Introduction

Over their relatively short history, hackers have embarked on a broad range of different political conversations, debates, movements, events and issues, and have used a diverse array of methods ranging from online graffiti, virtual-sit-ins, message dissemination and protest organizing, to distributed-denial of services (DDoS) attacks, secret document leaking, and the launching of viruses, all with the purpose of utilizing their (threat of) coercive power and influence to effect change. Even within a single operation, the tools used and the political agenda sought can flow and change throughout its lifetime, raising a variety of different ethical questions and debates as a result. Given this fluidity it is challenging to create distinct breaks between the chapters focusing only on specific hacking tools. Instead, broad themes based on the general ethos and political objectives sought by the hackers can be established to help categorize and then facilitate the ethical evaluation. This chapter will focus on operations whose purpose is concerned with political autonomy: that is, restoring, protecting or enabling the individual's and social group's ability to act with their autonomy intact and to use that autonomy to act as political beings. This includes operations whose objective is providing for people's rights in expression, association, access to information and political engagement, and, importantly, how cyberspace has come to play a fundamental role in each of their realizations.

Some of the most infamous examples of hacking operations in this area involve those carried out as part of the Arab Spring revolutions between 2010 and 2012, where Anonymous aided the emerging protest movements throughout the region by shutting down government websites through DDoS attacks, and helping dissidents circumvent online censorship by providing ‘online care packages’ that allowed anonymous online communication and access to information. This included Operation Tunisia, where on 2 January 2010 Anonymous began landing successful DDoS attacks against several Tunisian government websites, including those belonging to the president, prime minister, Ministry of Industry, minister of foreign affairs, stock exchange and the government Internet agency that had been censoring online dissidence. This was followed by Operation Egypt, starting on 26 January 2011, using DDoS attacks on Egyptian cabinet ministers and providing online technologies to aid communications during the protests. And in 2012, Anonymous attacked Syrian government websites to fight government censorship (Greenberg, 2012b).