global level that led to the
War on Terror, a crackdown on civil liberties, securitization and mili-
tainment, among other phenomena. The subsequent Afghanistan and
Iraq wars heightened the impact of internet politics on the global public
sphere and increased digital activism in the form of anti-war protest, in
which ICT was used to accelerate its mobilization. The Iraq war (2003–
2011) came to be known as the first internet war, because the digital
revolution ensured that independent voices and new media actors were
able to challenge the official narrative of the War on Terror and offer an
alternative. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars were the dominant spheres
of digital activism and cyberconflict in that period, but there were other
notable examples: the socio-political mobilization in Ukraine’s Orange
Revolutions (2004–2005); hacktivism during the Republican Convention
in the US 2004; the Madrid and London Al Qaeda bombings; continuing
resistance in China; the ICT impact on the Lebanon war in 2006; and
the Estonian cyberattacks of 2007.
The third phase, from 2007 to 2010, started with the South Ossetia
conflict. In 2008, Senator Barack Obama exploited the power of social
