Leveraging Technology for Peace: attacking censorship

[anonamatic]

"Concept" is stretching it for what is otherwise a self-laudatory endonym. I'd wager few widely perceived "hacktivists" actually use for themselves, and those that do are generally on the sidelines when it comes to computing. To be honest, "hacktivist" might as well be a synonym for typical left-leaning Slashdot denizen. That said, the concept you do describe here--narrowly--is called "leaking." It's certainly not a new or poorly understood notion, and I question whether any critical opportunity or challenge featured changes in any significant way as you move from hard media to telecommunications, let alone from a second order migration from say email to BBSes to Facebook.

Compiling statements of witnesses to war crimes has nothing to do with leaking anything. In fact i don't look at leaking as all that much of a hacktivist activity. At best it's whistle blowing, and often it's politics or something worse than that.

Hacktivism is stuff like the Tor project, & other anti-censorship efforts using technical means, or applying standard technology to safeguard peace & reconciliation efforts. It can be stuff like smuggling news in and out of North Korea using technical means, & at it's most basic is just to use technical means in unexpected ways to undermine various repressive practices by dictatorial regimes.

You'd lose that wager by the way. Your first mistake is to think it's somehow a self-laudatory label, it's not, rather it's used to describe an approach to problems. Your second mistake is to think that somehow people are sitting on the sidelines doing nothing. That's wrong too. One of the first efforts I became aware of in this arena was being done by the AAAS for instance. You're making some unfounded assumptions based on scant knowledge.