Introduction

Summary

Over the last two decades, political hackers, like the infamous Anonymous collective, have demonstrated their digital power and a willingness to use that power for their own political agenda. As communications, data, finances, activities, businesses and personal information become increasingly digitized and realized through the Internet, the birth of the modern information nation means that states and individuals are significantly dependent on cyberspace to survive, something that has not escaped the attention of the hacking community. Indeed, hackers have proven that they can exert significant power over individuals, corporations and even states, illustrating their technical ability and desire to influence the world through cyber-attacks. During this time they have shut down government websites across the globe; hacked Amazon, PayPal and Mastercard, costing $5.5 million in damages; aided in the Arab Spring revolutions by enabling secure communication between revolutionaries; released private corporate information; and attacked media companies over anti-piracy. And most recently, they have declared war on the Russian Federation following the invasion of Ukraine, releasing military information and hijacking state-owned media (Chirinos, 2022; Tidy, 2022). However, in a world increasingly obsessed with superheroes and villains, what do hackers represent?

On the one hand, political hackers have been criticized and automatically denounced for acting outside the state apparatus, taking the law into their own hands (Thomas, 2002; Serracino-Inglott, 2013; Klein, 2015; Trottier, 2017; Loveluck, 2020). Their use of violence is seen as a tool to further their political ends, coupled with no direct means for controlling their activity, resulting in concerns that they represent a threat to society's stability and the state's monopoly on the use of violence. They have been condemned for wielding too much personal power, with no official practical or ethical oversight, and protected by a cloak of anonymity that only serves to further empower and embolden them. While, on the other hand, many of their causes – protecting people's freedom of expression, autonomy and privacy, balancing the power of the state, and fighting for LGBTQ+ rights – are intuitively good things to fight for (Ford, 2012; Littauer, 2013). Indeed, they have developed a political ethos that prioritizes protecting people from a variety of harms while furthering the value that cyberspace and the Internet can play in people's lives.