Is Hacktivism Justified

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(believed that he was protecting the U.S army – and even took to social media to justify his denial of service attack. He tweeted, “TANGO DOWN - For attempting to endanger the lives of our troops, 'other assets' & foreign relations” . This demonstrated that he wasn’t afraid to showcase what he had done, he didn’t hide away similar to what most hackers tend to do, he instead publicized it and justified his reasons. In a recent paper Mansfield-Devine (2011) suggests that the Jester craved the publicity, he was eager to share to the world exactly what he had done and why. This seemed to be a common reoccurrence with other Hacktivist groups such as Anonymous and LuzSec, who frequently publicize their actions through social media and their own…show more content…
Hampson (2012) argued that in most developed countries such as the United Kingdom the act of Hacktivism is generally prohibited. In fact, the FBI recently released statement issuing a warning to Hacktivists “That they are breaking the law” . At the same time though, these countries also protect the right to protest as an essential element of free speech. Hampson (2012) continues to argue the point of free speech suggesting that Hacktivism is “primarily expressive”, and the actions taken by a Hacktivist causes little or no damage and is a “legitimate form of protest”. It appears that the most common tools used by Hacktivists to express a “protest” are a DDOS attack, which can be seen from the Jester case and many other cases similar. The reason behind this choice of attack is because it is a “simple way of causing a disruptive outage”(Ashish Patel) . As recently as 2006, the act of performing a DDOS attack wasn’t illegal under the Computer Misuse act of 1990 . This has since been changed due to the new legislation of the Police and

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