Hacktivism and the Humanities:
Programming Protest in the Era of
the Digital University
Elizabeth Losh
University of California, Irvine
The Civil Rights Movement
The Free Speech Movement
The Anti-War Movement
Critical Information Studies, A Manifesto
Siva 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 Pages
Defending 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 gate
2. '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.
j0hn4d4m5
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