Coding Democracy How Hackers Are Disrupting Power, Surveillance, and Authoritarianism

Hackers as vital disruptors, inspiring a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens take back democracy.

Hackers have a bad reputation, as shady deployers of bots and destroyers of infrastructure. In Coding Democracy, Maureen Webb offers another view. Hackers, she argues, can be vital disruptors. Hacking is becoming a practice, an ethos, and a metaphor for a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens are inventing new forms of distributed, decentralized democracy for a digital era. Confronted with concentrations of power, mass surveillance, and authoritarianism enabled by new technology, the hacking movement is trying to "build out" democracy into cyberspace.

Maureen Webb is a labor lawyer and human rights activist. She is the author of Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World and has taught national security law as an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia.

Chapter 1
The Hacker Ethic--Germany's Chaos Computer Club and the Genealogy of the Hacker Ethos In Berlin
Chapter 2
The Hacker Challenge--Cypherpunks on the Electronic Frontier
Chapter 3
A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century--Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful
Chapter 4
The Burden of Security--The Challenges for the Ordinary User
Chapter 5
Democracy in Cyperspace--First, the Governance Problems
Chapter 6
Culture Clash--Hermes and the Italian Hacking Team
Chapter 7
Democracy in Cyperspace--Then, the Design Problems
Chapter 8
The Gathering Storm--The New Crypto--and Information and Net Neutrality and Free Software and Trust-Busting--Wars
Chapter 9
Hacker Occupy--Bringing Occupy into Cyberspace and the Digital Era
Chapter 10
Distributed Democracy--Experiments in Spain, Italy, and Canada
Chapter 11
The Value and Risk of Transgressive Acts--Corrective Feedback
Chapter 12
Mainstreaming Hackerdom--A New Condition of Freedom