Key questions

• 1. Do digital networks afford more privacy or less, relative to pre-digital times, and for whom?

• 2. Can citizens trust their state's laws to protect data from global surveillance capitalist firms, or do these firms give citizens the means to learn of and resist state intrusion?

• 3. In what ways are hackers similar to and/or different from whistleblowers?

• 4. Does the term hacker conceal more than it reveals about the diversity of activities that are categorized under this label?

• 5. Is hacking now more an arm of inter-state power struggles (cyber warfare) than a form of resistance to the powerful (hacktivism)?

Links to affordances

Invasion of privacy requires the ability to gain access to other people's computers. The cat-and-mouse game between surveillance and encryption highlights that such access, and the ability to evade surveillance and retain the capacity to conceal content from such attempts at access, is never fully resolved. Successful intrusions by hacktivists have incited a backlash against state invasions of privacy, but, at the same time, self-exposure on social media continues, despite revelations about big-data abuses by surveillance capitalist platforms. It is possible to conceal (to a relatively secure level) a great deal more than most people care to do; whether those that care do so because they have something to hide should not be assumed. Ultimately, data abuses, when linked to micro-targeted marketing, allow some degree of behavioural management in the sale of products, while the ability to manipulate elections seems less powerful than often may be assumed.

Synopsis

Because the scope for privacy has expanded exponentially in recent years, and in particular in online spaces, what privacy there is to be invaded has also grown. The scope for privacy and its invasion is, then, a cat-and-mouse game between individuals and institutions, between institutions and between individuals. The scope for states to monitor individual communications is greater than ever before, as is the scale of big data collected by companies and now subject to ever more sophisticated forms of analysis for the purposes of profiling, micro marketing, behavioural prediction and choice modification. Yet, awareness of attempts to monitor citizens and manipulate consumers is also increased by means of digital networks. Such networks inform as well as inform upon us.

In what ways are WikiLeaks and Anonymous similar? In what ways are the two different?