What is a ‘Hacktivist’?
By PETER
LUDLOW
The untimely death of the young Internet activist Aaron Swartz,
apparently by suicide, has prompted an outpouring of reaction in
the digital world. Foremost among the debates being reheated — one
which had already grown in the wake of larger and more daring data
breaches in the past few years — is whether Swartz’s activities as
a “hacktivist” were being unfairly defined as malicious or
criminal. In particular, critics (as well as Swartz’s family in a
formal statement) have focused on the federal government’s
indictment of Swartz for downloading millions of documents from
the scholarly database JSTOR, an action which JSTOR itself had
declined to prosecute.
I believe the debate itself is far broader than the specifics of
this unhappy case, for if there was prosecutorial overreach it
raises the question of whether we as a society created the
enabling condition for this sort of overreach by letting the
demonization of hacktivists go unanswered. Prosecutors do not work
in a vacuum, after all; they are more apt to pursue cases where
public discourse supports their actions. The debate thus raises an
issue that, as philosopher of language, I have spent time
considering: the impact of how words and terms are defined in the
public sphere.
[...]
Continua qui:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/what-is-a-hacktivist/