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The rise of computer hackers has opened up whole new areas for political protestors – according to OU research.

Tim Jordan examined the growth of politically-motivated hacking – “hacktivism” – to see whether such tactics not only affected the protestors’ targets, but also the way the Internet itself operated.

In doing so he uncovered a much more subtle protest about online freedom of information – and how computer hackers struggle to overcome censorship.

“Before the mid-1990s people hacked into computers to alter things or, as often, simply to prove that they could,” said Tim, appointed as the OU's Head of Sociology in 2006. “But then political protestors began to see it as a way to get their points across and disrupt organisations. This was a whole new way of protesting.”

Tim and his co-researcher Paul Taylor from Leeds University accrued their information by interviews – “the great thing about protestors is that they always want to talk to someone” – and seeing how the direct physical action, such as a fuel blockade or a road protest, compared with that which was happing online. “When protestors famously blockaded the Global Policy Forum in Seattle in 1999, a separate action was being co-ordinated online to block the Forum’s computer network,” he said. “Protestors later claimed 450,000 computers were used in six days worldwide to disrupt the organisation.”

But the researchers were also found an unexpectedly common and effective method of online protest – against censorship. “During our research we found people were very concerned about the nature of censorship,” said Tim. “And hackers were able to play a very big part in this. China is a major example of a country introducing censorship across its entire national Internet network to prevent the dissemination of certain information, and using it to track its citizens’ behaviour.

“Hackers write software that can negate that censorship and allow people to bypass the restrictions. It can be very effective – for example, information can be hidden in a picture on a web page, so that when one person looks they see a picture, but someone else, with the relevant software, sees information hidden within the picture.

“Hacktivism is seen by some people as a new form of symbolic protest—electronic civil disobedience—and not able to achieve as much as real-life protest. But to use the example of censorship, information can be controlled but protest in the form of hacking can completely reverse that control.”

Tim and Paul’s findings are published in detail in their book, Hactivism and Cyberwars: Rebels with a Cause? published by Routledge.