“Now you see me – now you don’t!” – Practices and purposes of hacking online surveillance

Kaufmann, Mareile

doi:10.17951/ms.2018.2.85-101

“…As an engagement with digital governance hacking tends to be either lauded or denounced as Gabriella Coleman and Alex Golub (2008) observe. Especially in legal discourses and national strategies for cybersecurity hacking is associated with criminal or illegal activity and is assessed in terms of informational and monetary loss (for a study of legal discourses see Kaufmann 2018). The notion of hacktivism (e.g.…”

Section: A Diverse Terrain Captured By Binaries and Hatsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hacking in digital environments

Kaufmann¹

2021

Routledge Handbook of Media Geographies

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Hackers tend to be portrayed as criminals or activists. In current digital media landscapes, however, hacking inhabits many places. This chapter's aim is to complicate mainstream notions of hacking and acknowledge its diverse and distributed practices, intentions and instances. Instead of building on the clean model of binaries and 'hats', it offers an understanding of hacking that acknowledges how one hack can involve a variety of ethical, political, social, personal and affective dimensions. It supports an analytic approach of multiplicity, where hacking dataveillance can be understood as anything from pleasureful pragmatism to crafty critique. After briefly mapping the current standpoints and literatures on hacking in digital environments the chapter exemplifies this approach with a case study on hacking dataveillance. The case study grants insight into a field that is relatively new to Media Geography. Its empirical material illustrates and substantiates the argument about hacking as a multi-faceted media practice. Geographically, the chapter's insights are based on studies with hackers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

show abstract

“…As an engagement with digital governance hacking tends to be either lauded or denounced as Gabriella Coleman and Alex Golub (2008) observe. Especially in legal discourses and national strategies for cybersecurity hacking is associated with criminal or illegal activity and is assessed in terms of informational and monetary loss (for a study of legal discourses see Kaufmann 2018). The notion of hacktivism (e.g.…”

Section: A Diverse Terrain Captured By Binaries and Hatsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Routledge Handbook of Media Geographies

Adams¹,

Warf²

2021

2

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Hackers tend to be portrayed as criminals or activists. In current digital media landscapes, however, hacking inhabits many places. This chapter's aim is to complicate mainstream notions of hacking and acknowledge its diverse and distributed practices, intentions and instances. Instead of building on the clean model of binaries and 'hats', it offers an understanding of hacking that acknowledges how one hack can involve a variety of ethical, political, social, personal and affective dimensions. It supports an analytic approach of multiplicity, where hacking dataveillance can be understood as anything from pleasureful pragmatism to crafty critique. After briefly mapping the current standpoints and literatures on hacking in digital environments the chapter exemplifies this approach with a case study on hacking dataveillance. The case study grants insight into a field that is relatively new to Media Geography. Its empirical material illustrates and substantiates the argument about hacking as a multi-faceted media practice. Geographically, the chapter's insights are based on studies with hackers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

show abstract

“…Encryption software allows its users to conceal their identities and locations and therefore to hide from and become hard to reach for the outsiders. This is exemplified by the use of encryption technologies like The Onion Router ( Kaufmann, 2018b ; Tzanetakis et al, 2016 ). These techniques are associated with their own benefits and disadvantages – dependent on their purpose, which also adds an ideological level to the choice of technique ( Kaufmann, 2018b ).…”

Section: Conceptualizing Hard-to-reach Communities Onlinementioning

confidence: 99%

“…What stereotypically comes to mind when studying the hard-to-reach online are research subjects with illicit intentions, but also privacy advocates, activists, political refugees or simply those who enjoy playing with surveillance systems ( Kaufmann, 2018b ). Despite the fact that the reasons for disappearing online are this manifold, disappearance tends to be associated with hiding ( Tzanetakis, 2018 ) or with weak forms of protest as its users want to enjoy online services without contributing to their functioning ( Brunton and Nissenbaum, 2011 : online).…”

Section: Conceptualizing Hard-to-reach Communities Onlinementioning

confidence: 99%

Doing Internet research with hard-to-reach communities: methodological reflections on gaining meaningful access

Kaufmann

¹

,

Tzanetakis

²

2020

Qualitative Research

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article contributes to scholarship on digital sociology by addressing the methodological challenge of gaining access to hard-to-reach online communities. We use assemblage theory to argue how collaborative efforts of human participants, digital technologies, techniques, authorities, cultural codes and the human researcher co-determine aspects of gaining access to online subjects. In particular, we analyse how credibility and reflexivity are assembled in an online research context. This is exemplified by our own experiences of researching hackers that dispute surveillance and the social embeddedness of darknet drug market users. In this article, we demonstrate the utility of an assemblage perspective for understanding the complexities involved in negotiating access to hard-to-reach communities in digital spaces.

show abstract

“Now you see me – now you don’t!” – Practices and purposes of hacking online surveillance

Cited by 4 publications

References 17 publications

Hacking in digital environments

Hacking in digital environments

Routledge Handbook of Media Geographies

Doing Internet research with hard-to-reach communities: methodological reflections on gaining meaningful access

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About