Chapter 7
Embrace the digital revolution
The power of the people is greater than the people in power.1
Wael Ghonim
I’ve documented about two hundred protests on the Rulebreakers blog over three years. I would say too many made little use of technology beyond spreading invites on social media, and no more sophisticated implements on the ground than cardboard signs. Don’t get me wrong: I love cardboard signs, especially those a lot of effort has been put into. But they only carry the message about ten metres across, and most PA systems little farther. Often, as a result, the crowd ended up preaching to itself. If not for my modest coverage, their message wouldn’t have reached any farther than I can cast a rock. We live in the era of the Internet and cell phone cameras which can livestream footage across the globe, yet by this crude metric of mine I would say demonstrations often seem to be stuck in the Stone Age.
I therefore encourage you, my dear readers, to have a peek at The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions by Ray Brescia.2 The book attributes the advance of civil rights throughout modern History to communications breakthroughs, going as far back as the printing press (which historians credit for the Protestant Reformation, by the way), while giving honourable mentions to the telegraph and the radio.
Brescia argues that the advent of the television was instrumental to the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Let’s go back to Birmingham, Alabama in May 1963, at the heart of the segregated South, rife with racial violence, where Negroes were treated at best like second-class citizens. Black strategists saw an opportunity in this predicament and organized a downtown march meant to confront the mayor over legalized segregation, but quickly determined they lacked the numbers to make a difference, so they compensated with a tactic which remains controversial to this day.
Here’s how the ‘Children’s Crusade’ unfolded in Brescia’s own words:
In response, civil rights leaders organized a march of schoolchildren in support of those movement activists who had already been arrested and jailed. To counteract the overwhelming turnout of students, Connor had his forces train police dogs and fire hoses on the children. Still photographs captured the melee that ensued: one of a police dog, teeth bared, being restrained by a police officer to keep him from lunging at a teenage boy; another of fire hoses being trained on three children. After these images emerged in the media, more journalists and television news cameras descended on Birmingham and the televised images of confrontations were circulated throughout the nation and even the world.
To this I would add that Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech wouldn’t have reached across the world and reverberated through time if it hadn’t been televised and recorded for future generations; nor would have John F. Kennedy’s civil rights address. Sixty years later, technology has evolved exponentially, such that it would indeed make civil rights era activists drool with envy. Yet I’ve documented protests whose organizers didn’t even reach out to the local newspaper or TV station; if not for my YouTube channel, their speeches would have fallen on deaf ears and been quickly forgotten.
Contemporary technology has done much more than spread awareness of local events; it has outright turned the civil rights battlefield into an abstract one which no longer strictly requires boots on the ground. Nowadays digital activists jack into the Matrix and zip through cyberspace, waging battles that even science-fiction visionaries three generations prior struggled to anticipate. Authors had foreseen digital dystopias in which governments controlled the flow of information; instead mass communications have turned ordinary citizens into instant content publishers and mundane clips into viral stories, such that even the Chinese and Russian governments’ draconian censors struggle to stem the flow of public discontent.3
This chapter discusses civil rights protests and movements revolving around technology, in which activists fought back against the establishment with electron beams powered by mighty keystrokes. Reflect upon these as reminders that full-duplex mass communications enable even the most humble of civilians to fire back at government and corporate attempts to control the narrative with retaliatory payloads of weaponized dissent.
DeCSS
The transition to digital media around the turn of the millennium was a mixed blessing for content publishers, since for better or worse their products suddenly became a lot easier to copy and distribute. The Compact Disc (CD) allowed for much better music quality and lower manufacturing costs, and for better or worse its contents could be transferred across devices with ease, which would later create a market for the ubiquitous iPod. On the other hand, the Internet had also made illicit distribution of copyrighted music a breeze, and soon indeed online music piracy became rampant, enabled notably by the peer-to-peer file sharing platform Napster.4
With the Digital Video Disc (DVD), the industry sought to avoid making the same mistake it did with the CD, with a twofold protection mechanism. One was the Content Scramble System (CSS), a digital rights management encryption system meant to prevent playback on unauthorized players, hence extraction to file, in an attempt to bind the disc’s contents to its physical medium and restrict playback to a given region of the globe. The other was lobbying the American government for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, which among other things criminalized defeating anti-circumvention mechanisms in digital media, such as of course CSS—yet another law that would make the average American a felon, as I’m about to explain.
The protection did not hold for long. A decoding program called DeCSS was posted online in October 1999. It was written by a trio of programmers including Norwegian teenager Jon Lech Johansen, the remaining two anonymous. Johansen was raided by the police at his home in January 2000,5 then charged under a strained reading of a criminal statute which extended the prohibition of breaking into someone’s tangible correspondence to digital documents. He was acquitted twice, after pleading the application was intended for fair use such as viewing one’s legally acquired movies on unlicensed players, including those running on the open-source operating system Linux; the prosecution ultimately decided to drop the charges.6
But the legal saga would not end there. The American hacker quarterly magazine 2600 published DeCSS’s source code, only to be swiftly sued by Universal City Studios for violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision. Publisher Eric Corley refused to abide by a preliminary injunction issued by the court and kept linking to websites hosting the infringing source code, calling his decision an act of “electronic civil disobedience”. Corley lost both before the District Court and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, despite his pleading the First Amendment and fair use, in rulings decried by civil liberties advocates.7
Of course the claimant’s legal victory was an empty one, since DeCSS spread as quickly online as did illicit copies of copyrighted media. Unauthorized DVD playback applications flourished, including the very popular VideoLAN Client (VLC) which remains in widespread use nowadays. The media publishing industry failed to control in which region and on which player their customers view its products, ultimately a victory for fair use advocates—even though it was also a boon for online piracy.
The industry did not learn its lesson with the DVD. Toshiba introduced the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), a similar copy protection mechanism, in its ill-fated HD DVD (and rival Blu-ray disc which would long outlast it). Naturally, a decryption key was leaked in May 2007 and the now famous 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 sequence became ubiquitous in technology forums. Social bookmarking news aggregator Digg initially attempted to comply with a DMCA takedown notice, only to give up after its users massively rebelled and flooded the website with the sequence in ways intended to circumvent any filters.8 Founder Kevin Rose capitulated as follows:
Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…
In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
Digg on,
Kevin
Fearing the Streisand effect,9 Toshiba wisely elected not to worsen the situation by taking Digg to court, which would have simply been a repeat of the DeCSS debacle.
WikiLeaks
People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.
V for Vendetta (2004)
The crusade against digital rights management was a tempest in a teapot compared to the firestorm unleashed by WikiLeaks, the world’s most controversial website by far.10 The nonprofit organization was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange, who rallied investigative journalists to publish classified documents submitted by whistleblowers. Since then it has released over ten million files documenting a multitude of human rights violations by states and corporations worldwide.11
Naturally, it has drawn the ire of the world’s most powerful government like no other website ever has, for the sin of exposing its dirtiest secrets. The United States of America went ballistic against the organization following the release of incriminating documents leaked in 2010 by a military intelligence analyst, Private First Class Bradley Manning (nowadays known as Chelsea Manning), pertaining to the torture and mass murder of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq.12 Manning was convicted by a court-martial of multiple offences related to the unauthorized disclosure of state secrets, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Espionage Act. She was sentenced to 35 years in prison,13 decried by observers as grossly excessive and disproportionate to any actual harm;14 in January 2017 President Barack Obama commuted her sentence to time served plus four months15—paradoxically a year before the United States Army Court of Criminal Appeals confirmed the lower court’s sentence.16
Even this saga paled in comparison to the vendetta the American government waged against Assange himself. Shortly after Manning’s arrest, Sweden made an extradition request to the United Kingdom, alleging two separate complaints of sexual assault, widely believed to be vindictive prosecution on behalf of the United States, in retaliation for his journalistic activities.17 United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer would later denounce the Swedish investigation as an abuse of process, citing lack of evidence, numerous irregularities, and the lack of formal charges—although an open letter signed by 319 human rights advocates decried some semantical arguments he made during an interview with Russia Today as insensitive and legally erroneous.18
Fearing extradition to the United States at the conclusion of those proceedings, Assange sought asylum at Ecuador’s embassy, where he remained holed up for nearly seven years, from June 2012 to April 2019, until his host ultimately surrendered him to British authorities, claiming to be fed up with his paranoia and eccentric antics.19 I forgive him for being paranoid, given that Scotland Yard had besieged the embassy around the clock for the first three years attempting to capture him, at the cost of at least £11.1m, more fitting an operation for a high-profile terrorist than a mere sexual assault suspect; moreover, covert surveillance by the Metropolitan Police Service continued.20 The Ecuadorian government itself spent a small fortune ensuring Assange’s safety during his stay, and had tentatively plotted his escape.21 The CIA even contemplated assassinating him in 2017.22
Predictably the Swedish investigation was dropped in November 2019, mere months after Assange’s capture by the British authorities.23 However, immediately after his arrest the US government unsealed an indictment, filed by the Trump administration in 2018, accusing him of espionage by helping Manning breach into the Secret Internet Protocol Network for the purpose of leaking classified documents.24 Manning refused to testify against Assange before a grand jury, for which she was found in contempt and jailed until the conclusion of those proceedings one year later.25
The extradition proceedings went on interminably,26 in a perfect example of the process being the actual punishment. Assange ultimately accepted a plea bargain in 2024 which immediately set him free, concluding an epic 14-year campaign of retaliation against the messenger but also setting a precedent undermining press freedom.27 As for the human rights violations evidenced in the Manning leaks, they have never been investigated, since from the US government’s standpoint whistleblowing was the actual crime, one which it would have gone to any lengths to prosecute.28
The Manning leaks, while the most notable, were far from being the only ones fuelling the debate on the disclosure of confidential information; exhaustive enumeration alone would require a whole chapter.29 Among these were a July 2007 video from a US military helicopter showing the killing of civilians in Baghdad;30 a quarter million American diplomatic cables;31 incriminating files exposing secrets of Guantanamo Bay’s extralegal terrorist detention facility, including a list of detainees;32 over two million emails from Syria exposing shocking levels of foreign complicity in human rights abuse;33 personal emails of then CIA director John Brennan;34 troves of damaging emails taken from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman,35 a leak construed by the US government as an attempt by the Kremlin to interfere with the 2016 presidential election;36 nearly 300,000 email from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP);37 a list of worldwide infrastructure sites critical to the United States’ national security;38 evidence that the US government had been spying on Japanese officials since 2006;39 and even hacking tools used by the CIA to break into common electronic appliances, including smart televisions, thus realizing classical digital dystopias’ most iconic prophecy.40
And yet the most explosive US intelligence revelation of the WikiLeaks era isn’t listed among these. In 2013, NSA contractor Edward Snowden reached out to The Guardian with a colossal cache of documents exposing the agency’s mass spying on American citizens by storing phone call metadata.41 Snowden preferred the British newspaper to WikiLeaks because he felt apprehensive of the latter’s lack of document redaction,42 widely perceived among journalists as negligent and reckless.43 Nevertheless, WikiLeaks enabled his flight from Hong Kong to Russia,44 where ironically he sought asylum,45 before he could be deported to the United States to answer accusations of espionage.
The American government went to absurd lengths in its attempt to capture Snowden, just like it did for Assange. In July 2013, it went as far as having France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy close their airspace to Bolivia President Evo Morales’ plane and forcing its landing in Austria under suspicion that it might be harbouring the fugitive in order to grant him asylum, causing an international diplomatic row.46 Julian Assange later claimed to have spread false information in order to deceive American intelligence.47
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued Director of National Intelligence James Clapper over the constitutionality of the surveillance program. In May 2015, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the District Court’s decision dismissing the complaint and denying a preliminary injunction.48 By then the scandal had grown such that Congress passed the USA Freedom Act of 2015, curbing the program by having phone services providers hold onto the metadata, as opposed to the government itself, and by imposing a fairer warrant approval process on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA).49 The NSA shut down the surveillance program altogether by 2019.50
Efforts to address the derives which stemmed from abusive prosecution under the Espionage Act following Manning’s leaks have in contrast been unsuccessful. The best attempt was the introduction of the Espionage Act Reform Act of 2022, which unfortunately died in committee in both chambers of Congress. The Act would have limited its scope to individuals granted credentials by the government under a nondisclosure agreement, which would at least have spared Assange.
Sadly, WikiLeaks’ legacy is marred by controversy, scandal, infighting, failed endeavours like the Australian WikiLeaks Party,51 and arguably even blame for Trump’s first presidential term.52 Worst of all, it has dishearteningly little to show for in terms of legislative impact and accountability for state-sponsored human rights violations, given the scale of its revelations and resulting shock.53
Instead of meaningful reform, the United States chose unhinged retaliation against dissenters, delivering plots so epic that they wouldn’t look out of place in spy movies, inspiring the biographical documentaries The Fifth Estate (2013), Snowden (2016), and The Six Billion Dollar Man (2025).54 Reality isn’t nearly as romantic as depicted in dramatizations, however, especially when activism intersects with partisan politics, a peril I warn about in Chapter 8.
Aaron Swartz
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
Not every episode of government retaliation against hacktivists is a cloak-and-dagger novel. Here’s the tragic story of an outstanding civil rights advocate who denounced overreaching digital laws only to be targeted with one.55 By making him a martyr, the US government pleaded his case better than he ever could have on his own.
Aaron Swartz was a computer science prodigy who taught himself programming at a very young age, even for one among computer wizards of his generation. The young entrepreneur quickly became obsessed with the World Wide Web, and contributed to the advent of the so-called Web 2.0 with technologies like Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to download summaries of blog posts; the Python programming language website framework web.py; and Infogami, a flexible content management system designed to create rich and visually interesting websites, which later merged with social media platform Reddit.56
But Swartz wouldn’t be remembered so fondly today solely for his technological contribution to the Internet. He also championed open access to information and copyright reform, starting with the Creative Commons set of licences granting end users certain rights to use and distribute works, a middle ground between traditional copyright and public domain. Then in 2006 he co-founded Open Library, an online catalogue intended to list every book ever published, in partnership with the Internet Archive.
Swartz was frustrated that the world’s repository of scientific and technological literature was being held behind paywalls by a handful of corporate publishers keeping it beyond the reach of the masses. This model was simply incompatible with the mindset of pioneers like him who had built the free and open Internet.
In fact, he even bemoaned that the federal government’s Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) program charged a fee to download publicly available legal texts, arguing that the law should be made available for free. So in September 2008 he downloaded about 2.7 million federal court documents from the network with an automated script, borrowing credentials from a Sacramento library in order to evade the fee.57 The FBI investigated but declined to charge him, reasoning instead that the documents were indeed public property therefore no crime had been committed.
Swartz used the stunt to push for the Open PACER Act of 2013, but it failed to gain traction; it was resurrected in 2020 as the Open Courts Act, then passed by the House of Representatives only to languish in a Senate committee. That being said, PACER fees were deemed illegally excessive by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in August 2020.58
The activist was only getting warmed up. While a student at the Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT), he next went after nonprofit organization Journal Storage (JSTOR), a vast library of academic journal articles, whose underlying model he criticized for reselling publicly-funded research for outrageously high fees, putting those papers beyond the reach of all but a wealthy few.
Once again he used the MIT’s credentials as a loophole to automate downloading articles without paying any fees. In a sense it was legal, but it violated the university network’s terms of service, which forbade bulk transfer of documents using scripts. Network administrators repeatedly blocked his computer’s address, but such a measure was trivial for the hacktivist to work around.
This time though, he wouldn’t just get away with it. In January 2011, the administrators found Swartz’s laptop connected straight to the network in a closet, but instead of disconnecting it they installed a camera in order to catch him red-handed, at the behest of the Secret Service. He was arrested shortly after for breaking and entering, and later charged with a total of thirteen felonies for abusing the network.
Swartz was actually accused of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which indeed criminalized infringing upon a network’s terms of service—you know, that cryptic legalese preamble everybody skips by clicking ‘I agree’ without actually reading it, and which the service provider can unilaterally change afterward without notice anyway. To illustrate the law’s absurd implications, let’s point out that these commonly prohibit the use of profanity,59 such that using swear words in user-generated content amounts to a felony under a literal reading of the CFAA; on this basis, most of us would end up behind bars for the next thousand years at least. Fortunately this rigid interpretation has been struck down in March 2020 by the US District Court for the District of Columbia,60 then again in a different case by the Supreme Court in June 2021.61
But back in 2011 the matter remained unsettled, which made it the ideal trap for the government to retaliate against Swartz for his political activism. This explains the rapid involvement of the Secret Service and ensuing rabid prosecution of de minimis offences even JSTOR implored the Department of Justice (DOJ) not to pursue.
Swartz suddenly found himself in severe legal jeopardy, risking thirty-five years in prison and a million dollars in fines, for bending the rules in a way that caused no harm whatsoever, because he had become overly political from the government’s standpoint. The retaliation would embolden him further, to speak against emerging bills cracking down on online copyright violations such as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) introduced later that year. Both died following an intense online campaign of retaliation spearheaded by Swartz,62 which included a petition which gathered seven million signatures and a one-day January 2012 Internet blackout protest joined by major websites like Wikipedia and Google.63
But the ongoing prosecution would be his undoing. The financial and psychological toll on him had been such that he committed suicide in January 2013, three months ahead of trial, at the age of 26.64 His legacy is such that the Internet itself went into mourning afterward, and even inspired the documentaries The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014) and Killswitch (2014).
Congress demanded that the DOJ explain its vindictive prosecution of the outspoken activist.65 Swartz’s death triggered a sustained campaign to reform the CFAA, starting with a bill named after him which died in committee in both chambers, and only ceased when the court system curbed the CFAA’s unconstitutionally vague language.
I would like to conclude his story by quoting from one of his speeches, which would make a fitting epitath:
It’s easy sometimes to feel like you’re powerless, like when you come out on the streets and you march and you yell, and nobody hears you. But I’m here to tell you today: You are powerful.66
Aaron Swartz
Chapter 8: Beware the partisan politics swamp