On January 17, 2012, officials from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Scotland Yard had a phone conversation that revolved around a strategy to take down the hacktivistsFootnote 1 known as Anonymous, among other like-minded groups. Unfortunately for them, the very group they sought to investigate had compromised their e-mail systems. On February 1, Anonymous posted a recording of the conversation.Footnote 2 The ensuing embarrassment for both national-level investigative agencies also revealed key information about ongoing investigations. Similarly, in an internally-circulated 2008 classified Pentagon report, U.S. Army intelligence concluded that WikiLeaks “poses a significant ‘operational security and information security’ threat to military operations.”Footnote 3 The report warned that the potential leaking of secret U.S. military documents on the WikiLeaks website could “influence operations against the U.S. Army by a variety of domestic and foreign actors.”Footnote 4 Unfortunately for U.S. Army Intelligence, WikiLeaks procured the classified report about itself and subsequently leaked it on its website.Footnote 5
Are they freedom-of-speech fighters or tech-savvy terrorists? Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), social movements, or a new international criminal? We argue that WikiLeaks, Anonymous,Footnote 6 and other groups engaged in what has become described as hacktivism are “extraordinary bandits” (e-bandits), adapting Hobsbawm's iconic “social bandit” for the challenges of politics in the digital age.Footnote 7 E-bandits do not fit well in our existing analytical categories for a number of reasons. Introducing new terminology allows us to capture the essence of such actors in global politics while demonstrating the limits of existing tools from international relations (IR) and sociology. Using anonymizing technologies to create a transnational “politics of no one,” e-bandits are principled actorsFootnote 8 who capitalize on the Internet and other information technologies to lead disembodied, virtual attacks against physical targets in order to encourage political change. On the one hand, e-banditry is liberating—it allows whoever wants to join a movement to join, and “atypical” activists have joined political movements. It also allows for groups to impose physical costs without a physical presence. On the other hand, e-banditry by its very nature creates problems of coherence, lack of directed action, and multiple and multiplying goals as participants join for their own purposes without revealing their identities, and therefore their interests. Our current understandings of the roles of transnational social movements and non-state actors in IR are just beginning to grasp the importance of the Internet, largely focusing on the role and responsibility of the state in digital governance.Footnote 9 By contrast, we intend to advance the thinking on how non-state actors can harness information technologies for political gains on a transnational level through engaging in a new politics of no one.
What e-bandits show us is that technology changes resistance. To date, many have considered the role of technology as a way to retool existing ways of participating in citizen movements. Instead of collecting signatures for petitions in parking lots, people can use digital signatures procured by mass e-mails. Groups can cut costs using listservs for a planned protest. Webpages serve as publicity vehicles for activists, and blogs democratize who can opine. Here, we argue that the anonymizing potential of the Internet challenges some of our fundamental assumptions of who can use technology, and for what ends. Prior to the Internet, protest occurred much in the “old way”—citizens gathering in public demonstrations, holding placards, and making speeches against state policy or corporate greed. Neither WikiLeaks nor AnonymousFootnote 10 necessarily employ these techniques in their methods of holding actors accountable and expressing discontent with policies or actions. Instead, both organizations hold others accountable in a way that does not reveal their own identities, and as such, the threat of their action is both a threat from nobody and potentially from everywhere at the same time. This “politics of no one,” in which e-bandits make demands without revealing who they are, or who they speak for, affects the way that we conceive of contemporary forms of global citizen action.
The politics in which e-bandits engage are anything but business as usual in new technological clothing; the actions of e-bandits are extra-ordinary. First, as political actors, e-bandits are more akin to Robin Hood than the American Association for Retired Persons, politicking not through lobbying, but by “taking” what has been deemed off limits. Furthermore, Anonymous and WikiLeaks both explicitly see themselves as taking from the powerful to empower the disempowered with information and access to the political process. Second, e-banditry forces us to think about how technology changes “ordinary” transnational activism. Iconic images of street protests and massive marches often underlie the way we as scholars think about social movements and citizen action; they are ordinary ways we expect non-state actors to behave when they demand political change. E-bandits protest with virtual missives and actions, activity that leaves no physical traces but has real-world consequences, as when home phone numbers and addresses of public officials are released. Finally, e-banditry is relatively open in terms of who participates, which contributes to the growing sense that activism has outgrown organizations as the way by which individuals connect. To the extent that we can identify the “groupiness” of Anonymous or WikiLeaks, what one can say is that both organizations appeal to broader audiences than ordinary activist groups. As others have found, Anonymous' founding credo was anything but political,Footnote 11 and its actions continue to be precipitated and fueled by different kinds of activists than those attracted to other groups heavily reliant upon the Internet, such as Moveon.org. Participating in Anonymous' actions online is not an option for just anybody, as there are baseline technical knowledge requirements.Footnote 12 As a consequence, the anonymity under which e-bandits act provides us with a conceptual and theoretical challenge in terms of how we place these groups.
Here we first review the extant scholarship on transnational social movements, NGOs, and international criminal networks (ICNs) to demonstrate how each of these extensive literatures falls short in capturing the work of e-bandits. We then briefly introduce both Anonymous and WikiLeaks. Next we develop the concept of the e-bandit to show the importance of the politics of no one for IR and global activism. We will show how Anonymous and WikiLeaks epitomize e-banditry. We conclude with the implications of identifying e-bandits in politics and the future of a research agenda focused on the politics of no one.
Varieties of Transnationalism
IR has struggled since the 1970s to define political relationships outside of linkages between states, or between states and a catch-all category called “non-state actors.”Footnote 13 We often have difficulty classifying and understanding the role and effect of such actors. To illustrate, at various times, critics have accused Anonymous of being a terrorist group, and some American politicians, including U.S. Vice President Joe Biden,Footnote 14 have painted WikiLeaks with the same brush.Footnote 15 We find this characterization inappropriate, given standing definitions of terrorism in political science, which emphasize violence against civilians,Footnote 16 implying (at least the threat of) physical injury or death, rather than property damage, virtual or actual. However, we do take the characterization of e-bandits as “international criminal organization”Footnote 17 seriously, as we see parallels between these two types of actors in the ICN literature. We also consider two other veins of research that shed light on the role of e-bandits—NGOs and transnational social movements—to illustrate that e-bandits challenge extant explanations for how non-state actors influence global politics.
NGOs and Transnational Social Movements
Often, social movements and NGOs can be thought of in complementary terms. NGOs can lead social movements, or they can transmit the desires of activists, or they can carry domestic disputes into the international arena and vice versa. Despite the fact that “social movements” capture the more amorphous types of activism that professionalized NGOs do not, many scholars have conceived of social movements as led by social movement organizations, with economic concerns.Footnote 18 Much of the difference, however, is scholarly discipline, with “social movements” being the territory of sociologists, and “transnational advocacy and NGOs” belonging to political scientists.Footnote 19 Scholars interested in transnationalism in both fields come from a particular political spectrum, often limiting analyses to the “good ones” of transnational politics, shunning the comparatively less attractive (i.e., more politically-conservative) organizations such as the National Rifle Association.Footnote 20
Transnational activism received a massive amount of attention after the publication of Activists beyond Borders, Footnote 21 which gave those interested in the role of non-state actors in IR a common language and conceptual map. Using the idea of the boomerang pattern, Keck and Sikkink demonstrated the influence that networks wielded against norm-violating states. From that starting point, a research agenda emerged to examine networks for environmentalFootnote 22 and human rightsFootnote 23 causes. Scholars began thinking carefully about the role of non-state actors in different areas as well, such as security,Footnote 24 thereby linking the idea of transnational politics more generally to the extant literature on social networks.Footnote 25
The actors within those transnational networks, however, have remained loosely conceptualized. Often, analysis privileges the role of NGOs or global civil society,Footnote 26 to bring about political change,Footnote 27 but transnational social movements have also received continued interest.Footnote 28 What NGOs are, however, is not always well defined; many scholars adapt a definition from the United Nations that NGOs are groups that are not established by inter-governmental agreement,Footnote 29 cannot use or advocate violence, be for-profit, or be a political party. They must be representative and promote the political purposes of the UN.
Despite the ambiguity in their definition, NGOs are credited as primary movers of transnational networks, in some cases serving as a kingmaker for local social movements and transnational issues,Footnote 30 with the ability to push some ideas on to the international agendaFootnote 31 and others offFootnote 32 across a variety of topics, including human rights, environmentalism, and security. NGOs have formed the backbone of many transnational movements, including the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century, International Campaign to Ban Landmines, the network against the small arms trade, and the Multilateral Agreement on Investments.Footnote 33 International NGOs can affect domestic protest.Footnote 34 NGOs have made headway by creating alternative fora for activists across a variety of international issues,Footnote 35 and even influencing the processes of international environmental negotiations by transmitting information.Footnote 36 Furthermore, NGOs play a very important role in shaping the preferences of states on human rights in international lawFootnote 37 and norms.Footnote 38
Social movement scholars have demonstrated that activists build organizations and coalitions and try to change the way things work through inhibition, provocation, and information.Footnote 39 In short, social movements are “people with common purposes and solidarity who mount collective challenges to elites and authorities … [with] mobilization around particular norms.”Footnote 40 Social movement organizations enable transnational participation, bringing non-local activists to different sites.Footnote 41 Activists' identities are reified and recreated through participation in social movements.Footnote 42 Some social movements have not been averse to breaking the law and private property, for instance, through civil disobedience techniques such as the Black Bloc.Footnote 43
In spite of the usefulness of existing theory from sociology and IR, are WikiLeaks and Anonymous “merely” social movements or NGOs? These categories, as much as they describe many of the behaviors of e-bandits, seem to be missing some of the core raisons d'être, including a positive agenda for change. For instance, WikiLeaks argues that it is providing a more pure form of journalism, aimed at revealing the truth a coopted international media refuses to do, but without a positive agenda. Anonymous too lacks a coherent agenda, and is largely reactive, but its lack of agenda has more to do with its organizational structure (discussed later). One can imagine that e-bandits are engaged in a battle over information beyond political change, as they want to change the way information is distributed, but many of the demands have been “anti.”
On another note, while Anonymous' role in the Occupy movements has been well-establishedFootnote 44 and WikiLeaks has become a legitimate source for news,Footnote 45 social movement and NGO scholars have not rushed to embrace such actors. Indeed, there is a reluctance to lump e-bandits in with do-gooders such as Amnesty International or World Vision. This may in part have to do with the current security climate, in a post-9/11 age where much information is kept secret. But it almost certainly also has to do with the fact that neither WikiLeaks nor Anonymous is engaged in purely legal activities and that some of its actions seem more destructive than acting in the name of principle, and yet they are not exactly criminal, as we will show.
International Criminal Networks
In examining ICNs,Footnote 46 scholars have sought to understand the “dark side”Footnote 47 of network forms of organization. ICNs are “dark networks—both illegal and covert”,Footnote 48 and as such, they must “operate in the shadow of the law.”Footnote 49 A criminal network is best defined as “a set of actors who are connected by ties which in some way or other support the commission of illegal acts.”Footnote 50 The term ICNs is used broadly here to describe a myriad of illicit non-state actors that are oftentimes called by different names.
Since the 1980s, ICNs have been on the rise as a global security threat. Many governments now identify ICNs as top priorities in terms of domestic policing issues, and have dramatically increased budgets and personnel to combat them.Footnote 51 In the face of the expanding bureaucracy and policing measures meant to disrupt and eliminate ICNs, these groups adopt different network structures to solve the dilemma they inevitably face when managing their conflicting needs of both “concealment and coordination.”Footnote 52 The resulting trade-offs between efficiency and security can differ depending on the motivations of a given set of network actors.Footnote 53 As Morselli et al. note, “not all criminal networks pursue the same objective. For example, drug trafficking or networks in criminal enterprise are designed for pecuniary profit. Others, such as terrorist networks, pursue ideological objectives.”Footnote 54 The ends shape how networks approach the efficiency/security trade-off: criminal networks that pursue profit tend to prioritize efficiency over security, while many that pursue ideological ends tend to prioritize security over efficiency.Footnote 55
ICNs are structured and survive based on relational ties between participants.Footnote 56 Criminal actors, who are willing to co-offend, typically do so based on notions of trust that are borne out of “criminally exploitable ties.”Footnote 57 These ties are usually found in human bonds such as kinship, ethnicity, friendship, and prison associations, to name a few.Footnote 58 Trust relationships enhance the secrecy, and hence, the survivability of networks, helping them remain insular and clandestine.
Moreover, the resiliency of ICNs is, in part, based on access they gain to legitimate power channels through offers of money and other enticements that corrupt authorities and create space for their operations.Footnote 59It is these “exchange relationships”Footnote 60 between ICNs and legitimate authorities that distinguish their activities from acts of simple banditry,Footnote 61 which is why they tend to thrive in failed states, or states that suffer from high levels of government corruption.Footnote 62 Online scammers, for example, take advantage of government corruption in Russia to pursue economic gains online, while terrorist networks like al-Qaeda take root in sovereignty-challenged states like Afghanistan in order to exercise their necessary organizational functions.Footnote 63
Both WikiLeaks and AnonymousFootnote 64 closely resemble some of the key features of ICNs. They adopt network structures that facilitate access to new information for the benefit of learning and adaptation in the face of a powerful opposition that seeks to shut them down.Footnote 65 They overcome government attempts to disrupt their operations, by “[building] redundancy into their operations by exploiting the services of multiple peripheral nodes that perform the same task,”Footnote 66 and, like terror networks, they seek to circumvent or subvert formal state authority.Footnote 67 Additionally, both groups engage in criminal behavior. Anonymous members (“Anons”Footnote 68) participate in both illegal distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and in the theft and destruction of intellectual and private property, and WikiLeaks, at minimum, deals in the exchange and publishing of stolen materials.Footnote 69
Nevertheless, e-bandits are quite distinct from other ICNs. Though e-bandits do commit crimes and engage in extreme forms of action, they do not deploy physical violence as a key tactic in their operations the way more traditional criminal organizations and terrorist groups do.Footnote 70 Moreover, e-bandits do not always operate according to the typical motivations of most ICNs. In keeping with their Robin Hood-like tendencies, neither WikiLeaks nor Anonymous operates for pecuniary profit,Footnote 71 and while they do act primarily toward ideological ends and political change, WikiLeaks aims toward an ambiguously stated goal of “maximum political impact,”Footnote 72 and a notable component of Anonymous' activities are done simply for the lulz,Footnote 73 and not for economic or political gain.
Furthermore, while some observers argue that ties of trust are a universal aspect of organized crime,Footnote 74 e-bandits intentionally operate in the absence of trust. Instead, e-bandits rely on the encryption technologiesFootnote 75 and anonymizing proceduresFootnote 76 of the Internet to hide their identities from both authorities and co-offenders. The online activities of e-bandits are not about using the Internet simply as a medium for communication and information exchange the way some terrorist groups do.Footnote 77 Instead, e-bandits use the Internet as their primary tool for both concealment and action; thereby in fact operating in opposition to traditional ICN reliance on trust and physical relationships. Lastly, e-bandits do not engage in exchange relationships with government authorities to gain access to legitimate power channelsFootnote 78 through bribery or corruption. Following Kenney, this is what makes them less like organized criminals and more like bandits.Footnote 79
Anonymous and WikiLeaks in Brief
Anonymous and WikiLeaks both share the key characteristics of e-bandits. Both of them rely heavily on the notion of anonymity in their work, whether in how it goes about soliciting information (WikiLeaks) or as its primary activism tactic (Anonymous). They are both also promulgators of the idea that citizens deserve more access to information that the powers that be hold in secret, thus their raisons d'être hinge on a Robin Hood ethic of empowering the disempowered. Both groups have been able to attack governments and corporations in ways that have much more wide-ranging implications than many other global social movements before them, from economic to security threats.Footnote 80 Finally, Anonymous in particular has harnessed the collective agency of a new population of activists, previously and perhaps still unengaged in traditional forms of politics, but finding community and identity with like-minded individuals worried about the encroachment of state and corporate control, with the loss of freedom online, akin to the way youth have congregated on using electronic petitions as a form of civic engagement.Footnote 81 The changes in governance of the Internet have also led to the rise of e-banditry as a form of protest that is not inherently political, but nonetheless has political, social, and economic implications.
WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks is an organization that “solicits and publishes secrets and suppressed material from whistleblowers around the world.”Footnote 82 Launched in 2006, it calls itself “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking.”Footnote 83 Since its launch, it has published an extensive catalogue of secret documents—most of which seek to expose the dark underbelly of a variety of political and corporate issues.Footnote 84
WikiLeaks' website provides whistleblowers with “a high security anonymous drop box fortified by cutting-edge cryptographic information technologies.”Footnote 85 It uses a “modified version of the Tor Network,”Footnote 86 an online system that allows files to move across the Internet anonymously, with no way of determining where the file came from or where it is going.Footnote 87 Additionally, WikiLeaks routes all of its material through countries that have the strongest press freedom laws; it maintains servers in several different countries, and its material is hosted by hundreds of mirror sites, which makes removing its published content from the Internet virtually impossible.Footnote 88 By guaranteeing anonymity, WikiLeaks changes the way that whistle-blowing can be done both in terms of speed and the number of interlocutors necessary to release information. Encryption tools provide protection for the whistleblower and the ubiquity and usability of computers reduces the risk of discovery. Compared to the 1971 leaking of the Pentagon Papers, for example, when Daniel Ellsberg had to smuggle government secrets out of his office one volume at a time, and then copy them page by page, all the while risking detection, capture, and prosecution,Footnote 89 nowadays, almost anyone can submit material from almost anywhere, and leakers no longer need to rely on the oath of a journalist for assurances of their anonymity. WikiLeaks' ability to procure and publish secrets has caused the group to become a target of governments and corporations around the world. In addition to accusations of terrorism, the group's leader, Julian Assange, has become a wanted man; he is a target for capture, prosecution, and assassination.Footnote 90
AnonymousFootnote 91
The term “Anonymous” is a memeFootnote 92 that comes from online image boards. When someone posts or requests content online without signing their name to it, it is automatically assigned the name Anonymous.Footnote 93 Following from this, accurate characterizations of the “group” known as Anonymous are inherently difficult: “Anonymous is, like its name suggests, shrouded in some degree of deliberate mystery.”Footnote 94 As such, descriptions of Anonymous lack precision. Anonymous can perhaps best be described as an Internet meme used by a transient and loosely affiliated collection of hackers, activists, trolls, and troublemakers who share two characteristics: they believe that the Internet should be a completely libertarian domain and they are willing to oppose and use disruptive tactics against those who seek to regulate cyberspace.
Anonymous has no permanent membership, no hierarchy or leadership, and no clear manifesto outlining its purpose or objectives.Footnote 95 Anonymous was born on the popular image boards known as 4chan—an online, image-based bulletin board where anyone can anonymously post comments and share images.Footnote 96 Content posted on 4chan is not searchable, and it disappears soon after posting, never to be found again.Footnote 97 In other words, participants, as well as content, are both anonymous and transient. Users of 4chan, and those who identify with the group Anonymous more generally, are often Internet trollsFootnote 98 searching for lulz. At its inception, Anonymous acted primarily with prankster-ish intentions.Footnote 99 Anonymous adopted a more politically-oriented ethos after trolling the church of Scientology in 2008.Footnote 100 When the church demanded the removal of an internal video that had been posted on various Internet sites, Anonymous organized a series of worldwide protests and launched a DDoSFootnote 101 attack against Scientology's website in the name of free speech.Footnote 102 Since that first political turn, Anonymous has protested many more times. It also supports groups (such as WikiLeaks) and movements (such as the uprisings in Tunisia in 2010–2011) that broadly fit its own freedom-based, anti-censorship underpinnings.
The Politics of No One
E-bandits such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous do not fit neatly into extant political categories, but they are also not sui generis. First, as we discuss below, Hobsbawm's work on social bandits demonstrates that liminal actors have always had a role in political protest. Second, hacktivists (and hackers more generally)Footnote 103 have always used technology to protest political and economic conditions.Footnote 104 Specifically, hacktivists have harnessed their energies into “three key areas: anti-censorship and freedom of speech, privacy, and Internet security.”Footnote 105 Thus the key difference with e-banditry is that it harnesses both the anonymizing and economical capabilities of the Internet to link activists transnationally without revealing any real identities. Here we demonstrate how e-banditry challenges our conceptions and practices of politics in three different ways: “Robin Hood” activities, enabled via technology; using technology for virtual and anonymous protest; and changes in who can participate in political activism.
Contextualizing E-bandits—Why the Politics of No One is Different
Thinking about the role of the Internet in politics is a subject that scholars have wrestled with very seriously, as there are potentially far-reaching policy implications for democracy movements around the world.Footnote 106 A burgeoning literature explores how the Internet changes the way that individuals can act and interact politically, which can be roughly divided into the “Web 1.0” and “Web 2.0” periods.Footnote 107 Web 1.0 scholarship represents the first wave of interest in exploring the effects of the Internet and other digital media on participation and citizen experiences. Web 2.0, however, has opened up the door for thinking about how technology changes the nature of political participation and activism as Internet technologies and usages themselves proliferate.Footnote 108
Our analysis fits firmly into this interest in how the Internet shifts the way that protest worksFootnote 109 and why the Internet is important for civil society groups and NGOs.Footnote 110 Scholars working this vein have arrived at a number of interesting and somewhat oppositional conclusions. For one, not all agree that the Internet, or cyberspace more broadly, has necessarily all positive implications for change among non-state actors. While some have claimed the great transformative potential of cyberspace for activists fighting authoritarianism,Footnote 111 others have cautioned against the Internet as a tool for liberation,Footnote 112 or even the democracy of the Internet as a medium itself.Footnote 113 For non-state actors in particular, the encroachment of the state in terms of regulation and restriction poses problems for their abilities to use cyberspace as a tool, whether for dissent, protest, or mobilization.Footnote 114 Another perspective argues that it is the lack of state-led governance to date that has led to some of the quandaries we face regarding the regulation of the Internet today.Footnote 115 Bennett concludes that the Internet is a double-edged sword, creating opportunities for more lasting campaigns and building networks without pre-existing strong ties, but also creating decision-making and control problems.Footnote 116
In the context of the contradictory implications of the Internet, one way to think about its effect is how it shapes the way that individuals can act. One set of arguments posits that citizens can now engage one another politically without turning to parties or interest groups,Footnote 117 using online petitions as a means to express political and social preferences.Footnote 118 The Internet may also change the way that we think about leadership in social movements,Footnote 119 certainly lowering the costs of organizingFootnote 120 and therefore depressing the threshold of who can create and sustain an activist group. However, Bimber et al. demonstrate that organizations themselves are not going away in the face of cyberspace.Footnote 121 Instead, extant organizations such as Moveon.org, AARP, and the American Legion utilize new communication modes to allow people to shape their experiences with political organizations more directly. Organizations are learning how to use the Internet in all sorts of ways beyond simple appeals to mass publics, as the Howard Dean U.S. presidential campaign demonstrated.Footnote 122 All of these investigations help us rethink how collective action as we know it works in the context of cyberspace.
We are interested in the effects of cyberspace on political action as well, but unlike previous work, we are concerned with a different political logic that is only enabled by the anonymizing capacity of the Internet. The politics of no one is only significant and important if the identity of the actors remains unknown. To date, the implicit assumption that underlies almost all of the different takes of the effect of the Internet on political organization is one of forming networks where none existed before, thereby enabling activists to interact on a far more regular or economical basis than ever before. The politics of no one, on the other hand, is not about creating communities and networks so much as it is about using anonymity as a tool for political action, and by its very definition therefore shirking the notion of community creation. It is about getting people involved without giving them faces, names, or even necessarily a position to defend. Rather, the politics of no one allows e-bandits to engage politically through cyberspace, and just as quickly disappear into the digital air.
Much of the extant theorization lays the groundwork for the politics of no one. The way that the Internet has developed to date has allowed for e-banditry, but changes in regulations and government practices may change these abilities. Nonetheless, the significance of the politics of no one should not be overlooked. Other “old” movements—such as the Zapatistas—incorporated the Internet into their repertoires to enable networking with like-minded groups or international actors.Footnote 123 For the most part, however, they were not “anonymous” because the movement's identity was known, and the “anonymous” Zapatista leader himself, Subcomandante Marcos, became iconic. For e-bandits, if they are successful, the identities of the very activists are shrouded, even if they engage in highly-publicized activities that drum up state backlash.Footnote 124 They truly engage in the politics of “no one,” in that their views cannot be easily attributed to known individuals. Actors such as Anonymous and WikiLeaks have posed challenges to states, corporations, and other interested parties precisely because of the questions that their actions have raised. What are the possibilities opened for citizens with the advent of cyberspace? How can cyberspace constitute and define activism, rather than just being a tool of many that an organization uses to attract adherents, or an economical way for activists to stay in touch? All of the research to date on the politics of the Internet and the Internet in politics are enabling factors for the politics of no one. As we emphasize here, it is not the technology that makes e-banditry different, per se, but it is the anonymity that cyberspace enables that poses the greatest challenge for conceptualizing this kind of activism.
One of the closest analogues to e-banditry is the anarchist movement that became notable in the nineteenth century and persists today in the form of “anti” movementsFootnote 125 that have engaged in sometimes violent confrontations with police and property in the form of the “black bloc.”Footnote 126 As some have put it, anarchism is back, with a renewed focus on all forms of domination (beyond the state) and a de-emphasis on formal organization,Footnote 127 as punk bands and activists adopt the mantle of the iconic “circle-A.”Footnote 128 Anarchists seek to build new kinds of communities focused around the notion of an “affinity group,” with the idea being that larger groups act based on consensus and agreement from smaller groups.Footnote 129 In its current guise, anarchism finds its purpose in galvanizing groups that are frequently neglected by or are the victims of neo-liberal excess and seeks to give those groups voice in global politics through direct action. Using techniques such as the black bloc, in which individuals dress in black and move as a group in order to express “a radical critique of the economic and political system,”Footnote 130 anarchists have blocked traffic, confronted police, and destroyed private property. The black bloc technique, similar to some of the disruptive techniques used by e-bandits discussed below, generates attention, perhaps disproportionately, for the perpetrators of such actions, but it is important to point out the tensions in making the comparison between e-banditry and black blocs. Participants in black blocs are anonymous until they are caught; e-bandits may never be caught if their digital footprints are covered by anonymizing technology. Black blocs are used by a sub-section of the protesters in an anarchist crowd; e-banditry is a tactic used by everyone participating in the politics of no one. Both black blocs and e-bandits, however, are engaged in resistance against power,Footnote 131 whether in the form of the state, corporation, or both. Moreover, e-bandits and anarchists have been able to counter negative media coverage through their own Internet-based outreach.Footnote 132
E-bandits as Social Bandits
In his seminal work on banditry, HobsbawmFootnote 133 introduces the concept of the social bandit to articulate how such actors have occupied the space between lords, states, and the peasantry throughout history by challenging the status quo and those who benefit from existing societal structures.Footnote 134 One type of social bandit, the noble robber (“Robin Hood”), is particularly applicable to thinking about e-bandits. Hobsbawm identifies the main characteristics of noble robbers, which can be summarized as righting injustices by taking from the rich to give to the poor; righteousness in that they are victims of injustice and pursue justice through noble and defensive means; and come from a community and therefore have its support, enduring as legendary figures.Footnote 135 E-bandits exhibit similar tendencies. First, they seek to redress threats to the freedom of the Internet, whether those threats come in the form of government restriction, surveillance, or regulation, or when corporations act in ways they deem unjust. In that sense, e-bandits take away from “the man,” which is relatively wealthy in terms of power and resources, in order to empower ordinary people. By taking information, defacing websites, or otherwise using digital means to act against the powers that be, e-bandits effectively take from the rich through disabling commercial and government websites, and try at times to give back to the community, either in terms of revelation (releasing videos, previously unavailable materials), reporting, or providing previously unavailable tools (DDoS attacks).
Second, e-bandits use basic principles to justify their behavior. Even though Anonymous in particular emerged from individuals interested in “just the lulz,” its first action against the Church of Scientology protested the censorship of videos containing actor Tom Cruise. WikiLeaks sees itself as an antidote to the complacency of modern mass media, releasing primary documents as a way for individuals to see the truth for themselves. E-bandits fit into the rough ethos of hacktivism, espousing an ethic of empowering those who are not privileged with knowledge while exposing the weaknesses of the powerful.
What makes them e-bandits, finally, is the method by which they achieve their goals, employing virtual and online techniques in the hacktivist style, which is defined most simply as “activism gone electronic.”Footnote 136 The fundamental role the Internet plays in e-banditry distinguishes them as a community, which at once requires specialized skills, but also is inclusive and widens the doors for different kinds of individuals to become politically active and involved in a broader public interested in defending a set of principles. Some have seen the shifts enabled by the Internet as pivotal in changing how we think about social, political, and economic relationships.Footnote 137 Hacking, which forms the basis of e-banditry, is a skill set that not all people can become good at, and there is a specific way in which hackers go about demonstrating their prowess at manipulating code to gain access to blocked information.Footnote 138
As one might expect, though, there is wide variation on what constitutes a hacktivist. Some, such as the founding members of the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), see hacktivism as “intended to refer to the development and use of technology to foster human rights and the open exchange of information.”Footnote 139 These hacktivists view their work as liberating and in line with the broader human rights agenda promoting free speech and expression.Footnote 140 Others we might call hacktivists hijack websites and deface them, and launch DDoS attacks that shut down e-mail servers and websites.Footnote 141 Such tactics are key tools for Anonymous, but would not be embraced by cDc.
For our purposes, hacktivism differs from e-banditry in that e-bandits always operate anonymously but claim credit for their actions in the name of a social cause. By contrast, many early hackers wanted to leave no trace of their activities. E-bandits want their actions to be discovered, and in fact, purposefully make them well known and bombastic precisely for the purposes of generating support for the cause. They do not, however, want their identities to be known. E-bandits also engage in illegal, extra-legal, and legal activities that result in negative or at least costly outcomes for their targets, thus distinguishing them from some hacktivists who simply want to post videos on behalf of a cause.
Thus, we see e-bandits as forming a distinct subgroup among hacktivists, pursuing a distinct kind of activism enabled by the anonymizing technologies of the Internet, which at once lends a common identity to those who participate, but at the same time making it difficult for others (and e-bandits themselves) to identify them as specific individuals. The critical component that distinguishes e-banditry from other social movements or even hacktivists is the disembodiment of activism. This decoupling of resistance and physical presence is central to the politics of no one, as technology enables anonymity that does not require individuals to physically gather for a show of strength or support. For e-bandits, the technology allows for their actions, and they in turn embody the most crucial elements of the technology. WikiLeaks' anonymous drop box, for instance, provides potential whistleblowers with a measure of assurance that their identities will not be revealed in exchange for sharing potentially explosive information. “No one” is there to drop off the documents or pick them up. The threats posed by e-bandits are not about physical destruction or trespass, but virtual transgressions, such as disrupting website traffic, stealing information stored in digital databases, or broadcasting secrets in easily-replicable digitized form. Thus, the anonymous and disembodied nature of e-banditry forms the core of the politics of no one.
Anonymous and WikiLeaks as E-Bandits
We have argued that e-banditry has changed the way that non-state actors can pursue political ends. Technology has come to define the way that politics is expressed, not merely serving as a means by which other political actions are taken. Both Anonymous and WikiLeaks embody e-banditry, and furthermore, inspire new ways of thinking about democracy and citizen activism.
Robin Hood?
Both WikiLeaks and Anonymous see themselves as providing a public service for mass consumption, revealing controversial materials without the same ethical concerns of the mainstream media or launching online attacks against governments and corporations with little regard for the law. Both view their actions as “taking it to the man”—fighting corporate greed, government corruption, and journalistic restrictions through technology—somewhat akin to Robin Hood stealing from the rich to give to the poor. In this case, both Anonymous and WikiLeaks steal and redistribute information.
Assange has emphasized that Wikileaks' “mission is to expose injustice.”Footnote 142 It targets both highly oppressive regimes and immoral behavior on the part of governments and corporations in the West with the ultimate goal of being part of a social movement that can “bring down many administrations.”Footnote 143 WikiLeaks has collaborated with several traditional media outlets such as The Guardian and The New York Times, Footnote 144 giving both of them, as well as their entire readership, access to stolen information they would otherwise not have obtained. WikiLeaks shared stolen data with these other media outlets in order to increase the amount of political impact the material would have, and to share in the labor of dealing with such a large trove of documents—thereby ensuring a broad proliferation of the material.Footnote 145 Upon the release of the material, WikiLeaks published its own un-redacted version on its website for readers to see the source documents in their entirety.Footnote 146 In this way, WikiLeaks was able to occupy a unique position by simultaneously being source, publisher, and political activist.
Anonymous more explicitly breaks law in its pursuit of principles, and in defense of the disempowered it deems to have been wronged by the powers that be. In December 2011, Anonymous hacked the servers of an intelligence firm known as Stratfor.Footnote 147 Anonymous stole the company's client list along with the credit card information of many of its members, and also procured millions of internal e-mails, which are said to show the monitoring of activists by private corporations, secret payments to government officials, and insider trading.Footnote 148 The hack was said to be in retaliation for the arrest and imprisonment of Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army intelligence officer accused of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks.Footnote 149 Anonymous shared the e-mails with WikiLeaks, thus allowing the information contained in them to reach a broad public, and in Robin Hood-like fashion, it used the stolen credit card information to make several charitable donations.Footnote 150
Anonymous also acts defensively for itself and its perceived allies, such as WikiLeaks. In February 2011, HBGary FederalFootnote 151 CEO Aaron Barr claimed to have unearthed intimate details about the hierarchy and identities of some Anons,Footnote 152 and he threatened to turn this information over to the FBI.Footnote 153 In response, Anonymous hacked into the company's servers, defaced its website, destroyed and stole data, seized its Facebook and Twitter accounts, and lifted thousands of internal e-mails that were subsequently published openly on the Internet.Footnote 154 One of the stolen files turned out to contain material outlining a plot by HBGary Federal to disrupt and discredit WikiLeaks and its many supporters through threats, exploitation, and fraud.Footnote 155
The hacking of both HBGary Federal and Stratfor were particularly novel for several reasons. First, the obtained information was not leaked by an aggrieved insider, rather, it was gathered by a group of outsiders that was able to use technology to infiltrate the system and expose secret information. Second, Anonymous was not limited to traditional forms of protest when Barr issued his threats against the group. Instead, it was able to immediately threaten and retaliate—striking back at an adversary while willfully breaking some laws along the way. Lastly, these attacks were largely reactionary in nature and perpetrated against people who were deemed by Anons to “deserve it”; in other words, Anonymous was motivated by a sense of injustice,Footnote 156 and these anonymous, disembodied attacks had real-world consequences for those who were hacked.
Moreover, Anonymous endeavors to expose corporate malfeasance through the activities of Anonymous Analytics (AA). AA employs “unique skill sets to expose companies that practice poor corporate governance and are involved in large-scale fraudulent activities.”Footnote 157 One observer has characterized the group as research vigilantes who are “the WikiLeaks of the business world, bent on uncovering corporate wrongdoing.”Footnote 158 The operation has already levied allegations of corporate wrongdoing against several prominent corporations. The allegations accuse the targeted corporations of misrepresenting corporate achievements to advertisers, providing falsified financial statements, and defrauding investors.Footnote 159 The research done by AA is beginning to achieve a level of broad legitimacy. As an example, Moody's Investor Service recently used an AA report against the company Choada as a reason to downgrade its credit rating.Footnote 160
In terms of the Robin Hood-like qualities of both groups, both have skirted the legal/illegal divide, engaging in activities that both circumvent and outright break laws protecting intellectual property and privacy, yet they do so, they claim, in the name of higher principles and at great risk to their own survival. Observers have noted the willingness of WikiLeaks' staff to face life in prison, or even possible execution, in order to release information it deems vital to the public interest.Footnote 161 Anonymous, especially, has claimed that it is not worried about running afoul of the law based on its own sense of ethics.Footnote 162 Both groups take enormous risks in the name of principles they believe in, fighting on behalf of others who can't fight for themselves. Anons have come to the online defense of rape victims, oppressed groups, targets of government censorship, student protestors, and even the grieving families of murdered children.Footnote 163 Legitimate or not, what seems most apparent, is the Robin Hood-esque aspirations of both of these groups to fight on the behalf of the disempowered, to break the stranglehold of information, and to broaden access to political power.
Technology
New communication technologies and the Internet are at the heart of e-banditry. These technologies have altered the terms by which transnational political participation occurs, forcing open the boundaries of what constitutes “activism.” E-bandits use Internet technologies to deploy anonymity as a means to steal and gather information, attack adversaries, and capture political power. In other words, as Nye argues, “technology is putting into the hands of deviant individuals and groups destructive powers that were once reserved primarily for governments.Footnote 164
WikiLeaks has been described as an “advocacy group for sources,”Footnote 165 one that provides assurances of anonymity for anyone who comes forward through its online drop box. The drop box is a critical technological development in information gathering,Footnote 166 since the anonymity afforded by WikiLeaks' encryption tools has the potential to motivate people to share secret information when they might not otherwise be inclined to do so for fear of reprisals.Footnote 167 The most famous case to date has been that of U.S. Army Intelligence analyst Bradley Manning.Footnote 168
WikiLeaks has acquired and published a myriad of secret documents as part of a broader effort to “[give] people the information they need.”Footnote 169 In 2010, it released a classified U.S. military video titled “Collateral Murder.” The video, which received over 10 million views on YouTube alone, shows U.S. military personnel opening fire on a group of Iraqi civilians.Footnote 170 WikiLeaks followed that by releasing a trove of secret military files that document the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These “War Logs” paint an unflattering picture of both wars, and reveal the un-reporting of civilian deaths, the capturing and killing of opposition leaders without trial, the acquisition of surface-to-air missiles by the Taliban, and the increasing use of drones to hunt Taliban targets by remote control.Footnote 171 In addition, WikiLeaks released a massive classified file containing secret diplomatic cable between the US and many of its enemies and allies. The cables contain detailed accounts of such things as corruption by foreign regimes, undercover arms shipments, and human trafficking.Footnote 172
Although e-banditry generally requires technical sophistication, Anonymous' operations provide a means for non-specialists to use technology to participate in political action.Footnote 173 Some of Anonymous' most basic tactics, such a DDoS attacks, are easy to participate in, and are often described as a “digital sit-in.”Footnote 174 In terms of transnational activism, DDoS attacks are transformative, because by simply sitting in front of a computer screen, anyone can anonymouslyFootnote 175 engage in a virtual protest that has real-world effects, thereby bypassing the traditional requirement of a physical gathering to demonstrate support. Other Anons carry out riskier, more advanced activities such as the building and maintaining of infrastructure, providing technological assistance, facilitating anonymity, law-breaking, information gathering, and other types of labor that furthers the group's political objectives.Footnote 176 Furthermore, some Anons employ botnetsFootnote 177 to wreak havoc against state and corporate targets online. Botnet controllers simultaneously harness the power of thousands of hijacked computers (often without any of the computers owners being aware) that have the online capacity to take down the websites of governments and major corporations.Footnote 178 These online attacks have costly real-world effects, and are often done in retaliation against targets that Anons deem to be corrupt or unjust.Footnote 179
Technology shapes the way that these groups engage in political action. The cloak of anonymity inhibits discovery, facilitates information exchange, and encourages participation, thereby changing the way that we think about political protest. In this light then, technological evolution has spawned new ways to participate in direct action without having to physically gather; the Internet provides the means for the anonymous and disembodied politics of no one.
Changing Participation
Anonymous is radically democratic in its structure. There are no leaders, anyone can join, and members are located almost everywhere in the world.Footnote 180 Anons meet in Internet Relay ChatsFootnote 181 (IRCs) where anyone can bring forward issues, discuss strategy, or propose attacks with the aim of furthering broad political objectives.Footnote 182 Each Anon is motivated by his or her own political issues, and can pick and choose which operations they wish to participate in.Footnote 183 Many of those who take part in the group's operations act in the name of principled causes, and by a desire to fight for “something.”Footnote 184 In this way, Anonymous' structures are akin to affinity groups among anarchists.
This democratic structure, however, can cut both ways. In one sense, the open and leaderless nature of Anonymous makes it susceptible to problems of incoherence and a lack of directed action. Sometimes Anons are interested in “hacking as a form of protest,”Footnote 185 other times however, Anons are subject to internal strife and in-fighting. Indeed, some former participants have become vigilantes who seek to expose and bring down other Anons.Footnote 186 Nonetheless, the transient and radically democratic nature of these types of hacktivist groups makes it very difficult for authorities to disrupt their activities. LeaderlessFootnote 187 groups that have flat decision-making strategies and fluid membership make it near impossible for authorities to use “kingpin strategies”Footnote 188 to take them down. It might be said then, that along with anonymity, the fluid and democratic nature of hacktivist groups contributes to their resiliency and survival.
Beyond reporting, WikiLeaks works to create democratic links between activists with shared political values. The group recently launched its own online social networking platform.Footnote 189 The platform is intended to allow like-minded individuals to anonymously join with others who share similar principles and who wish to fight for common causes.Footnote 190 The “Friends of WikiLeaks” (FoWL) site is built upon similar characteristics as the whistle-blowing website. Encryption ensures anonymity to users and the site claims to be beyond surveillance or compromise.Footnote 191 Users can sign up using anonymous information, and then communicate with like-minded activists worldwide in languages of their own choosing.Footnote 192 FoWL allows users to decide for themselves how best to organize their contacts and operations, and users are encouraged to bring forward issues of their choosing for discussion and action.Footnote 193 In short, the anonymity afforded by both FoWL and WikiLeaks' drop box allows ordinary citizens, political outsiders, and atypical activists to engage in political activism.
Conclusion
In recent years, we have been confronted with the role of social media in citizen protests and overthrows of unpopular and repressive governments in the Middle East. Much virtual ink has been spilled describing the capability of the Internet to make people matter,Footnote 194 rendering once-invincible autocrats such as Hosni Mubarak vulnerable to the demands of ordinary people. These analyses, however trenchant, reflect an old mode of thinking about activism as enabled by communications technologies. Technology is yet another tool for activists to employ; Middle Eastern protesters used social media to tap into one another's extant political interests and unify demands. Transnational supporters showed their solidarity via virtual links to events on the ground, broadcasting footage and passing the message on to Western audiences. Importantly, these political demands existed prior to social networking technologies.Footnote 195
It is not enough to simply attribute positive qualities to the Internet for its mobilizing potential. In fact, there are potential pitfalls, and perhaps even some negative, or at least uncomfortable consequences. We have presented an alternative way to conceive of technology and how its anonymizing capability creates the conditions for the politics of no one. E-bandits challenge our current conceptions of transnational activism in three important ways. The first is that e-bandits engage in an explicit resistance to power through technological means, and are largely able to attack powerful targets through techniques that shield their identities as they engage in questionable kinds of activities (à la Robin Hood). The second is that the anonymizing potential of the Internet enables different kinds of social protest to emerge. Instead of physical protest as a show of strength, activists can gather online, sometimes advertently, sometimes inadvertently, and express their political preferences through leaking information and attacking servers. Virtual protest, as we demonstrate, often creates physical externalities. Finally, e-banditry expands the boundaries of who can become a political activist. Rather than technology as a tool among many for activists to choose from, communication technology in the case of Anonymous, WikiLeaks, and groups similar to them have found activism because of technology. Communication technologies, therefore, underlie and define groups, and are the only tool with which these groups might wield political influence. The “who” behind protests, whether they are professional activists, non-citizens, or kids with high-level computer skills, matters less if the means by which protest happens are both anonymous and disabling, thereby demanding attention from policymakers or business executives. In this sense, therefore, we can view Anonymous and WikiLeaks as emblematic of transnational, democratic movements, largely un-directed by a centralized viewpoint, dependent on its participants to define its goals.
We think this last plank of the theory of e-banditry holds plenty of promise for a future research agenda. The tension that has arisen in recent years over the “representativeness” of NGOs and other transnational movements is directly affected by Internet technologies. Professionalization of the non-profit advocacy sector has made it harder for those without resources to break in; the potential unleashed by the Internet for non-professionals to engage in activism and impose consequences on their targets is something worth exploring further. Not only is this important for transnational advocacy, but also for thinking about the potential of radical democracy within our current institutions, as we see with the growing number of Pirate Parties in Europe and beyond. What are the challenges posed by the politics of no one to our conceptions of democracy, both globally and domestically?
Secondly, the ever-evolving nature of WikiLeaks and Anonymous makes us wonder whether they are enduring or ephemeral. Do e-bandits arise in times of turbulence and uncertainly to question the status quo, revealing its inconsistencies? Or are these actors here to stay, changing forever the landscape of what it means to be a transnational actor, and indeed, how activism can occur without a physical gathering of protestors? Can the whistle-blowing, the unleashing of private information, and the temporary destruction of websites substitute for occupation of city streets and public places? Anonymous and WikiLeaks already collaborate on projects.Footnote 196 In recent events, the link between the two has become increasingly explicit as the two groups work in concert to enact political goals. Where Anonymous can gather information, WikiLeaks can disseminate it—as illustrated by WikiLeaks' recent release of millions of internal documents from the private intelligence firm Stratfor that were allegedly obtained by Anonymous.Footnote 197 These actions, along with some of their other structures described here, seem to indicate that the two groups have plans to stay.
Finally, from an organizational perspective, future research can examine further some of the questions that have arisen in IR regarding the study of NGOs. As e-bandits move to more “legitimate” means of attaining and distributing information, we can examine their actions using tools from extant debates about the credibility of NGOs.Footnote 198 Thus, theories and research on transnational advocacy networks, in which autonomous NGOs, activists, and other like-minded actors seek out one another in order to attain collective global goals, remains highly relevant to both academic and policy circles. E-bandits both force us to think about our assumptions about transnational politics, and they also reinforce the importance of looking carefully at the non-state actors in networks.
