Jasmine Singh

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Wiki Assignment One

Wiki Final Assignment Two: The Political Battlefield of CyberSpace: Anonymously & Legally Changing the World

Who Are The Players?

  • Anonymous: Anonymous is more or less a loosely organized international movement of online activists who share similar social and political ideals. This organization claims to promote the access to information, free speech, and transparency. They support a wide range of different ideas, from anti corruption to antiauthoritarian movements [1].
The group does not have a leader, and nor does it need one to function. Individual members make their own decisions about what action to take next, and if most members agree with that individual's claim, then actions are carried out collectively to accomplish respective goals.
Joining the group is easy so long as members hide their identities while conducting online activities. Since the group is complex and informal, it's hard to "establish an accurate demographic" on the Anonymous users [2]. If any of them decide to participate in a live protest, members wear a mask that represents the "face" of the group .
As mentioned earlier, some of the events they have taken so far have ranged from closer politics to very far politics, respective to the location of the United States. However, Anonymous users do not only exist in the United States, either. Many Anonymous users are around the world. These activists are known for their very famous and infamous hacking ploys, where they hack onto other governmental agencies', companies, commercial entities', politician's, and corporations' websites for the sake of proving a point or attaining what they think is justice. These hackings exist in the form of denial of service (DoS) or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which shut down the protest affiliated websites. Some of these hackings have involved the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's websites.
Intent by Anonymous also ranges with the multitude of different political concerns they have. Sometimes, they act only for humor and to prove their strength. Some examples of this include HBGary and HBGary Federal operations, where they made a fool of a couple people who tried to expose some of the Anonymous members and the supposed "leaders" of the anarchic group. Sometimes, they act to serve real political justice around the world, to those who are oppressed. Some of these examples include their very first actions, like "OpTunisia," where they stood up against an oppressive ruler. This specific operation sparked many of the Freedom operations that Anonymous would eventually also start [3]. Obviously, these actions, although good and bad, are very illegal. Sometimes Anonymous users are discovered and arrested. However, based on the anonymity of the organization, it is hard to ascertain if the right users are being arrested. Whether or not they will eventually grow and become something even bigger is currently up for debate. It is for certain, though, that Anonymous has changed many lives around the world - for the better and sometimes, humorously for the worse.
  • The Government: Private corporations want the ability to shut down unauthorized sites where people download illegal content, like copyrighted material, for free.
  • SOPA: The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a United States bill that was initially created to allow U.S. law enforcement to help stop and prevent copyright infringement and "online trafficking in counterfeit goods," [4]. If intellectual property-rights holder feel that they have been harmed by copyright infringement, SOPA allows that the rights holders notify related payment facilitators and ad networks of the identity of the website, who will then stop services to that website. If these facilitators do not respond accordingly, the rights holder can file yet another complaint in the form of injunctive relief. The SOPA bill also attacks websites that stream videos, counterfeit drugs, military materials, or consumer goods. If these sites act on unauthorized terms, SOPA makes sure that the copyrighted material will be removed and can most definitely lead to the site being shut down.
SOPA addresses the differences between a domestic site and a foreign site. According to their terms, a domestic site is defined as a site that has a domestic domain name or IP address. The domain needs to be assigned to a registrar or other authority that is located in the United States. Some of the biggest examples include ".com," ".org," and ".us." A foreign site, on the other hand, is everything else that is not a domestic site, without a domestic domain. This includes "redd.it" and "bit.ly." However, "piratebay.org" can also be considered domestic because it has a U.S. registered domain.
If, indeed, the site is shown to infringe on copyrighted material, the site could be subject to seizure.
  • PIPA (Protect IP): The Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) was introduced in to the U.S. Senate on May 12, 2011. This proposal gives the government the power to block access to infringing domain names. This act allows that if a site is shown to engage in, enable, or facilitate activities for copyright infringement or counterfeit products, or if the site is designed to do the same, then the the Attorney General can require all sites and search engines to remove all links to the foreign site and make sure that ads are no longer served to the site or on it. Payment networks will also be required to cease any transactions between the foreign site and U.S. customers, and service providers will need to block customer access to the foreign site (DNS blacklisting) [5].
  • What Does This Do?
Since both SOPA and PIPA are worded very broadly, and since the concept of domestic vs. foreign is really complex, the legislation allows for a huge interpretation between what is a foreign site, what is a domestic site, and what to do to many of them. Consequential actions do include many forms of censorship, which is a really big concerns for many Internet and Web users. Under the broad definition of facilitation, a site could be targeted for something as simple as describing how to rip a Blu-Ray [6].
In essence, these bills don't even stop piracy. Both of these bills claim to prevent it, but they do nothing to the actual material that is infringing on copyright. Citizens will still be able to use foreign DNS servers and newer methods will develop to advertise them. All that will exist after all is said and done, is a "realm of federal regulation and censorship," [7].

What's Being Done?

  • Anonymous: Basically, after hearing about SOPA and PIPA, the question revolves around how groups like Anonymous, which is a hacking group, are preventing the government from censoring our Internet and Web as we know them today. This concept, in turn, brings up another governmental backlash at censoring, called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, otherwise known as CISPA.
Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA): CISPA is another bill issued by the United States legislative branch that allows a self-protected entity to "identify and obtain cyber threat information to protect the rights and property of such self-protected entity and share the cyber threat information with any other entity, including the Federal Government," [8]. The goal of this bill is to more or less provide companies with the ability to share any personal data with any other private company or corporation, so as they please if they seem to be a cyber-threat. A cyber threat is defined as an effort to harm the public or private system/network or as a theft of public data, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information. With another amendment to the bill, CISPA now can allow the same private entities to use personal data from their customers under any law enforcement needs pertaining to protecting children and individuals from death or serious bodily harm, and to protect the national security of the United States. [9].
If a private company, however, wants to make sure that its personal data is safe and sound, then they can make sure that even CISPA can't take the information from them. Still, this bill allows the Federal Government and many other corporations to share personal information, even if it they act under mistaken terms. This means that, if, by accident, the reason to draw information from a private company was not actually under the terms that qualifies CISPA to exist, it does not matter. CISPA grants immunity to these private corporations. [10].
Many users feel that CISPA undermines the privacy of millions of Internet users. Big corporations aren't even affected all that much in terms of making a profit, so they are unlikely to protest CISPA, especially considering that the only reasons why SOPA and PIPA were stopped were because of a vehement collaboration of protests against them. However, that just makes it all the more difficult to stop CISPA [11].
  • Anonymous' Intake on CISPA: As an act of retaliation to CISPA, Anonymous part-took in a collaboration of 400 websites "blacking out," [12]. Other actions included running ads against CISPA by all the companies opposing it, but the supporters seemed to outweigh their actions.
Anonymous did not only take a stance on CISPA, but it took a stand on many issues. As stated earlier in this post, Anonymous has stood up against many different political issues, including FreedomOps, which focused on allowing citizens of oppressed countries to stand up to their oppressive rulers. Many of these "operations," like 'OpTunisia' included protecting online privacies. Anonymous was successful for the grand majority of these operations in terms of their goals, and allowed the citizens of the oppressed countries to regain full access to the Internet [13].
  • Edward Snowden: Who is Edward Snowden? Edward Snowden is a former technical contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee. He spread information that was supposed to be private, regarding PRISM and Tempora Internet surveillance programs, which was illegal, but Snowden claimed that this information was only leaked under his belief that the information was valuable to the public in terms of what is "being done in their name and what is being done against them." More specifically, Snowden says, "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things (surveillance on its citizens) … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded." [14].
Connections to Snowden: It is apparent that the information Snowden released was all in the same name and goal that even Anonymous strives to accomplish: for justice. From what Snowden claims, the government has a lot more access to what we do and say than any of the bills have proclaimed they could. The government should not have access to everyday actions like that, and if they truly do, then we are not living in the world that we were made to believe. Snowden's actions have been quite the controversy as of late, but they still shed a lot of light on citizens' rights to privacy and how far they are being respected.

Works Cited

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