We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists Page #2

people woke up and saw a

car up there in the morning,

or they measured a bridge by the body-lengths

of somebody, let's say his name was Brian

and they discovered the bridge

over the Charles river was,

you know, 822 Brians.

These are funny things.

That's where hacking originated

and then migrated in

engineering and computer communities.

It's, really, it's pranks.

Basically Microsoft

and Apple, both,

got their entire start of computer crime.

Bill Gates stole

pretty much all of the MS-DOS.

Steve Jobs,

he was creating boxes to

defraud the phone company.

I always saw hacking,

as implicitly political.

Hackers, whether they're

conscious about it or not,

whether explicit about it or not,

make a statement,

about how we should treat information.

And some years after my book came out,

one of the people I wrote about,

Richard Stallman,

got very publically

and explicitly political

about open software, about..

And he believed that software should be free.

Free as in freedom, not free

as in beer, as he put it there.

Behind it, whether misguided or

not, there is a political impulse.

Hactivism was a term coined by a

group called Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc).

The Lopht had an interesting

relationship with the cDc.

Actually there was 3 members,

that were in both organizations.

And we kind of capped like,

the serious security research,

that they were doing, they

would do under the Lopht name

and if they're doing some sort

of just goofy stunt-like things,

they would do it under the cDc name,

because the cDc was really kind of a,

sort of, like a propaganda

type of organization.

They had a guy who was

the minister of propaganda,

they were kinda merry pranksters

like, everything they did,

was completely over the top you know,

they would dress up like Mr-T sometimes,

they would do rap songs at

DEFCON, like a rap performance.

One of the guys there, I think his name is

t-fish, or short for tweety fish, coined the term

hactivism, because he saw what,

one of the things, his group was

doing, which he called hactivism

was writing software that people in other

countries could use to communicate securely,

even if their government

was spying on them.

So what the principal was really,

was freedom of expression.

It was everyone should

have access to the internet,

everyone should be able to communicate and

get their message out on the internet.

Even more important in countries,

where there was repressive regimes,

that if you said something against the regime,

they would come and take you away

and you weren't saying anything anymore.

A good place to start are with,

what is often been called virtual sit-ins,

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