What Is Hacktivism? A Short Guide to Hacking as Protest

Hacktivism is what you get when you fuse hacking and activism: using the tools and tactics of hacking to pursue a political or social cause rather than money or mischief. It is one of the most contested corners of hacker culture, because the same act can look like civil disobedience to one person and a crime to another.

Where the word came from

The term was coined in 1996 by a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow, a long-running hacker group, and spread from there. But the idea predates the word. The conviction underneath it, that information and networks are political and that ordinary people should be able to act on them, runs straight back through the cypherpunks, who argued that privacy required cryptography in public hands, and the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which took the fight for digital rights into the courts.

The tactics

Hacktivism is not one thing. It covers a wide range of methods, some legal, many not:

• Building tools. The most durable hacktivism is constructive. Tor gives dissidents a way to speak without being watched; Signal put strong encryption in everyone's pocket. These outlast any single protest.
• Leaks and transparency. Exposing documents in the public interest, the lineage that runs through the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto and the wider transparency movement.
• Disruption. Virtual sit-ins, distributed denial-of-service actions, and website defacements, used to draw attention the way a street blockade does. These are the most legally fraught.
• Speech and press. Zines and broadcasts like 2600 that gave the underground a political voice.

The argument it never settles

Is hacktivism protest or crime? The honest answer is that it is argued case by case. A virtual sit-in resembles a physical one, but the law treats unauthorized access very differently from standing on a sidewalk. The same panic that followed the early intrusions, traced in our exhibits on the 414s and the Morris Worm, shaped laws that now apply to activists too. That tension, between the hacker conviction that information wants to be free and a legal system built to protect property, is the permanent weather of hacktivism.

A note on the people

This is a guide to the idea. For the activists and groups themselves, their biographies and timelines, see our sister reference, HackersMinds, which catalogues the people who shaped this history. Here we keep to the concept: that somewhere in the 1990s, a generation decided the keyboard was a place you could take a stand, and the world has been arguing about it ever since.