Cyberactivism

Online Activism in Theory and Practice

MARTHA MCCAUGHEY, Michael Ayers, Michael D. Ayers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135381554
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Cyberactivism is a timely collection of essays examining the growing importance of online activism. The contributors show how online activists have not only incorporated recent technology as a tool for change, but also how they have changed the meaning of activism, what community means, and how they conceive of collective identity and democratic change. Topics addressed range from the Zapatista movement's use of the web to promote their cause globally to the establishment of alternative media sources like indymedia.org to the direct action of "hacktivists" who disrupt commercial computer networks. Cyberactivism is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the impact of the Internet on politics today.

Part I
Cyber-Social Movements Emerging Online

1
Internet Protests, from Text to Web

Laura J. Gurak and John Logie

Cyberspaces as Protest Sites

From its earliest days, the Internet has been about networking: not just networks of wires and hubs but networks of people. Protests, too, are always about networks, usually networks of people who have a common interest or concern and come together—whether in a physical place, such as in front of a government building, or via a petition or other campaign. No wonder, then, that the Internet has been a useful site for social activism of many forms. But how much do we know about the rhetorical dynamics of Internet protests? Are electronic petitions seen to be just as credible as paper ones? Do mass Web protest campaigns make a difference? Do the speed and reach of online communication bring the same features to electronic protests?

This chapter presents a comparison of two of the earliest Internet-based protests, the cases of Lotus MarketPlace and the Clipper chip, with more recent Web-based protests, such as the protest efforts enabled by sites such as Petitionsite.com and the “Haunting of GeoCities”—a protest against Yahoo!’s attempted appropriation of Web spaces built by “citizens” of GeoCities, the leading purveyor of “free” Web space. In just ten years we have come a long way from the text-based protests of Lotus MarketPlace and the Clipper chip, which relied on newsgroups, e-mail, and the then-novel nature of speed and reach on the Internet. Now, Web pages that go far beyond text in their appeals, using color, sound, images, graphics, and of course, words, still demonstrate the rich opportunities for social action and persuasion in the increasingly visual spaces of the Internet.

Our comparison illustrates that things have certainly changed. But it also points out that some features of online protests, such as speed, reach, problems with fact-checking, new notions of credibility, and traditional power structures, are the same even with the major shift of the Internet from a text-based network to the graphically rich environments found on the World Wide Web. Also, our comparison of “then and now” illustrates that way back when, in the early 1990s, Internet-based petitions and the like were still novel and may have caught people off-guard (such as the CEO of Lotus, who canceled the product after receiving too much e-mail). Today, companies and governments alike take electronic correspondence, including electronic petitions, with a grain of salt. But protests that take advantage of the key features of the Internet, especially the Web’s potential for using powerful visual images to reinforce the protest’s core message, can still be effective.

The Cases of Lotus MarketPlace and the Clipper Chip

On April 10, 1990, Lotus Development Corporation announced a product called MarketPlace: Households. MarketPlace was to be a direct mail marketing database for Macintosh computers. It would contain name, address, and spending habit information on 120 million individual American consumers from 80 million different households. After MarketPlace was announced, computer-privacy advocates began investigating what they believed was a product that crossed the line in terms of privacy. Although most of the data contained in MarketPlace were already available (the data were provided by Equifax, the number two credit reporting agency in the country), privacy advocates felt that MarketPlace was an inappropriate and invasive application of this data. Having the data so readily available to a mass market of PC users extended what many already felt was a “panopticon” of information sources in the United States, from credit profiles to grocery store checkout scanning systems to government files. Furthermore, the data were provided on the noncorrectable CD-ROM medium. If an entry was in error, it could not be corrected until a subsequent repressing of the database. And although Lotus indicated the privacy protection measures they had put in place, including an encryption scheme so that only “authorized business users” (those who had purchased the program and had somehow been prescreened by Lotus) had access to the data, privacy advocates were not convinced.

From Lotus’s first announcement until months after it canceled the product, various electronic bulletin boards and e-mail were full of discussions about MarketPlace. In fact, computer-mediated communication (CMC) was a critical forum in this case. In late November, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece about MarketPlace. This story presented Lotus’s position as well as the position of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), an advocacy group that took a position against MarketPlace. Networks were immediately abuzz with discussions of the Journal article; soon, debates about the privacy implications of MarketPlace and suggestions for contacting Lotus began to circulate. People posted Lotus’s address and phone number, the e-mail address of Lotus’s CEO, and information about how to get names removed from the database. Some people posted “form letters” that could be sent to Lotus. Notices were forwarded around the Net, reposted to other newsgroups, and sent off as e-mail messages. In one case, a discussion group was formed specifically to talk about MarketPlace.

One of the most powerful voices within the Lotus protest was that of Larry Seiler, a New England–based computer professional. Shortly after the MarketPlace announcement, Seiler wrote a message that circulated widely via e-mail and Usenet newsgroups:

Summary: Basically, Lotus is putting together a database, about to be released on CD-ROM in March. It will contain a LOT of personal information about YOU, which anyone in the country can access by just buying the discs. It seems to me (and a lot of other people, too) that this will be a little too much of a big brother, and it seems like a good idea to get out while there is still time. Feel free to forward this message to as many people as you know. (qtd. in Gurak 1997, 88–89)

In another letter, Seiler again advanced the notion that simple circulation of the message throughout the Internet might prompt significant enough outrage to build pressure on Lotus. Seiler wrote:

[P]ass this message along to anyone you think might care. To me, this is not just a matter of privacy. Lotus is going to sell information behind our backs—we are not allowed to dispute their data or even know what it is. Worse, Lotus is going to sell rumors about our income. Still worse, they will do it on a scale never before achieved. This should not be tolerated. Please help to stop Lotus. (qtd. in Gurak 1997, 88–89)

While Seiler’s messages do not outline specific strategies for protest, they were nevertheless resoundingly effective, triggering waves of ad hoc action by sympathetic Netizens.

During the following Internet-based protest, over thirty thousand people contacted Lotus and asked that their names be removed from the database. The product, which had been scheduled for release during the third quarter of 1990, was, ultimately, never released. On January 23, 1991, Lotus issued a press release announcing that it would cancel MarketPlace: Households because of “public concerns and misunderstandings of the product, and the substantial, unexpected costs required to fully address consumer privacy issues” (Gurak 1997, 19). In the end, many acknowledged the role of Internet-based networks in stopping the release of MarketPlace. Some subsequently called it “[a] victory for computer populism” (Winner 1991, 66).

Four years later, a similar online action took place. The Computer Security Act of 1987 required that the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), a federal standards-setting organization under the Commerce Department, develop a new national standard for computer encryption. This standard would replace the existing data encryption standard, known as DES, in response to the need for a more sophisticated approach. Unlike the proposed Clipper standard, which requires two keys (each held by a different agency), the DES involved a single key to both encrypt and decrypt a message; by 1987, this design was considered outdated and not sophisticated enough to support the continuing “information revolution.”

NIST thus followed the directive of the 1987 Computer Security Act and began work on a new federal encryption standard. To do so, they turned to the National Security Agency (NSA), described as “the United States’ most secretive intelligence organization” (Markoff 1993, D1). The NSA proceeded to develop an escrowed encryption standard (EES), which would be implemented in a chip that came to be known as Clipper. This chip could be inserted into a telephone handset or fax machine. On April 16, 1993, President Clinton proposed the EES as the new encryption standard.

This announcement triggered immediate concern among privacy advocates. The lack of concern on the government’s part for public input caused groups like CPSR and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to begin sounding alarm bells. Media coverage began appearing, highlighting the ideological split between privacy advocates and the government’s proposal. In addition, computer and telecommunications industries, aware of the growing markets for communication technology, were troubled by the implications of the Clipper chip. No foreign companies, they argued, would want to purchase products using encryption schemes that could be unscrambled by U.S. investigative agencies. The Clipper standard would be a severe blow to U.S. exports; Forbes magazine called it “really a dumb idea,” suggesting that “[h]igh-tech exports will be devastated” (Forbes 1994, 26). Industry representatives thus joined with privacy advocates to voice continuing opposition to the Clipper chip.

As in the Lotus MarketPlace case, cyberspace was an important forum for discussions, debates, and protests over the Clipper chip. Information moved across the Internet via e-mail, Usenet newsgroups, and discussion lists. Special ftp sites were set up to house important Clipper-related documents, and before long the Internet was “buzzing with talk of insurrection” about Clipper (Markoff 1994a, D4). Some of this buzz took the form of hot-tempered eruptions. One posting to the Computer Privacy Digest read: “DEFEAT THE BIG BROTHER PROPOSAL! JUST SAY F!CK NO TO THE PRIVACY CLIPPER!” (qtd. in Gurak 1997, 63). But the more popular forms of protest clearly took into account the U.S. government as the ultimate audience, and for this reason, sample form letters and electronic petitions became increasingly dominant as protest efforts progressed. The most popular of these petitions could be “signed” by simply typing in one’s information and sending the file back to CPSR. This petition, while distributed via e-mail, took on the form and conventions of a paper-based letter, complete with an address block reading “The President/The White House/Washington DC 20500” and reflected the more careful prose of a reflective, collaborative composing effort, as opposed to Seiler’s relatively raw, emotionally charged language. This petition garnered anywhere from forty thousand to fifty thousand signatures.¹ Despite these industry and advocacy efforts, the Clinton administration officially adopted the Clipper as a federal information-processing standard for voice communications on February 4, 1994.

What We Learned from These Text-Based Cyber-Actions

From a rhetorical perspective and from the perspective of Internet studies, these two cases have much to teach us about online actions. First, we learned that on the Internet, exigencies come together quickly and can snowball in a matter of days or even hours. In today’s webbed world of online news, hoaxes and humor, and the like, this feature may seem almost commonplace. But it is only recently that we have had such a technology as to allow a social effort or action to form, with tens of thousands of participants, in such a short time. In both the MarketPlace and Clipper cases, discussions and protests got off to a quick start, within twenty-four hours of the announcement of each technology.

By the end of the 1980s, discussions of computers and personal privacy were in the public eye. Lotus MarketPlace acted as a catalyst around which the exigence could then focus as individuals began using the Internet to talk about MarketPlace. MarketPlace and, later, Clipper thus gave people the “mobilization exigency” around which to organize these concerns about computer privacy; such exigence has been argued to be a feature that can help distinguish “the rhetorical situation of movements” and protests from other rhetorical situations (Smith and Windes 1976). As one privacy advocate put it, the MarketPlace protest community was “like kindling waiting for a spark” (Rotenberg 1992); both MarketPlace and later Clipper provided needed sparks.

Another lesson from these two early cases has to do with the power and potential of online communities. Participants were able to assume that others in the newsgroups or lists understood certain technical concepts and agreed with certain premises. The highly specialized virtual spaces on the Internet make it easy to join a community and quickly understand and assume this community ethos; a newsgroup focused on computer privacy, for example, is most likely to be inhabited by participants who are concerned about privacy and want to protect their rights. Often, participants often do not have to spend time making introductory remarks or defending the premises of their statements. This “instant ethos” makes it easy to reach many individuals of similar values in short order and, when combined with online delivery, allowed for both protests to focus quickly. Assumptions about technical knowledge and computer privacy in both cases allowed for the creation of short, direct messages that assumed the community ethos and would appeal to the readers of these messages. In addition, an authoritative and ironic voice offered a strong challenge to Lotus’s or the government’s claims and invited other readers to join the debate.

Both cases also illustrate the way in which the Internet’s nonhierarchical structure allows individuals to bypass “standard procedure” and reach out to each other. As the debates continued beyond their initial stages, certain texts became widely reposted and distributed. In the protest over MarketPlace, the most prominent posting was “the Seiler letter,” which, although initially posted to only a few sites, was soon widely available on the Internet as participants copied and reposted it. In the Clipper case, CPSR’s electronic petition and letter to stop Clipper were also widely distributed. In both cases, these bottom-up texts became representative of the debate at large and created cohesion among participants across the Internet.² Once participants learned of MarketPlace and later Clipper, they could and did easily use e-mail to write directly to the CEO of Lotus or the President of the United States, bypassing traditional hierarchical structures. In addition, some participants utilized the ability in cyberspace to write anonymous postings, such as a purported internal press release from Lotus and, in the Clipper case, purportedly confidential information from the manufacturer of the chips. These anonymous postings also circumvented traditional gate-keeping structures and allowed information to circulate widely, under the radar so to speak, creating what one participant called “an electronic wave going around the world.”

The Lotus and Clipper cases also presented early warning about when and how one can judge the credibility of information from the Internet. Much of the material about Lotus was angry and critical of MarketPlace, and it contained inaccurate and often hyperbolic information about the MarketPlace product; many of these inaccuracies came about as a result of the bottom-up method of posting and reposting. The electronic petition against Clipper, on the other hand, exhibited a highly professional ethos, one made all the more credible by CPSR’s name, which was prominently attached to the petition. In general, information remained relatively accurate throughout the Clipper debate, in large part because most of this information was circulated from the top down through organizations such as the EFF and CPSR.

Web-Based Protests: Petitionsite.com

The kinds of text-based actions that took place informally in the Lotus Marketplace protest and in a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Cyber-Social Movements Emerging Online
• Part II Theorizing Online Activism
• Part III Cautionary Readings of Community, Empowerment, and Capitalism Online
• List of Contributors
• Index