Taylor Owen - Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age

DISRUPTIVE POWER

OXFORD STUDIES IN DIGITAL POLITICS

Series Editor: Andrew Chadwick, Royal Holloway, University of London

Expect Us: Online Communities and Political Mobilization

Jessica L. Beyer

The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power

Andrew Chadwick

Tweeting to Power: The Social Media Revolution in American Politics

Jason Gainous and Kevin M. Wagner

The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam

Philip N. Howard

Democracys Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring

Philip N. Howard and Muzammil M. Hussain

The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy

David Karpf

Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama

Daniel Kreiss

Bits and Atoms: Information and Communication Technology in Areas of Limited Statehood

Steven Livingston and Gregor Walter-Drop

Digital Cities: The Internet and the Geography of Opportunity

Karen Mossberger, Caroline J. Tolbert, and William W. Franko

Revolution Stalled: The Political Limits of the Internet in the Post-Soviet Sphere

Sarah Oates

Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics

Zizi Papacharissi

Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age

Jennifer Stromer-Galley

News on the Internet: Information and Citizenship in the 21st Century

David Tewksbury and Jason Rittenberg

DISRUPTIVE POWER

T HE C RISIS OF THE S TATE IN THE D IGITAL A GE

TAYLOR OWEN

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by

Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Taylor Owen 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file at the Library of Congress

9780199363889

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To: R & W

CONTENTS

This book represents the culmination of three meandering years exploring the intersection of digital technology and international affairs and is ultimately the product of many peoples work. It began as a lecture and working paper for the Trudeau Foundation in the spring of 2012, and I am appreciative of PG Forest giving me the chance to come back to the Foundation and try out some new ideas on the smartest (and most critical) crowd in Canada. At the time, the ideas presented were nascent, and represented my initial explorations of what I increasingly saw as the profound ways technology was reshaping the international system.

This essay became a larger research project funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant called International Relations in the Digital Age, a partnership between the Canadian International Council and UBC. My friend and colleague Anouk Dey was critical as an RA on both of these initial stages. And my co-PI on the SSHRC research project, partner at the CIC and Open-Canada and close friend Jennifer Jeffs built the project and team with me. We had a great group of UBC journalism students helping out with a wide range of research, including Sadiya Ansari, Lindsay Sample, Kate Adach, Alexis Beckett, and Alexandra Gibb.

For the year I spent focusing on researching and writing the book, I had the amazing good fortune of having two wonderful RAs, Tanzeel Hakak and Cherise Seucharan. Both are wise beyond their years, and handled my ridiculous schedule and wandering (they would say vague) ideas with grace and persistence. Many of the ideas in this book are theirs as much as mine.

While writing this book I was also working at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia with the extraordinary and tolerant Emily Bell. The incredible opportunities that working with Emily on building the Tow Center afforded me, as well as the time she allowed me to binge write among the cramming undergrads in the Bodleian, made this book possible.

As I have now learned, bringing a book into the world is a process. Three people made this one happen. First, Ethan Bassoff at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin took a chance on me, and got this book into the hands of New York publishers. Second, Angela Chnapko at Oxford University Press was supportive, encouraging, and incredibly helpful at every stage of the editing and publishing process. Finally, Blake Eskin agreed to dive in to the project as an utterly ruthless editor, and gave me the most educational writing experience I have ever had.

Finally, and by far most importantly, I owe everything to my amazing parents and to my best friend, confidant, fiercest critic, partner and wife Ariel, and to our little man Walter.

DISRUPTIVE POWER

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. Aaron Swartz

In January 2012, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Scotland Yard, and intelligence agencies in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden created a task force to counter Anonymous. These countries saw the collective of activist hackers and its numerous offshoots as a national security threat.

Anonymouswhich is best defined as an Internet gathering with a loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directivesname of Anonymous, ebbing and flowing in both scale and frequency. The group has inserted itself into political conflicts in the United States and around the globe.

In November 2011, at an Occupy rally against budget cuts and increased tuition at the University of California, San Diego, a riot police officer was filmed pepper-spraying a peaceful protestor. When video of the incident went viral on YouTube, Anonymous responded by leaking the police officers name, address, phone number, and email address. He received over 17,000 threatening emails, 10,000 text messages, and hundreds of letters. The group did the same to Arizona Department of Public Safety officials in response to the passage of Arizona Bill 1070, an anti-immigration bill widely seen as racist. This attack was part of the bigger operation called Anti-Sec in which Anonymous attacked many Western governments for reasons ranging from Internet censorship to racial profiling.

During the Arab Spring, Anonymous worked in support of anti-government protestors in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, hacking into government websites, shutting them down with distributed denial-of service (DDoS) attacks, and releasing names, email addresses, and passwords of government officials. In December of 2011, in the name of revealing corporate and government corruption, Anonymous hacked into the US intelligence consultancy Stratfor, obtaining, among other data, 2.7 million corporate emails detailing often sensitive conversations involving current and former government officials and thousands of off-the-record sources.

Next page