Электронное гражданское неповиновение: формы и история

A form of nonviolent online protest
Electronic civil disobedience (ECD; also known as cyber civil disobedience or cyber disobedience) can refer to any type of civil disobedience in which the participants use information technology to carry out their actions. Electronic civil disobedience often involves computers and the Internet and may also be known as hacktivism. The term "electronic civil disobedience" was coined in the critical writings of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a collective of tactical media artists and practitioners, in their seminal 1996 text, Electronic Civil Disobedience: And Other Unpopular Ideas. Electronic civil disobedience seeks to continue the practices of nonviolent yet disruptive protest originally pioneered by American poet Henry David Thoreau, who in 1848 published Civil Disobedience. Computerized activism exists at the intersections of politico social movements and computer mediated communication. Stefan Wray writes about ECD:
"As hackers become politicized and as activists become computerized, we are going to see an increase in the number of cyber activists who engage in what will become more widely known as Electronic Civil Disobedience. The same principals of traditional civil disobedience, like trespass and blockage, will still be applied, but more and more these acts will take place in electronic or digital form. The primary site for Electronic Civil Disobedience will be in cyberspace.

The origins of computerized activism extend back in pre Web history to the mid 1980s. Examples include PeaceNet (1986), a newsgroup service, which allowed political activists to communicate across international borders with relative ease and speed using Bulletin Board Systems and email lists.

The term electronic civil disobedience and hacktivism may be used synonymously, although some commentators maintain that the difference is that ECD actors don’t hide their names, while most hacktivists wish to remain anonymous. Some commentators maintain that ECD uses only legal means, as opposed to illegal actions used by hacktivists. It is also maintained that hacktivism is done by individuals rather than by specific groups.

In order to draw attention to John Major's Criminal Justice Bill, a group of cyber activists staged an event in which they "kidnapped" 60s counter cultural hero Timothy Leary at a book launch for Chaos & Cyberculture held on Guy Fawkes Day 1994, and then proceeded to "force him to DDoS government websites". Leary called the event an "Intervasion". The Intervasion was preceded by mass email bombing and denial of service attacks against government servers with some success. Although ignored by the mainstream media, the event was reported on Free Radio Berkeley.

On February 24, 2004, large scale intentional copyright infringement occurred in an event called Grey Tuesday, "a day of coordinated civil disobedience". Activists intentionally violated EMI's copyright of The White Album by distributing MP3 files of The Grey Album, a mashup of The White Album with The Black Album, in an attempt to draw public attention to copyright reform issues and anti copyright ideals. Reportedly over 400 sites participated including 170 that hosted the album. Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School, comments that "As a matter of pure legal doctrine, the Grey Tuesday protest is breaking the law, end of story. But copyright law was written with a particular form of industry in mind. The flourishing of information technology gives amateurs and homerecording artists powerful tools to build and share interesting, transformative, and socially valuable art drawn from pieces of popular cultures. There's no place to plug such an important cultural sea change into the current legal regime."

On July 15, 2011, 667 people from 28 different countries participated in the online collective act of electronic civil disobedience called "Border Haunt" that targeted the policing of the U. S. Mexico border. Participants collected entries from a database maintained by the Arizona Daily Star that holds the names and descriptions of migrants that died trying to cross the border territory and then sent those entries into a database run by the company BlueServo which is used to surveil and police the border. As a result, the border was conceptually and symbolically haunted for the duration of the one day action as the border policing structure received over 1,000 reports of deceased migrants attempting to cross the border. The Border Haunt action was organized by Ian Alan Paul, a California based new media artist and was reported on by Al Jazeera English and the Bay Citizen.

In response to the political assassination of Zapatista teacher Jose Luis Solís López (alias Galeano), in Chiapas, Mexico, Ian Alan Paul and Ricardo Dominguez developed a new form of Electronic Civil Disobedience that was used as part of a distributed online performance on May 24, 2014 as part of the week of action and day of remembrance in solidarity with the Zapatista communities. When users logged on to the project website, their web browsers sent mass amounts of page requests to the server of the Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, filling their error logs with lines of text drawn from Don Quixote, communiques from the Zapatista Communities, as well as from texts authored by the Critical Art Ensemble. As a kind of E Graffiti and form of Electronic Civil Disobedience, floods of HTTP traffic were sent from around the world as the books and communiques were written onto the error logs of their servers several thousand times by different users.

In 2020 a Swedish citizen initiative to build an app for accessing the data from the City of Stockholm’s official school system began. The background is that the City of Stockholm had developed an official school system in house. The result was a very expensive system (more than $117 million Following this the city began to work against the new alternative citizen made frontend and tried blocking it by obfuscating the official webbapplications API calls, reporting key people in the citizen project to the police, calling them out in the press as unlawful, etc. During most of 2021 the city counsel and staff upheld their opposition but saw their costs rising and that there was an overwhelming support of the new frontend. The politicians in charge finally chose to step in in the fall of 2021 and open up a collaboration with the parents building the frontend.

When the government of Thailand proposed a system to reform their country's network in 2015. They stated that changes were imperative "to control the inappropriate websites and control the inflow of information." Their proposed reform would allow the government to monitor and censor the circulation of their network. A couple of months before this news, the Thai government underwent a coup which also resulted in the new government taking over major media and banning political gatherings. These serious events concerned the people of Thailand which caused them to organize and act. Rather than participating in a DDOS attack against the government which is usually associated with criminal activity, they decided to take to Facebook to gather internet users from around the world. These users all occupied Thai government websites in order to overflow their bandwidth and called it a "Virtual sit in." The daily average users increased by almost 100,000 people which then prompted the government to announce that they would not use their reform proposal to censor but to study the youth.