A Lesson in Hacktivism and Surveillance Ethics
One sleepy July morning[1], the members of a small Milanese boutique cybersecurity firm, Hacking Team, awoke from the annuls of the weekend, unaware of the life-shattering series of events that they were about to experience. Only a few hours before, an entity who later identified themselves as Phineas Fisher (henceforth referred to as Fisher) uploaded a 400 GB trove of emails, internal documents, marketing and sales information, product source code, and other information to BitTorrent for all the world to see (Ragan, 2015; Associated Press, 2015).
Hacking Team was little known to the public, primarily finding its customer base in nation-states and law enforcement agencies; their primary product was a self-purported hacking suite for governmental interception called the DaVinci Remote Control System (RCS), which allowed those with the financial means to utilize pre-developed and packaged zero-day exploits to fully compromise most modern devices such as Android, iOS, and Blackberry phones, Windows, MacOS, or Linux computers, among many others (Ragan, 2015; O’Neill, 2019). While Hacking Team claimed not to sell to organizations that many would consider unethical (Osborne, Hacking Team: We won’t ‘shrivel up and go away’ after cyberattack, 2015; Collins, 2015), Fisher claimed that they helped…
