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overview
This note considers digital vigilantes: people who use
the net to take the law into their own hands in responding
to cybercrime or merely bad manners.
It covers -
The
following page discusses selected incidents of digital
vigilantism.
introduction
Digital vigilantes are individuals or groups using digital
technologies such as the web to take extra-legal action
against perceived ills.
They are a contemporary manifestation of traditional impatience
with law enforcement agencies (or merely disrespect for
legal systems and particular values) and opportunities
for personal aggrandisement. In the past notions of 'direct
action' or 'rough justice' – strengthened by the
weakness or cooption of authorities – resulted in
- lynch
mobs (directed against people who were convicted criminals,
accused of crimes or merely ‘different’)
- practices
such as charivari, haberfeld-treiben, scampanate, katzenmusik
and 'rough music' (where pre-industrial townfolk and
peasants enforced morality by making noise outside a
target's home, with the threat of arson or physical
assault such as tarring-&-feathering)
-
signalling through graffiti or by lobbing bricks, dead
cats and other nasties through the windows of alleged
sex offenders, reds or other community hate figures.
Digital
vigilantism encompasses a range of activities that include
-
- web
distribution of 3G phone video of bad manners
-
denial of service attacks against spammers
- defacement
or destruction of a site maintained by an organisation
or individual with contrary views
- defamatory
blogs or postings about eBay
sellers or romances that
have soured
- online
'honeytraps' to lure paedophiles, sometimes accompanied
by media exposure
-
email or SMS threats
to eviscerate the recipient.
It
may be undertaken by the technologically sophisticated
or by those whose grasp of new media and the law is inversely
proportional to the vehemence with which their views are
expressed. It is a flipside of often woolly visions of
the netizen, the cybercitizen
"homesteading the digital frontier" in an environment
where the state is supposedly no longer meaningful.
Neologisms such as digilante and cyber-vigilante have
not gained wide acceptance. The range of activities that
are sometimes characterised as digital vigilantism or
online vigilantism is so broad as to render the term of
uncertain value.
Unsurprisingly, although the mass media recurrently feature
coverage of 'online vigilantism' and individual proponents
(who are often held in distinctly lower esteem by law
enforcement agencies and experts) there has been little
academic study of 'online vigilantism' as such. Research
has instead concentrated on particular activities such
as defamation, defacement and denial of service.
Critics have noted that many online vigilantes are breaking
the law (or merely breaching moral codes that they purport
to defend). Critics on occasion lament that unauthorised
action by enthusiastic amateurs may undermine law enforcement
and may injure third parties in ways that have no meaningful
redress. Others question uncritical reception by the media
of claims by particular groups and the emphasis on particular
personalities whose readiness with a soundbite is not
matched by substantive performance.
studies
In contrast to extensive and upbeat coverage in popular
media the academic literature about digital vigilantes
is thin. Most analysis appears in works such as Wendy
Grossman's Net.Wars (New York: New York Uni Press
1997), which question much-quoted utopian texts such as
Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading
on the Electronic Frontier (London: Secker &
Warburg 1994).
For US antecedents see Ray Abrahams' Vigilant Citizens:
Vigilantism and the State (Malden: Polity Press 1998),
Robert Dykstra's The Cattle Towns (Lincoln: Uni
of Nebraska Press 1968) and 'To Live and Die in Dodge
City' in Lethal Imagination: Violence & Brutality
in American History (New York: New York Uni Press
1999) edited by Michael Bellesiles, John Boesenecker's
Gold Dust & Gunsmoke: Tales of Gold Rush Outlaws,
Lawmen & Vigilantes (New York: Wiley 1999), Frederick
Allen's A Decent, Orderly Lynching: The Montana Vigilantes
(Norman: Uni of Oklahoma Press 2004), Roger McGrath's
Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes: Violence
on the Frontier (Berkeley: Uni of California Press
1987) and Norton Moses' Lynching and Vigilantism in
the United States: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport:
Greenwood Press 1997).
For European 'rough music' see in particular EP Thompson's
'Rough Music: Le Charivari anglais' in Customs in
Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (London:
Merlin Press 1993).
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