Hacktivismo

For as long as there have been computer networks to hack, there have been hackers to do it— even if their projects generally amounted to simply causing trouble, showing off, or both. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that one of the biggest stories to emerge from this years Def Con hackers' convention (yes, even hackers have conventions) is that members of one of the world's most notorious hack-collectives have embarked on a project that actually sounds constructive. High-minded, even.

The challenge: In many countries, governments block access to certain Web sites that carry information or ideas that these governments would prefer to keep from their citizens. (Even something as apparently uncontroversial as CNN.com, for instance, has been blocked in China.) The hackers' response: software that lets users get around government-installed "firewalls" and gain access to whatever forbidden sites they want. This may be the first instance of world-class hacking for human rights.

Before you conclude that the hacking community has somehow grown up, bear in mind that we're talking about an an application called Peekabooty, and its authors are a "special operations group" that is "sponsored by" something called Cult of the Dead Cow, whose members go by such similarly dopey handles as Drunken Master and The Mixter. The cDc (for short) is best known for stunts and hijinx; its most infamous contribution to hack history was the creation of Back Orifice, a tool that can be used to gain remote access to the PCs of unsuspecting Windows users.

But the aims of Hactivismo, as this cDc spinoff is called, are neither malicious nor sophomoric. Its target is "state-sponsored censorship" in China, Cuba, and various Islamic countries, among others, where Web filtering used "to prevent challenging content from spreading through repressive regimes," the group says. The project has five official programmers, and 28 participants in the U.S., Canada, Germany, Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, China. The designated spokesman, who calls himself Oxblood Ruffin, describes the work as an extension of the well-known hacker ideal of free-flowing information. "Access to information is a basic human right," he says.

Uncharacteristically, even non-hackers are getting involved. At Def Con, Patrick Ball, deputy director of the science and human rights project of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, joined them in presenting the project. He admits to some initial skepticism on being contacted by Cult of the Dead Cow, but now he's an enthusiastic proponent of Peekabooty and will support the groups distribution efforts.

Hacktivismo describes Peekabooty as a "distributed collaborative privacy network." The core technology is a small application that will be distributed first by Hacktivismo and its contacts, and then organically – from peer to peer, through email or simply handing over a disc. Once installed, the program works with a standard Web browser. But instead of linking to the local, filtered server — the one the censor expects you to use — it goes through the computers of fellow travelers who also use Hacktivismo's software, and who form a kind of anonymous network (every individual running the application becomes a node on this "network cloud"), to find a server outside the firewall. And voila, access granted.

Wouldn’t a citizen of a nation unfriendly to Web freedom be running a risk by running Peekabooty? In fact, yes. "I personally have lost a lot of sleep over this issue," acknowledges Oxblood. who expects the risk question to be a prominent one as the application makes its way into the world. But Hacktivismo figures that ultimately the program will spread quickly enough to make the notion of tracking down individual users impractical. Moreover, it will even be possible to tap into the network without installing the application at all, by manually entering the address of a server of a trusted Peekabooty user. In any case, activists within the target countries know the risks better than anyone, and "they're just begging for this application," says Oxblood.

The final version of Peekabooty, due out later this year, will be released in an open source format, which means that others will be able to tweak the software and improve its ability to cope with the techno-"arms race" as repressive nations implement counter-measures. Oxblood figures the world's best geeks will get involved, in no small part because of the cachet cDc brings to the project. He even compares its involvement in such a high-minded enterprise with Nixon going to China. "If any other hacker group had done this, no one would take it seriously. Hackers watch what we do. And we're interested in showing that work like this is bad-ass. It's important. It's going to have a huge practical upside."

Cult of the Dead Cow:
http://www.cultdeadcow.com/

A shorter version of this article appeared in Newsweek International on July 30, 2001