The Power to Selectively Reveal Oneself: Privacy Protection among Hacker-activists

ABSTRACT

Privacy advocates and hacker activists (‘hacktivists’) oppose biometric technologies, such as electronic fingerprinting and facial recognition, that are increasingly used to sort and identify people. This paper draws from ethnographic fieldwork among technology experts and hacktivists in Denmark and Germany to explore how these individuals work to resist the encroachment of surveillance technologies in their physical and digital lives. Particular attention is paid to the practices they use to mask their locations, communications, and legal identities, thereby negotiating the border between public and private. This article describes how hacktivists exchange information about data protection and border-crossing to illustrate how encryption and other steps to protect privacy can be understood as moral practices. As opposed to common legal and philosophical definitions that characterise the right to privacy as inherent to the liberal, individual self, I suggest that hacktivists are advancing novel understandings of both identity and privacy as relational.

KEYWORDS:

• hacking
• surveillance
• privacy
• biometrics
• Europe

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Yale Fox International Fellowship and grants from the Yale Center for Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration and the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. I extend my appreciation to the two reviewers for this journal, Duana Fullwiley, Miyako Inoue, Mathias Levi Toft Kristiansen, Margaux Fitoussi, the members of the Biometric Borderworlds research group, and the participants of the Stanford Anthropology Department Brown Bag Seminar and the Stanford Graduate STS Workshop for their valuable feedback at various stages of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Given the heightened privacy concerns of my informants, all names are pseudonyms –except in the case of publicly identified hacks – and biographical details are brief to ensure anonymity.

2 Privacy activists often proffer technical services to journalists, activists, and human rights defenders – groups they have identified as particularly vulnerable to surveillance based on professional or political affiliation. However, they less frequently characterise surveillance as a practice that affects certain groups based upon race, nationality/citizenship status, sexuality, gender, or class. Hacktivists repeatedly emphasise how everyone should be concerned about surveillance because everyone has the right to a private life. This is unsurprising when considering the popular cultural imagination of the unmarked liberal subject. Yet, even as liberal rhetoric purports to promote and protect ‘universal’ freedoms, various scholars have demonstrated how European liberalism has historically (Arendt 1973; Mehta 1999) and contemporarily (Fernando 2014; Mahmud 2014) relied upon the political and social exclusion of certain groups of people.

3 The person(s) responsible for the development of Bitcoin employed the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto; their true identity remains unknown. Craig Wright is one of several individuals who has been linked with Bitcoin and perhaps the most vocal claimant. However, his claim is disputed by multiple developers and journalists. I find Wright’s comments about privacy and the potential to re-invent the self to be intriguing precisely because of his embroilment in this controversy.

4 This can also be observed in hacktivist practices such as the construction of community Internet networks that employ decentralised mesh networks and VPN tunnels to bolster confidentiality (see De Filippi & Tréguer 2015), like Berlin’s Freifunk, which has provided free wireless connections to dozens of refugee shelters in Germany.

5 While most biometric identifiers pertain only to an individual, DNA is a type of personal data that inherently relates to, and in certain contexts implicates, biological family members. See Suter 2010 and Olwig, this issue, for discussion of how familial DNA is used by the state to identify individuals and/or establish biological relationships for criminology and family reunification purposes.

6 By calling these stories ‘rumours’, I do not mean to imply that they are untrue or unfounded; I recognise that they are based off the cases of actual persons. However, I follow Luna (2018: 64) and other scholars of rumour in that I am less concerned with ‘the veracity of narratives but rather examine them to make sense of particular political conditions.’ In the case of hacker arrests, I am intrigued by how certain figures have taken on an outsized, almost mythological importance and their stories are told as cautionary tales.

7 Erin Sales (2014: 222) explains, ‘the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that compelling an accused to demonstrate physical characteristics for identification purposes does not qualify as compelled self-incrimination because it is not testimonial in nature.’