John Perry Barlow - Electronic Frontier Foundation

Cyberspace Declaration of Independence

A war is being fought in the Internet twenty-four hours a day. A team of defenders spread throughout the world, are ready to stop and neutralize every attack. It is the Global Thread Operation Center where all attacks are being monitored; any of which could be the signal for a stronger hit that could generate absolute chaos. The room looks like a set from a futuristic movie. Four huge screens in the front of the room display the process data that is taking place. Several rows of desks and panels fill the room. More than twenty people are moving around, answering and making phone calls, talking to each other, and examining computer screens. They are re

The white hats first start fighting the bad guys at the Internet Security Services Global Threat Center. Just in one hour, they observe more than 400 pre-attacks, 1500 Denial-of-Service attacks (overload or flood of site’s servers) (TechTV, “What Is”) and last year alone they seized approximately 83 million hacker attacks all over the world. The team has to analyze every attack and figure out if it will hit any of the companies they protect and it does, how dangerous can it be? For the last 20 years the battle between the good guys and the bad guys has become greater and the techniques, software and types of attack by the black hats have evolved (TLC).

q Hackers should be judged by their hacking.

The EFF leads a new hacker battle as John defends one of the most spread and common hacks of the moment, related with the music and the movie industry. With the release of movies in DVD format, movies were capable of being played in computers and now the Entertainment industry was involved in this technological battle. In order to prevent illegal copies of such films, the industry distributes the DVDs with a high Copyright protection but still people find the way to crack them. Matthew Pavlovich was recently involved in a sue hold by “Hollywood.” Matthew is the creator of a certain program that allows people to copy the movies in the computer. Since he is an “open source” programmer, others have used his code base in order to crack the encryption files that conform the movies. Originally, the program called DeCSS was created by Pavlovich to allow Linux users to play the movies as well and to remove the many other restrictions that “Hollywood” force us to have. Thanks the hard work of the EFF lawyers and staff, the U.S Supreme court dropped the lawsuit in Matthews favor (TehcTV, US). Every day there are many cases like this where the big companies just worry about suing many other people.

But again the public is given a bad perspective of what the original hacker community is all about. It is important for them to understand the role hackers play in our society, a benign one, and because of those black hats like Mafia Boy and Cold Fire, hackers become the excuse for bad laws, censorship and repression. The future of cyberspace and its rights might be in danger because of this.

Thanks to John Perry Barlow, hackers now count with a force that backs them up. Barlow is the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organization that fights for cyber-rights. “We are dealing with the battle between the future and the past, between the powers that were and the powers that have yet to be” Barlow says (TLC). He also believes that “the internet represents a change in history as great as the industrial revolution” and from this philosophy he came about with the creation of a Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace, fearing from the government and lawmakers that want to take over it. In a few words he summarizes:

Some topics in this essay:
Mafia Boy, Captain Zap, Lauderdale Garcia, Matthew Pavlovich, Hands-On Imperative, England TLC, Threat Center, Marie Moore, Operation Center, Hackers TLC, hat hackers, captain zap, white hats, world cyberspace, white hat hackers, black hat, future past, black hats, computer systems, hacker ethic, white hat, movement context obey, concepts property expression, property expression identity, expression identity movement,