AUT: On Electronic Civil Disobedience; Paper for Socialist Scholars

[Stefan Wray <sjw210@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

"As hackers become politicized and as activists become computerized, we are
going to see an increase in the number of cyber-activists who engage in
what will become more widely known as Electronic Civil Disobedience." - On
Electronic Civil Disobedience.

                 PLEASE FORWARD THIS MESSAGE

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ANNOUNCING ->

      A PANEL ON ELECTRONIC CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IN NEW YORK

1998 Socialist Scholars Conference
Borough of Manhattan Community College
199 Chambers Street, New York City
Panel on Electronic Civil Disobedience
Sunday, March 20, 10:00 a.m., Room N-406

Sponsor: Z-TV (aka Zapatista TV)
Chair: Stefan Wray - New York Zapatistas
       L.A. Kauffman - Lower East Side Collective
       Ricardo Dominguez - Thing.net

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CALLING FOR ->

      COLLABORATION TO PRODUCE NEW PAMPHLET ON ELECTRONIC CD

We are considering the possibilility of producing a pamphlet (or small
book?) based on this panel on Electronic Civil Disobedience. The text below
might serve as an introductory section, as might text from the other two
presenters. Ricardo Dominguez will speak on Digital Zapatismo, discussing
existing and emerging computer-based tactics of resistance. L.A. Kauffman
will share concrete experience of the Mighty Email Army, a project of the
Lower East Side Collective.

If you can contribute a section, please get in touch. It seems that,
increasingly, on-line activists are becoming interested in doing more with
their computers than merely sending email messages and creating web sites.
If you are a computer whiz full of all sorts of tricks that push the
envelope of contemporary on-line activism, please share those ideas with
us. Most interesting are ideas that merge the strategies and tactics of
mass civil disobedience - like trespass and blockade - with computer
technology. Also interesting to us would be conceptual pieces that deal
more with the theory of electronic civil disobedience. Contact Stefan Wray
at sjw210@xxxxxxxxxxx

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TEXT ->

      DRAFT OF PAPER FOR PANEL PRESENTATION

On Electronic Civil Disobedience
by Stefan Wray
Paper presented to the 1998 Socialist Scholars Conference
Panel on Electronic Civil Disobedience
March 20, 21, and 22
New York, NY


I heartily accept the motto, -- "That government is best which governs
least;" and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and
systematically. Carried out it finally amounts to this, which I also
believe, -- "That government is best which governs not at all;"
                                     - Civil Disobedience, Henry David
Thoreau.

Civil disobedience has been part of the American political experience since
the inception of this country. But today, as we enter the next century, we
are faced with the possibilities and realities of different, hybrid,
electronic forms of civil disobedience. A fusion of computer technology
with the more traditional forms of American civil disobedience has created
new electronic and digital varieties of CD that take place in cyberspace,
on the Net, or in the matrix.

The term electronic civil disobedience is borrowed from a book by that same
name. The Critical Art Ensemble's (1996) Electronic Civil Disobedience
provides us with a useful benchmark or launch pad from where we can travel
back to the historical practice of civil disobedience in the United States
and travel forward to the imagined practice of civil disobedience in the
near future. One thing is certain, we have only begun to realize the full
potential of how computers will change political activism. Another thing is
also clear; electronic civil disobedience will be part of this trajectory.

One hundred and fifty years ago, in 1848, the same year that the Communist
Manifesto was published in Europe, Henry David Thoreau delivered a lecture
titled "Resistance to Civil Government," which was later published as an
essay called "Civil Disobedience." Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience
emerged from his own personal refusal to pay a poll tax as an expression of
his opposition to the United States' war against Mexico. (Thoreau 1968)
Since Thoreau's time the tactics of civil disobedience have become woven
into the fabric of dissent in this country, as individuals at the
grassroots have continually attempted to participate in civil society.

Thirty years ago, in 1968, evolving out of the experience of activists in
the Civil Rights movement, civil disobedience became an important and
widespread tactic used by the opposition to yet another imperialist war,
the United States' war against Vietnam. In 1971, as historian Howard Zinn
describes, "twenty thousand people came to Washington to commit civil
disobedience, trying to tie up Washington traffic to express their
revulsion against the killing still going on in Vietnam. Fourteen thousand
of them were arrested, the largest mass arrest in American history." (Zinn
1995, 477)

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the tactics of civil disobedience and
direct action were taken up by a number of social movements. The
anti-nuclear movement began to engage in mass civil disobedience starting
in the mid 1970s - with large arrests at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant
in New Hampshire - and continued using this tactic through to the end of
the 1980s - with mass arrests at the Nuclear Test Site near Las Vegas, Nevada.

In the 1980s, the radical wing of the environmental movement, represented
by groups like Earth First!, reinterpreted notions of civil disobedience in
order to apply these tactics to rural and isolated settings where old
growth forests were being devastated. Thoreau's ideas were brought to life
again by authors like Edward Abbey, who paid him homage in an essay called
Down The River with Henry Thoreau. (Abbey 1981)

Other radical groups, like ACT-UP, made sure that civil disobedience
maintained an urban presence. Using shock tactics, such as forcing ones way
onto the set of a live national news broadcast, ACT-UP activists pushed
civil disobedience more in the direction of in-your-face politics as a way
to emphasize the urgency of the AIDS crisis.

In an odd twist of irony, by the late 1980s and more so in the early 1990s,
even groups on the right began to adopt tactics of trespass and blockade.
The so-called "pro-life" movement started to physically block abortion
clinics.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Gulf War - or more appropriately the
U.S. war against Iraq - was yet another moment in which opposition was
expressed in acts of individual, small group, and mass civil disobedience.
In the fall of 1990, a small group of 14 anti-Gulf War activists, mostly
students from U.C. Berkeley and San Francisco State, occupied and held for
several hours an Army Recruiting Center in San Francisco before being
arrested. Also that fall, an adhoc coalition opposed to the war, called the
Bay Area Direct Action Network, began to strategize about different ways to
block building entranceways and highways. When the United States started to
drop its "smart bombs" on Baghdad tens of thousands of people poured into
the streets of San Francisco.

One notable action at this time was the occupation and blockage of the Bay
Bridge that connects San Francisco to Oakland and Berkeley. Following a
physical blockade that delayed the opening of the U.S. Federal Building in
San Francisco, thousands of protesters started to march downtown toward the
financial district. At the last minute, these protesters turned, took
another route, and easily pushed pass the dozen or so Highway Patrol
attempting to protect the bridge. This throng of people made it nearly all
the way to Treasure Island, the mid-way point on the bridge, before being
met with a massive show of force by the Oakland Police Department. While
unreported by the mainstream media, similar acts of blocking government
buildings and major highways occurred all up and down the west coast.

So, over the course of the last 150 years, since the publication of
Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, we have seen the tactics of individual,
group, and mass civil disobedience applied to varying degrees by a quite a
number of social movements in the United States. In the second half of the
twentieth century, civil disobedience has been practiced in every decade.
Sometimes it has been successful. Other times it has failed. Given that the
objective realities of U.S. society are not likely to alter radically any
time soon, we can safely assume that radical social movements, in one form
or another, will continue to adopt the strategies and tactics of civil
disobedience into the 21st century.

But, in the next century, most of us will witness, and some of us will
perhaps directly experience, a striking difference in the form and manner
of civil disobedience. Unlike in Thoreau's time, when the telegraph had
barely gotten off the ground, and even unlike during the tumultuous 1960s,
when the Vietnam War was televised - but when computers were still
monster-sized machines off limits to most people - we, today, live in the
age of the personal computer. We live in a computer-based information age.

As hackers become politicized and as activists become computerized, we are
going to see an increase in the number of cyber-activists who engage in
what will become more widely known as Electronic Civil Disobedience. The
same principals of traditional civil disobedience, like trespass and
blockage, will still be applied, but more and more these acts will take
place in electronic or digital form. The primary site for Electronic Civil
Disobedience will be in cyberspace.

In the next century, for example, we on the left will witness or be part of
an increasing number of virtual sit-ins in which government and corporate
web sites are blocked, preventing so-called legitimate usage. Just as the
Vietnam War and the Gulf War brought thousands into the streets to disrupt
the flow of normal business and governance - acting upon the physical
infrastructure - future interventionist wars will be protested by the
clogging or actual rupture of fiber optic cables and ISDN lines - acting
upon the electronic and communications infrastructure. Just as massive
non-violent civil disobedience has been used to shutdown or suspend
governmental or corporate operations, massive non-violent email assaults
will shutdown government or corporate computer servers. Given the expected
continued rapid growth and development of computer technology, and given
the increasing knowledge, sophistication, and expertise of a growing body
of cyber-activists, there is no telling exactly how electronic civil
disobedience will play itself out in the future. But we can be certain that
electronic civil disobedience will undoubtedly become an important element
in the emergence of new radical social movements in the years ahead.

There are already examples now in existence of the theory and the practice
of electronic civil disobedience, as well as evidence of government and
corporate awareness of the potential threat posed by sophisticated
cyber-activism.

To gain some understanding of emerging theory on Electronic Civil
Disobedience it is probably best to first look at several short pieces by
the Critical Art Ensemble. In 1994 the Critical Art Ensemble produced a
work called The Electronic Disturbance and in 1996 they produced a sequel
called, not surprisingly, Electronic Civil Disobedience. Both works argue
that capitalism has become increasingly nomadic, mobile, liquid, dispersed,
and electronic. Moreover, they argue that resistance needs to take on these
very same attributes. Instead of physically blocking a building
entranceway, or occupying a CEO's office, Critical Art Ensemble argues that
we need to think about how we can blockade and trespass in digital and
electronic forms.

Not only do these works by the Critical Art Ensemble begin to establish a
language with which we can develop ideas about and continue to practice
electronic civil disobedience, they also make a case that practicing
electronic civil disobedience has become imperative because increasingly
traditional forms of CD have become less and less effective. They argue
that the streets have become the location of dead capital and that to
seriously confront capital in its current mobile electronic form, then
resistance must take place in the same location where capital now exists in
greatest concentrations, namely in cyberspace. While the second part of the
Critical Art Ensemble's argument makes sense, the statement that the
streets are completely useless needs to be qualified. For example, we can
not discount the role that street protest played in the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This adds credence to
the notion that rather than pure electronic civil disobedience, we are
likely to see a proliferation of hybridized actions that involve a
multiplicity of tactics, combining actions on the street and actions in
cyberspace.

The intellectual roots of the Critical Art Ensemble's work, especially in
relation to their nomadic conceptions of capital and resistance, can be
first traced to Hakim Bey's (1991) T. A. Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone,
Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, who in turn borrows ideas about
nomadology from Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's (1987) A Thousand
Plateaus. Bey's temporary - and nomadic -  autonomous zones, existing in
cyberspace, become the launch pads from where electronic civil disobedience
is activated. The influence of A Thousand Plateaus, especially the chapter
called "Treatise on Nomadology and the War Machine," can be seen running
throughout the Critical Art Ensemble's work. All of these works just
mentioned should be required reading for the serious student and
practitioner of electronic civil disobedience.

Besides examining hypothetical ideas in these theoretical works, we can
actually see that incipient electronic civil disobedience has started to be
practiced. One site for discovering such practice is within the global
pro-Zapatista movement that has come into being since the January 1, 1994
Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. Since just days after the emergence
of the EZLN onto the global political scene, computers, and more
specifically, computer-based communication over the Internet, primarily and
originally in the form of email, have become key and central to the
existence of this global Zapatista inspired movement against neoliberalism
and for humanity. With each passing year, since 1994, the level of computer
sophistication has increased. What began as mere transmission of EZLN
communiques and other information via email became also a network of
hypertext linked web sites. In borrowing another term from Deleuze and
Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus - in addition to nomadic - the movement of
information through these various cyber-nets of resistance has been said to
have occurred rhizomatically, moving horizontally, non-linearly, and
underground.

Rhizome is word that comes from botany and is used to describe certain
types of tubers, that as a system of roots expands horizontally and
underground. The adjective rhizomatic have been used in a political context
as a way to describe the distribution, spread, and dispersion of
information on the Net about the Zapatistas. Rather than operating through
a central command structure in which information filters down from the top
in a vertical and linear manner - the model of radio and television
broadcasting - information about the Zapatistas on the Net has been said to
be moving from node to node, horizontally and non-linearly. This is
relevant in that the method of announcing and distributing information
about electronic civil disobedience actions has occurred in this rhizomatic
fashion.

For example, arising out of this increased cyber-activism around the
Zapatistas, and following the recent Acteal Massacre that took place in
Chiapas just this past December, a group calling themselves the Anonymous
Digital Coalition, which we believe originated in Italy, began to post
messages onto the Net calling for cyber attacks against five Mexico City
based financial institution's web sites. The intent of their plan, which
was promulgated far and wide via this rhizomatic system of distribution,
was for thousands of people around the world to simultaneously load these
web sites on to their Internet browsers. The idea was that repeated
reloading of the web sites on to numerous people's browsers would in effect
block those web sites from so called legitimate use. The only evidence
available to me that this action worked is an email message I received from
someone who said that they made repeated attempts to access these sites
during the aforementioned time, but could not do so.

Another example is even more recent. Last month, when it looked as if the
United States was going to launch another bombing campaign against Iraq, a
national news story appeared describing how the Pentagon had allegedly
noticed an increase in the number of hacking attempts into Department of
Defense computers. Whether these cyber assaults are real or a figment of
the Pentagon's imagination is irrelevant. The point is that this level of
cyber-activism directed against a government institution is yet another
potential scenario that we will in the future either be witnesses to or
participants in.

As is to be expected, the roots of future government crackdowns against
electronic civil disobedience already exist in the present. Since as early
as 1993 there were warnings coming from RAND of impending netwar (Arquilla
and Ronfeldt 1993). Soon thereafter, the U.S. military establishment began
to worry about netwar or its more universal term, information warfare. In
1996, The Nation published an article describing a report produced by the
Pentagon's office on Special Operations Forces in which they make
recommendations to counter or contain possible netwar or information warfare.

But as attempts to prevent people from engaging in traditional civil
disobedience have failed before or have at least not been universally
successful, we can expect that whatever net the government creates in
attempts to capture future cyber-activists will be strewn with holes and
ways of evasion will be possible. One possible technical solution that will
enable cyber-activists to flood government or corporate email servers -
potentially to the point of these servers crashing - is the off-shore spam
engine, a web-site form-based means of directing multiple email messages to
targeted email addresses, anonymously.

To conclude. While it may be partially true, as the Critical Art Ensemble
claims, that participation in street actions has become increasingly
meaningless and futile and that future resistance must become primarily
nomadic, electronic, and cyberspacial, it is doubtful that physical street
actions, involving real people on the ground, will end any time soon. What
is more likely is that we will see electronic civil disobedience continue
to be phased in as a component of or as a complement to traditional civil
disobedience. In the near future, we can expect to see hybrid civil
disobedience actions that will involve people taking part in electronic
civil disobedience from behind their computer screens while simultaneously
people are engaging in more traditional forms of civil disobedience out in
the streets.

As we consider the trajectory of resistance in the United States and as we
envision the possibilities of resistance increasingly taking place in
cyberspace, it is important to remember that civil disobedience has been an
important part of the history of political growth and change in this
country. Thoreau's contribution, by example and by word, influenced
generations that followed. But today, we stand at a new crossroads, one in
which these older forms of resistance and protest are being transformed.
While it is useful to consider the path that civil disobedience has taken
up until now, we also need to be aware that our political terrain is
changing dramatically. In the 21st century, electronic civil disobedience
will occur.

                                - End -

Word Count: 2,830

(Stefan Wray is a doctoral student in the Dept. of Culture and
Communication at NYU. His dissertation research focuses on international
grassroots political communication on the Internet. He received an M.A. in
Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. His masters thesis, "The
Drug War and Information Warfare in Mexico" is available at
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/wray/ You can send email to him at:
sjw210@xxxxxxxxxxx)


                               References

Abbey, Edward. 1991. Down The River. New York: Plume.

Arquilla, John and David Ronfeldt. 1993. "Cyberwar is Coming!" Comparative
Strategy 12: 141-65.

Bey, Hakim. 1991. T. A. Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological
Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.

Corn, David. 1996. "Pentagon Trolls the Net." The Nation, 4 March.

Critical Art Ensemble. 1994. The Electronic Disturbance. Brooklyn, NY:
Autonomedia.

Critical Art Ensemble. 1996. Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other
Unpopular Ideas. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. Trans. by Brain Massumi. Minneapolis: The University of
Minnesota Press.

Thoreau, Henry David. 1968. The variorum Walden and the variorum Civil
disobedience. New York: Washington Square Press.

Zinn, Howard. 1995. A People's History of the United States. 1492- Present.
New York: Harper Perennial.




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