Coding Democracy: How Hackers Are Disrupting Power, Surveillance, and Authoritarianism

by Maureen Webb, Cory Doctorow (Foreword by)

Overview

Hackers as vital disruptors, inspiring a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens take back democracy.

Hackers have a bad reputation, as shady deployers of bots and destroyers of infrastructure. In Coding Democracy, Maureen Webb offers another view. Hackers, she argues, can be vital disruptors. Hacking is becoming a practice, an ethos, and a metaphor for a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens are inventing new forms of distributed, decentralized democracy for a digital era. Confronted with concentrations of power, mass surveillance, and authoritarianism enabled by new technology, the hacking movement is trying to “build out” democracy into cyberspace.

Webb travels to Berlin, where she visits the Chaos Communication Camp, a flagship event in the hacker world; to Silicon Valley, where she reports on the Apple-FBI case, the significance of Russian troll farms, and the hacking of tractor software by desperate farmers; to Barcelona, to meet the hacker group XNet, which has helped bring nearly 100 prominent Spanish bankers and politicians to justice for their role in the 2008 financial crisis; and to Harvard and MIT, to investigate the institutionalization of hacking. Webb describes an amazing array of hacker experiments that could dramatically change the current political economy. These ambitious hacks aim to displace such tech monoliths as Facebook and Amazon; enable worker cooperatives to kill platforms like Uber; give people control over their data; automate trust; and provide citizens a real say in governance, along with capacity to reach consensus. Coding Democracy is not just another optimistic declaration of technological utopianism; instead, it provides the tools for an urgently needed upgrade of democracy in the digital era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262357111
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Series:	The MIT Press
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	913 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Maureen Webb is a labor lawyer and human rights activist. She is the author of Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World and has taught national security law as an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia.

Table of Contents

Foreword Cory Doctorow xi

Author's Note xv

Acknowledgments xix

1 The Hacker Ethic: Germany's Chaos Computer Club and the Genealogy of the Hacker Ethos 1

In Berlin 1

Getting to the Chaos Commmumcation Camp 2

First-Wave Hackers: Hacking Culture in the US from the Late 1950s, including the Hands-On Imperative and Other Principles of a Hacker Ethos 5

Second-Wave Hackers: Computers and Code for the People, including the People's Computer Company, The WELL, Homebrew, Silicon Valley, RMS, and Free Software 10

First-Wave Europe: The Early Development of European Hacker Culture in the 1970s and 1980s 13

The Early Days of the Chaos Computer Club 15

1989: A Watershed Year for Germany and the CCC 18

The Fall of the Wall 21

The 1990s: Hackerdom Expands, Silicon Valley Takes Off, and a Schism Develops between the Philosophies of Proprietary Software and Free Software 22

First Impressions: Be Excellent to Each Other 29

2 The Hacker Challenge: Cypherpunks on the Electronic Frontier 33

Third-Wave Hackers: The Cypherpunks 33

Fellow Travelers, Reluctant Heroes, and the Cryptowars of the 1990s 40

The Smart-Ass Antipodean 51

3 A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century: Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful 53

Code Is Law, and the Onion Router Proves It 53

WikiLeaks 56

A New Kind of Cypherpunk 60

Snowden 65

A Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century and the Concept of Popular Sovereignty 68

The Burden of Security: The Challenges for the Ordinary User 71

Security 101 71

The Sakharovs 78

Berlin: City of Freedom, City of Exiles 79

A Cryptoparty 84

5 Democracy in Cyberspace: First, the Governance Problems 93

Harry 93

Internet Governance: "Loraxes Who Speak for the Trees" 95

Harry Redux 98

Of Trees and Tongues 101

What Is Democracy? Or How to Govern Democratically in a World That Is No Longer Flat? 105

Hacker Governance: Noisy Square 108

6 Culture Clash: Hermes and the Italian Hackingteam 111

The Italian Embassy 111

Black, White, and Gray 114

7 Democracy in Cyberspace: Then the Design Problems 125

The Problem of Provable Security 125

The Problem of Designing Privacy-Preserving Protocols 127

Email: A Case in Point 130

Remaking the Internet for the Twenty-first Century 135

8 The Gathering Storm: The New Crypto-And Information and Net Neutrality and Free Software and Trust-Busting-Wars 139

A New Digital Era Civics Is Necessary 139

The New Cryptowars 140

The New Information Wars 145

The New Net Neutrality Wars 153

The New Free Software Wars 157

The New Trust-Busting Wars and the Unsustainability of Current Digital Capitalism 164

The Gathering Storm 172

9 Hacker Occupy: Bringing Occupy into Cyberspace and the Digital Era 175

The Occupy Movement 175

A Multitude of Diverse Experiments 185

Hacking Experiments Using Federated Technology, or the Basic Internet Structure 186

Hacking Experiments Using P2P Distributed Technology 191

Hacking Experiments Using the Blockchain 194

Solid? 198

The Blockchain Reality Check 202

"The Next System" 204

10 Distributed Democracy: Experiments in Spain, Italy, and Canada 207

Getting Control of Democratic Processes: The indignant of Barcelona 207

Hacking Corruption: Xnet's 15MpaRato 211

Hazte Banquero (Become a Banker) 217

Maddish: Platforms for the People 220

PartidoX 222

Homage to Catalonia 230

Hacking Electoral Politics in Italy: "A New Politics Is Possible" 233

Hacking Democratic Decision Making Itself: A Canadian Algorithm for Global Democracy 243

No More Wrecking Balls 247

11 The Value and Risk of Transgressee Acts: Corrective Feedback 249

Berlin's Graffiti 249

The Value of Transgressive Acts 252

The Risk of Transgressive Acts 255

Hacker Crackdown 3.0 259

Where Power Meets Its Limits: The Making of Martyrs 271

Democratic Constitutionalism as Conversation Leading to Rough Consensus 275

12 Mainstreaming Hackerdom: A New Condition of Freedom 281

A City upon a Hill 281

Libre Planet, the Heart of Free Software 284

Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation Awards 290

Pros, Cons, and Disobedience Awards 292

MIT's Media Lab 297

Harvard and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society 303

Emergence 307

Enlivening a Moral Imagination 309

The Epicenter of a Civilization 318

Coda 321

Notes 323

Index 369

Editorial Reviews

"Coders seeking to do good in the world will find much inspiration here."

 

—Kirkus Reviews

"She's building a powerful case for the fact that technology as we know it—omnipresent, flawed, world-improving—has become so entrenched and static that it really does need the hackers worrying the edges of its firewalls. In Webb's telling, hackers aren't heroes destined to bring the world to a grand new order of their own transgressive imaginings. They're agents of positive chaos."

—Wired

"'Coding Democracy' is a thorough, well-written work of scholarship that should be seen as a welcome addition to a growing body of work about the relationship between computing, society and government. A lawyer, Webb is able to weave the hacker narrative into various strands of thought relating to political science, history, legislation, law enforcement, regulations, civil law, politics and ethics."

—Journal of Cyber Policy

"Coding Democracy: How hackers are disrupting power, surveillance, and authoritarianism  by Maureen Webb, which says hurrah for the hackers who are inspiring activism that may let ordinary citizens take back democracy."

—New Scientist

From the Publisher

2020-01-12
Facebook and Amazon may be in the business of selling us to the highest bidder, but not without good guys fighting to keep the internet free and safe.

Webb, a Vancouver-based labor attorney and activist, once hoped that democratic constitutions around the world would roll back the wave of governmental and corporate intrusions on privacy. Unfortunately, "when you take stock of the pervasive illegality states and corporations are engaged in with their uses of digital tech, it is manifest that the law is collapsing." Leave it, then, to the white-hat hackers of the world to deliver us from technological evil. The author traces the hacker ethic to MIT programmers in the late 1950s who stole mainframe time when the authorities weren't looking, then to the Bay Area libertarians who would launch the computing revolution. Valuably, Webb ranges far beyond that American-centric story—even as, she notes, most internet traffic passes through and most of the internet's backbone resides in the U.S.—to examine the long history of hacking in Europe, courtesy especially of the Berlin-born Chaos Computer Club and a tech culture "aligned more with the advent of personal computing than with the development of early mainframe computing." The CCC gave rise to other hacking movements, such as the Spanish ensemble of coders who linked the financial collapse of 2008 as it played out in their country with misdoings on the parts of bankers and government officials, and the Five Star Movement in Italy, with its hearty mistrust of the status quo. While making allowances for black-hatters such as Julian Assange, Webb asserts that the goal of hackers and "hacktivists" is profoundly on the side of ordinary people. "The goal they share," she writes, "is to distribute power to the people, to put the people's hands on matters as local, national, and global citizens." And the overarching task, she concludes, is no less daunting—namely, to "build a new condition of freedom."

Coders seeking to do good in the world will find much inspiration here.

Kirkus Reviews