Hacktivism and the Humanities: Programming Protest in the Era of the Digital University Elizabeth...

Hacktivism and the Humanities: Programming Protest in the Era of

the Digital University

Elizabeth LoshUniversity of California, Irvine

The Civil Rights Movement

The Free Speech Movement

The Anti-War Movement

Critical Information Studies, A ManifestoSiva Vaidhyanathan

“needed to make sense of important phenomena such as copyright policy, electronic voting, encryption, the state of libraries, the preservation of ancient cultural traditions, and markets for cultural production”

Contemporary Contexts:

Not Exclusively about Digital Rights

• Message control that stifles scientific discourse (DRM but also global warming)

• The PATRIOT Act and new exceptions to the right to privacy

• The compromising of habeas corpus• The Doctrine of Preemption• Attacks on principles of sovereignty and

regional self-determination in an age of globalization

• Constraints on speech created by new technological regimes

• Internet surveillance and blocking• Threats to network neutrality

What Hacktivism isn’t: Why critical code studies matter

Hactivism vs. Tactical Media Activism

A shared interest in the exploit

Hacking Digital Video

Hacking E-mail

Hacking Home PagesDefending East Timor

Estonian DDoS Attacks

Electronic Disturbance Theater

Commemorative Poetry from Here Nor There for Jam Echelon Day

Political Phishing

Those who know code are depicted as

• stealthy• elitist• highly individualistic• protective of expert knowledge• opposed to public deliberation• disinterested in the norms of civil

society

What about University Contexts?

And thus, I now present: Chris's Northwest Airlines Boarding Pass Generator

Using this, you can:

1. Meet your elderly grandparents at the gate2. 'Upgrade' yourself once on the airplane –by printing another boarding pass for a ticket you're already purchased, only this time, in Business Class.3. Demonstrate that the TSA Boarding Pass/ID check is useless.

Have Fun! Christopher Soghoian

Ed: The only way for these kind of problems to get fixed, are through public full disclosure. TSA/DHS cannot be expected to fix anything unless they are publicly shamed into doing so.

This situation is made even worse when you consider the fact that you can print your own boarding pass online at home.

This is often a bunch of text/html, with one or two images (a barcode, and perhaps an airline logo). It is trivially easy – as in, 20 seconds with a text-editor, and not even requiring you to open photoshop – to open it up, and change the name.

Christopher Soghoian

These pages serve two purposes. The first is to distribute a boarding pass generator for NWA. The second is to demonstrate the framework that the NWA generator was written in, with the hope that you will write your own document generators like this one.

The motivation for writing this boarding pass generator and framework is twofold. First, it is clear that even though the weaknesses in our airport security system were known about for some time, no action was taken until Christopher Soghoian produced his script. His generator got people's attention, and was taken off the internet.

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WikiScanner

Books that Make You Dumb

Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto

Carnivore from the Radical Software Group

Terminal Air by Trevor Paglin

Freedom Fone by Tad Hirsch

Darfur by John Maeda

What Constitutes Academic Freedom?

Edward Felten and Dmitry Sklyarov and anxieties about violating laws

against digital replication

Tor research at the University of Colorado and anxieties about

compromising human subjects

Virtual Jihadi at RPI and anxieties about Homeland Security

Ebon Fisher at Stevens and contract disputes

Faculty Bloggers