Hacktivism Quotes

In 1791, the right to bear arms to defend against an over-reaching government wasn't theoretical. Today, it's hard to imagine physical weapons serving the same purpose. But it's easy to see how hacktivists might - especially if you broaden the opponents to include hate groups and rapacious multinationals.

Shutting down governments on your computer is just as much as fun as going to a riot at Yale.

The government targets 'Anonymous' for the same reason it targets al-Qaida - because they're the enemy.

Cory Doctorow is a fast and furious storyteller who gets all the details of alternate reality gaming right, while offering a startling, new vision of how these games might play out in the high-stakes context of a terrorist attack. Little Brother is a brilliant novel with a bold argument: hackers and gamers might just be our country's best hope for the future.

Now we have the hacker kids playing politics.

You have a very large population of hackers in Eastern Europe in general and Russia especially. A lot of them consider themselves patriotic individuals and will take broad direction from government policies.

This week a group of activists, known as Anonymous, hacked the Twitter account of the KKK. The KKK is furious. They said Anonymous is just a bunch of cowards who don't have the courage to show their faces.

I'm not affiliated with either Wikileaks or Anonymous - of course, it's not like I would tell you anyway if I were because the whole point is to be anonymous.

Anonymous is not an organization. It is an idea, a zeitgeist, coupled with a set of social and technical practices.

Seeing Anonymous primarily as a cybersecurity threat is like analyzing the breadth of the antiwar movement and 1960s counterculture by focusing only on the Weathermen.

Hacktivism: The merger of hacking and political activism can wreak enormous havoc.

One of my favourite books about hackers is 'Masters of Deception' about this hacking group in the 1990s. Many of them didn't come from wealthy families. These are kids that are very intelligent; they just happen to be misdirected.

When Paul [Greengrass] was writing, he'd send me story ideas that he had. He was particularly interested in social movements and revolutions that had been happening all over the world, and how computers and the internet had helped those movements. He encouraged me to read a book about Anonymous, the hacker group called "white hat" hackers, meaning they're driven by ideology and social disruption as opposed to just greed.

I was really fascinated by some of the things happening with Anonymous, the hackers group. I don't necessarily agree with everything they've done, but I thought it was a really interesting use of technology and the fact that there's a whole group of people who can take over systems and fight things from behind the scenes.

Anonymous is like an amoeba: it's got too many different operations run by truly different people which might not share a single person with another operation, but they use the same branding - they are part of the Anonymous brand, just like al-Qaida.

We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.

If Anonymous and Lulzsec are the id of hacking, then physical hackerspaces are the heart of the higher-minded hacking ideals: freedom of information, meritocracy of ideas, a joy of learning and anti-authoritarianism.

For some reason, it seems that the government considers hackers who are out to line their pockets less of a threat than those who are trying to make a political point.