Hacktivism is alive and well, if a bit weird, in 2020, says Gabriella Coleman, a cultural anthropologist specializing in hacker culture at McGill University.
At the end of June, Twitter banned the account of the hacker collective Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) and blocked links to "BlueLeaks," the group's data trove of 270 GB of data containing internal records from more than 200 police departments.
The hacktivist collective Anonymous also returned to prominence as its members took actions to support Black Lives Matter protesters, including getting legions of Korean pop music superfans to participate in social media disruptions.
"BlueLeaks shows that there's still a lot of interest in activist hacking," Coleman says. "In the context of the English-speaking world, DDoSecrets is the hinge between the Wikileaks and Anonymous era and the contemporary movement. They created a platform to keep leaking alive. If it wasn't for them it would be much dimmer. It's still dim because it's such a high-risk behavior."
High-Risk BehaviorWhile the days of high-risk technical hacks dominating headlines may be gone, the Twitter hijack and BlueLeaks show there are still hackers looking to access secure data — and their reasons remain varied.
One thing that might temper planned hacktivist actions could be "the hammer of the state" in the form of aggressive law enforcement, says Coleman, author of "Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous."
DDoSecrets has said they're prepared for the US government to come after them, but Coleman isn't so sur ..
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