The state of electronic civil disobedience in Australia: 2010

February 22, 2010 in Rants & Raves, Series, Thoughts
Tags: analysis, Australia, censorship, civil disobedience, cyber activism, cyber activist, DDoS, demonstration, DoS, ECD, electronic civil disobedience, federal government, government, governments, Internet, Internet censorship, online activism, online activist, personal opinion, politics, protest, public policy, review, social justice

Analysing and presenting an account of Australian electronic civil disobedience (ECD) has become somewhat of a yearly series for me, having written something like this for the last 5 years.  The consistency in title for the yearly series has only been going for the last couple of years.

In the past year there has been a significant increase in the level and sophistication of online activism in Australia.  Although this is not to suggest that it is cutting edge; and despite the best efforts of the Greens, Labor Party and Liberals to match the online juggernaught the Obama campaign built. There has also been for the past 3 years an escalation in the war between Conroy’s censorship regime and the open internet campaign groups (of which I have written about here, here and here), most notably Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA).

Whatever the increase in online, or cyber, activism, it does not necessarily equate to electronic civil disobedience.

How we contextualise the future of communicating our dissatisfaction with political decisions needs to be considered in the context of our growing dependency on the Internet.  As I have discussed before ECD must be considered a legitimate form of protest, especially as our world becomes more and more dependent on the Internet. While there continues an under-appreciation and misunderstanding of ECD, it will continue to be conceived of as being cloak-and-dagger activity.  This is something conveniently mis-represented as being the work of hackers by supposed  social/political commentators that support Australia’s mandatory Internet filter regime.

Since my last analysis of the state of electronic civil disobedience in Australia, there has been a continuation of ECD primarily, and at least most notably, through a loosely formed group called Anonymous. The group successfully disabled Government websites in protest to Senator Conroy’s mandatory Internet censorship regime.  Deploying a distributed denial of service (DDoS or DoS) action was again a very effective tool for Anonymous, with widespread outages of websites.  There has been much commentary about these “attacks”, as there was last year, as being unhelpful to the open internet campaign.  The open internet campaign supporters deride Anonymous for “attacking” government websites; saying such “attacks” play to Conroy’s advantage and declare they would never “stoop” to such methods.  The group has also been effectively labeled a terrorist group by Senator Conroy and his vocal band of conservative commentators.  Unfortunately, Anonymous followed the DoS actions with rounds of spamming government workers with pornography and propoganda. This was an error in judgement and should not have been deployed, as it alienates those likely to support the open internet initiative.  It was also a major distraction from the message from the DoS action, which was widely reported by mainstream and alternative media. (As an aside the media release and details released by “spokespeople” of Anonymous was unclear and illustrated a degree of political naivity about Australian’s general attitudes to censorship.)

Other than Anonymous, there have been rumours of other similiarly formed groups undertaking high-level (webpage/site defacement and website redirection) ECD actions.  However, these remain unsubstantiated rumours as there has been no evidence, either from such groups, or their targets, about disruption or a campaign of ECD.

The state of electronic civil disobedience is poorly with little interest in its use, even more so by those most involved with the Internet industry. Although it is fair to say that the state of ECD in Australian in 2010 is better than the period between 2006 and 2008.

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