Привет!
I’m curious what everyone here thinks of topics such as Hacktivism, and Vigilante Justice?
I think there are needs for both, in certain areas. Sometimes the only way to affect change is to do so via direct action, through hacking.
For instance, though the change in law was very brief, a very significant change in US law happened not too long ago because of a Hacktivist.
A little background: In 2001 Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), and in 2011 Barack Obama signed into law the 2011 NDAA, which codified into law powers assumed under the AUMF, which granted the federal government the authority to suspend due process, and indefinitely detain Americans charged with terrorism with no charge, trial, or legal counsel.
This law was ever so briefly overturned, after a lawsuit by journalists Chris Hedges and Alexa O’Brien.
On Friday the 28-year-old activist
will appear for sentencing in the Southern District Court of New York
in Manhattan. After having made a plea agreement, he faces the
possibility of a 10-year sentence for hacking into the Texas-based
private security firm Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor, which
does work for the Homeland Security Department, the Marine Corps, the
Defense Intelligence Agency and numerous corporations including Dow
Chemical and Raytheon.
…
Hammond turned the pilfered information over to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone
and other publications. The 3 million email exchanges, once made
public, exposed the private security firm’s infiltration, monitoring and
surveillance of protesters and dissidents, especially in the Occupy
movement, on behalf of corporations and the national security state.
And, perhaps most important, the information provided chilling evidence
that anti-terrorism laws are being routinely used by the federal
government to criminalize nonviolent, democratic dissent and falsely
link dissidents to international terrorist organizations. Hammond sought
no financial gain. He got none.
The email exchanges Hammond made public were entered as evidence in my lawsuit
against President Barack Obama over Section 1021 of the National
Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Section 1021 permits the military to
seize citizens who are deemed by the state to be terrorists, strip them
of due process and hold them indefinitely in military facilities. Alexa
O’Brien, a content strategist and journalist who co-founded US Day of
Rage, an organization created to reform the election process, was one of
my co-plaintiffs. Stratfor officials attempted, we know because of the
Hammond leaks, to falsely link her and her organization to Islamic
radicals and websites as well as to jihadist ideology, putting her at
risk of detention under the new law. Judge Katherine B. Forrest ruled,
in part because of the leak, that we plaintiffs had a credible fear, and
she nullified the law, a decision that an appellate court overturned
when the Obama administration appealed it.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_revolutionaries_in_our_midst_20131110
The authority of the federal government to indefinitely detain American citizens with no charge or trial was overturned, largely because of what Jeremy Hammond did.
Would I do something like this myself? Hell no! Look where it got him. Ten years in prison, and ultimately no change in the law, thanks to an appeal by The Obama administration. There is too much risk involved in something like this, and no possible reward, because when it comes to the United States, hacktivism, just like voting, protest, and violence, does not affect positive change for the common citizen. There is no positive change for the common citizen in America. There is only positive change for the corporations, at the expense of the common citizen.
I think the United States is basically a doomed, sinking ship, and nothing will save it. So my plan of action is to bail I think.
On the topic of Vigilante Justice, I think this is also necessary in some cases.
For instance, someone I know personally was, within the last eight to twelve years, scammed out of a very large sum of money by an overseas scammer. Through complete access to my personal acquaintance’s accounts, I was able to discover the identify of the scammer, and found that they were part of a large scam ring that had been active for at least several years.
We took this information to the authorities, and were told that my acquaintance’s loss, which was somewhere between eight thousand and thirty five thousand dollars, wasn’t substantial enough to warrant investigation. So I put the scammer right in the authorities’ laps, and they didn’t even fucking look at the case.
So in a situation like this, what is a person to do? Do absolutely nothing, and find no justice, or try to do something, and maybe have a chance of finding some sort of justice?
To me, the answer is clear. Doing nothing is not an option, in cases like this.
So what say you, Level1Hacking?