[Solar-general] How Wikileaks mainstreams hacktivist youth culture: how Wrong Hands revealed Linden Lab spy operation in Second Life

[Nicolás Reynolds]

Title: How Wikileaks mainstreams hacktivist youth culture: how Wrong Hands
revealed Linden Lab spy operation in Second Life
Author: Michel Bauwens
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 23:05:48 -0300
Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/P2pFoundation/~3/afB_q_gzj1Q/13


  No one is saying that the operations exposed by the Wrong Hands were 
  equivalent to the Afghan War documents or the State Department cables exposed
  by Wikileaks; the real moral is not the importance of the exposed 
  information, but rather the fact that the Wikileaks operation could provide a
  model for a new generation of hacktivists. Wikileaks is teaching young people
  by example. Assange may eventually be incarcerated or worse, but the genie is
  definitely out of the bottle at this point. There is no question but that 
  hacktivist culture is now a worldwide phenomenon. The interesting question is
  not whether hacktivist culture will change our world. The interesting 
  question now is what our world will look like after it is reshaped by 
  hacktivist culture. 

Interesting article by “Urizenus Sklar�, who also reveals[1] in the example 
below that Linden Lab is sponsoring a vigilante surveillance network in Second 
Life:

“A not so subtle cultural shift is taking root worldwide: Hacktivist culture is
rapidly morphing from a small underground subculture into mainstream culture 
for a younger generation, not just in the United States, but worldwide. Julian 
Assange and WikiLeaks did not start this cultural movement, but they have 
served as a catalyst for its robust growth and worldwide propagation. And while
the new generation of hacktivists has Wikileaks as its model, they also grew up
in the era of George W. Bush’s neo-imperialism and its attendant war against 
transparency. WikiLeaks is the answer to the age of W, and it has given rise to
what I call Generation W.

Perhaps the surest sign of the mainstreaming of hacktivism was when 4chan 
underwent a metamorphosis from a group of kids trading anime and lolcat images 
and occasionally trolling for lulz into a potent political hacktivist movement,
quite willing and able to take Mastercard and the Bank of America offline for 
refusing to process payments to WikiLeaks.

Of course, 4chan’s “Operation Payback� was originally motivated by the 
draconian actions of lawyers trying to advance bogus copyright claims, but 
their basic underlying principle was the same hacktivist ethic motivating their
defense of WikiLeaks: information wants to be free; it should not be hoarded by
powerful nation states, nor should it be under the control of powerful 
commercial interests.

The 4chan actions that have received attention in the media have involved the 
distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against Mastercard and Bank of 
America, but there have been smaller and much more telling episodes in which 
young people with 4chan backgrounds have created their own hacktivist 
operations and deployed them with impressive effect.�

The example: The Wrong Hands campaign against Linden Lab spying

“In one recent case, reported in my essay “Watching the Watchers: Power and 
Politics in Second Life� a group of Woodbury University students affiliated 
with 4Chan created a group called “The Wrong Hands� (as in “if this information
should find its way into the wrong hands…�). They subsequently infiltrated an 
online vigilante group that was operating inside of the virtual world Second 
Life. The vigilante group (known as the JLU) was exposed as having an extensive
surveillance operation in Second Life — one that tracked individuals in the 
virtual world and kept files on those individuals. Indeed, their database 
contained 1,700 pages of information and misinformation on users, ranging from 
chat logs, to presumed real life information about Second Life users.

Once the Wrong Hands infiltrated the JLU, they leaked the contents of the JLU 
database, posting it in many locations online. Shockingly, the leaked evidence 
suggested that the JLU surveillance activities were being backed by employees 
of Linden Lab (the company that owns Second Life), and further that Linden Lab 
employees were providing the JLU with special technical capabilities that could
facilitated their surveillance operation. “
[image 3][2][image 5][4][image 7][6][image 8]

Links: 
[1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/urizenus-sklar/generation-h-wikileaks-ig_b_803149.html (link)
[2]: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/P2pFoundation?a=afB_q_gzj1Q:CMe9pP5MxLs:7Q72WNTAKBA (link)
[3]: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/P2pFoundation?d=7Q72WNTAKBA (image)
[4]: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/P2pFoundation?a=afB_q_gzj1Q:CMe9pP5MxLs:D7DqB2pKExk (link)
[5]: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/P2pFoundation?i=afB_q_gzj1Q:CMe9pP5MxLs:D7DqB2pKExk (image)
[6]: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/P2pFoundation?a=afB_q_gzj1Q:CMe9pP5MxLs:2mJPEYqXBVI (link)
[7]: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/P2pFoundation?d=2mJPEYqXBVI (image)
[8]: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/P2pFoundation/~4/afB_q_gzj1Q (image)
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