Hacktivism is at least as old as October 1989 when US Deptartment of Energy were penetrated by the anti-nuclear WANK worm, which changed the system announcement banner to:
W O R M S A G A I N S T N U C L E A R K I L L E R S
_______________________________________________________________
\__ ____________ _____ ________ ____ ____ __ _____/
\ \ \ /\ / / / /\ \ | \ \ | | | | / / /
\ \ \ / \ / / / /__\ \ | |\ \ | | | |/ / /
\ \ \/ /\ \/ / / ______ \ | | \ \| | | |\ \ /
\_\ /__\ /____/ /______\ \____| |__\ | |____| |_\ \_/
\___________________________________________________/
\ /
\ Your System Has Been Officially WANKed /
\_____________________________________________/
You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war.
Aldous Huxley once wrote:
Perhaps men of genius are the only true men. In all the history of the race
there have been only a few thousand real men. And the rest of us--what are we?
Teachable animals. Without the help of the real man, we should have found out
almost nothing at all. Almost all the ideas with which we are familiar could
never have occurred to minds like ours. Plant the seeds there and they will
grow; but our minds could never spontaneously have generated them.
At the core of the cypherpunk philosophy was the belief that the great question of politics in the age of the internet was whether the state would strangle individual freedom and privacy through its capacity for electronic surveillance or whether autonomous individuals would eventually undermine and even destroy the state through their deployment of electronic weapons newly at hand. Many cypherpunks were optimistic that in the battle for the future of humankind - between the State and the Individual - the individual would ultimately triumph. Their optimism was based on developments in intellectual history and computer software: the invention in the mid 1970s of public-key cryptography by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, and the creation by Phil Zimmerman in the early 1990s of a program known as PGP, 'Pretty Good Privacy'.
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