Emerging issues in Internet Regulation: The unstable role of WikiLeaks and cyber-vigilantism Alison Powell London School of Economics

and Political Science OII@10 conference, 2011 **Based on an upcoming chapter entitled Argument-by-technology: How technical activism contributes to internet governance to be published in Research Handbook on Internet Governance, edited by Ian Brown.** Abstract This paper outlines the emerging issues in internet regulation introduced by distributed organizations and cyber-vigilantism: notably, the contributions of WikiLeaks and Anonymous to the problematics of internet governance through an uneven disruption of the power held by existing institutions including the state, but also the mass media. Drawing on Christopher Kelty's (2004) observation that persuasive arguments can be made both through language and by technology, it examines how existing definitions of governance, which are often focused on rule-making, engage with this broader set of 'arguments-by-technology' and what the consequences of these new arguments might be. It concludes that WikiLeaks as an exploit of the features of cyberlocker technology and Anonymous' cyber-vigilantism destabilize the historical arguments linking features of internet technology with political features and introduce more nuanced possibilities, including the ability of activist organizations to discredit state-level actors and to influence the process of media production. Keywords: internet governance, digital activism, WikiLeaks, Anonymous, media power, new media power Introduction Decision-making about the nature of the internet based on particular technical features of networks has remained a feature of the internets history and kind of de facto 'governance by design. Aligned with cyber-libertarianism, this perspective stresses the exceptional nature of the internet's centreless design, and hence the efficacy of making decisions about it by developing new technical standards. Other spheres are also influenced by the idea that political or social purposes can be achieved through network design or exploit of particular design features. Recently, distributed cyber-vigilantism has re-emerged, including the recent actions of online collective Anonymous that are positioned as a 'defence' of WikiLeaks. Such arguments by technology can be understood as non-rule-based contributions to governance, but they may require a broader conception of governance that allows for an understanding not just on the efficacy of technical 'rhetoric' but on the substance of the argument and the culture in which it is embedded. This paper argues that: 1. technical activism or advocacy occupies an overlap between competing definitions of internet governance; 2. it is linked with an historical set of links between specific political or social values and features of internet design that configure expectations about technical action 3. the assumed alignment between design and politics is only weakly communicated in situations when alternatives challenge existing institutions 4. the challenges of alternatives can reiterate some of the power of existing alternatives, or critique them, often simultaneously

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1932740

Arguments-by Technology and Internet Governance Institutions Many existing definitions of internet governance focus primarily on the process of rule-making and decision-making, rather than the philosophical debates driving these decisions. Bygrave and Bing provide two contrasting definitions of internet governance. The first, derived from the WSIS working group on internet governance, focuses primarily on the development of principles, and fixes the roles of each of the participants. It reads:Internet governance is the development and application by governments, the private sector, and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures and programmes that shape the evolution and utilization of the Internet. (WGIG, cited in Bygrave and Bing, p. 2). This definition is outcome oriented, in that it suggests that governance is the development of norms and rules to shape the internet. A broader definition describes internet governance as: collective action by governments and/or private sector operators of TCP/IP networks, to establish rules and procedures to enforce public policies and resolve disputes that involve multiple jurisdictions (Mueller, Mathiason, and McKnight 2004, cited in Bygrave and Bing p. 2). This broader definition implies that a variety of persons and organizations are involved in making decisions about the internet, but again, rule-making appears as a central feature of governance. Both of these definitions presented above and indeed the entire enterprise of working out how to govern the internet - hinges on an assumption that the internet is unique, by virtue of its history, design, or capacity. The philosophical lever that permits this focus is the acknowledgement that the internet itself is the result of a collective negotiation among its original architects. Anthropologist of technology Christopher Kelty argues that in some technical cultures such as software production, arguments are made both by text and by technology. He describes how the shared international community of programming geeks is united by the extent to which they can influence the technical and legal conditions of possibility for their own association. (185). Thus, collaborating over the internet to create a network that works in an unexpected way could be considered as an argument about the ideal conditions of association of internet geeks. Kelty also identifies that these internet geeks, in addition to being engaged in collectively manufacturing the technical conditions of possibility for their own association through code, are also collaborating globally at a scale never previously possible. These two features: the capacity to easily facilitate global and distributed collaboration, and the capacity to collectively design and manage the system supporting that collaboration, raise questions about the conventional rule-based definitions of governance. To what extent does 'argument-bytechnology' contribute to internet governance? Does it challenge the frameworks that situate governance as primarily related to rule-making? The following section draws out two different outcomes for 'argument-by-technology' as it links with two influential perspectives on internet governance. Destabilizing State-based Governance Mueller (2010) suggests that the ideologies of internet governance can be mapped on two axes from state to network and from transnational to national. He argues that the internet has introduced transnational aspects into communications regulation and governance, including more networks of transnational actors, such as civil society. This has nourished a move away from hierarchy and towards more networked forms of governance. This analysis of the shifting processes of governance argues that the global reach of the internet as well as its capacity to mobilize issue-based networks has presented a new set of issues for multistakeholder governance, one that challenges as well as integrates state-level forms of governance.

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1932740

Some of the capacities of the internet thus influence existing governance processes. Mueller illustrates this by noting the shift from the state participation at the World Summits on the information Society (WSIS) in the early 2000s to the broader participation in the later Internet Governance Forums. During the WSIS process, civil society actors, denied official voting status, pushed for the inclusion of issues beyond physical network access. At the conclusion of the WSIS process, the Internet Governance Forum, a 'talking shop' was meant to allow for the formation of dynamic coalitions to discuss emergent issues, with a more balanced participation between states and civil society. This process was originally meant to shift the form and the process of governance from one based on confined, statelevel decision making towards negotiation across a variety of levels (Held and McGrew, 2003). A range of stakeholders, many organized using the internet, participated. Raboy noted that these more open decision-making fora form[ed] the basis of a new model of representation and legitimation of non-governmental input to global affairs, and as a result, the rules and parameters of global governance. . . shifted (Raboy 2004: 349). The capacity of the internet to mobilize support and rally diverse stakeholders underpins, to a certain extent, these shifts in governance practice. However, as Mueller notes, this focus on the internet as a platform for political action fails to acknowledge the extent to which it is a site for political action as well. He identifies the nascent Access to Knowledge movements (that include open source software advocacy, free culture, copyright reform and arguably - WikiLeaks) as attempts to draw attention to the intrinsic politics of the internet, forming a loosely linked set of nascent movements. In these Access to Knowledge movements, digital communication platforms present a challenge to existing conventions of intellectual property and to existing state-level modes of governance. The contributions to governance of such movements or quasi-movements are not always evident within framings of governance that focus on rule-making. Technology activist movements are often made up of practitioners rather than policy specialists, their organizational structures are often looser, and they often frame their intervention. As Hintz and Milan (2009) argue, for example, the multistakeholder processes of both WSIS and the IGF created barriers to participation of members of technology collectives whose loose, collective-based organizational structure was incompatible with the procedures for registering NGOs at these events, and who could not afford to participate. As well, while UN sponsored governance processes are one place where many internet stakeholders stake policy claims and 'talk shop,' other decisions impacting internet governance issues take place through praxis. The capacity for some technical experts to intervene in the function of internet networks also suggests that rebuilding the internet could be a form of governance in itself an argument by technology, if you like. This capacity is alluded to in histories of the internet that focus on the ability of its users to contribute to its design, and in which deliberation is central to a design process that produces the internet itself. The potential of design and technology as arguments in themselves also underpins claims that technical design specifications can act as political interventions. These claims contribute to a contrasting perspective on internet governance that concentrates influence neither in rule-making nor in processes that contribute to rule-making, but instead in design and the positive or negative implications of design decisions. This design-focused perspective on governance broadens the range of things that are considered to be governance activities, but also creates its own expectations for the role of oppositional activities that could 'route around' damage on the internet. Design and Generativity If technology activism is difficult to square with a perspective on governance that is concerned with rule-making, it might be better understood from a perspective concerned with the relationship between

the internet's design and its social influence. This strand of scholarship presumes that much of the influence of the internet has resulted from the capacities of its original design, and the social frameworks which became associated with these capacities. Jonathan Zittrain has developed this perspective by arguing that the internet, as well as the personal computer, are 'generative technologies' Zittrain (2009) writes, 'generativity is a system's capacity to produce unanticipated changes through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences (p. 70). A descriptive concept grounded in the theories of technological affordances which analyzes the possible or likely uses of technologies, this concept is related to the normative ideals that also underscore Access to Knowledge movements. These include the ideas of sharing source code associated with the free software movement, and the theories of the informational commons. Generativity can be advocated transnationally through open-source movements, locally through community networks, or in hybrid modes that also influence private sector actors, such as the development of filesharing sites like the Pirate Bay and the development of contribution-based news sites like Indymedia. Unlike the Access to Knowledge movements as described by Mueller, however, generativity is largely focused on the capacities of a particular technology. Zittrain describes them as the following: 1. how extensively a system or technology leverages a set of possible tasks; 2. how well it can be adapted to a range of tasks; 3. how easily new contributors can master it; 4. how accessible it is to those ready and able to build on it; and 5. how transferable any changes are to others (p. 71). Generativity, then, is a set of capacities inherent to a design of a technology that permit it to make a range of tasks possible. Generativity is at the heart of Kelty's original formulation of argument-by-technology: the generative potential of computer code allows for the contribution of internet geeks to the creation and maintenance of the internet. Zittrain argues that it is generativity that has influenced the development of the internet, and that the most significant challenge for the future of the internet is the maintenance of generativity. This challenge is made more difficult by the fact that same generativity that invites participation in and innovation of new applications for internet systems also invites the development of spam, viruses and malware. Both beneficent 'geeks' and malicious 'hackers' take advantage of this generativity exploiting either positively or negatively the capacities and weaknesses of internet systems. This focus on the power of technical interventions echoes discussions of the conceptual contributions of 'hacker culture' an empowered technical subculture sometimes associated with the subculture of technical advocates who eventually designed and built the early internet (see Turner, 2005 and 2009). The hacker trickster is often described as enlivening the positive potential of computer networking: the hacker makes trouble for everyone, but this modern-day trickster has a powerful purpose: the realization of a mythic utopia locked up by our stagnating tendencies to freeze revolutionary technologies in the ice of outdated social patterns (Mosco, 2006 p. 48). This quotation is typical of statements that delegate political or social influence to technical exploits. Zittrain, too, sees a politics in design, but acknowledges that generativity can be negative. The central governance problem, then, for Zittrain, is how positive generativity can be maintained in the face of the problems of security, privacy and neutrality that the internet raises. He is adamant that the processes of WSIS and the IGF that he calls 'stakeholder governance' don't include the geeks and hobbyists who are more interested in writing code than participating in governance meetings. He writes, without them we too easily neglect the prospect that we could code new tools and protocols to facilitate social solutions (p. 243). Governance doesn't take place among a new set of stakeholders engaged in discussion: it takes place in code. Expectations about arguments-by-technology: Internet history So far, we have reviewed the contributions of two distinct perspectives on internet governance. The

first states that the governance of the internet presents a challenge to existing state-based institutions, and that it has contributed to the rise of new institutions of governance. As well, a set of nascent social movements are beginning to politicize the internet. The second focuses on the extent to which the design of the internet is seen to be the primary force in its governance, for better or for worse. The point of contact between these two perspectives is, of course, an acknowledgement that the design of technology can be a political statement or express a set of political values. The connections or articulations between values and technology are expressed in the internet governance field by the arguments made by different stakeholders about how to govern or regulate it. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1983) introduces the concept of articulation theory to describe how material elements, practices, and social groups are connected; articulations are lines of tendential force linking political ideologies with particular cultural assumptions. These are not determined by the origins of the ideologies or assumptions. Thus, new ideas can be created through the connection of one set of ideas to another. This is evident in the connection of ideas about internet design with ideas about its politics. The idea that the internet has some features, for example its interlinked network architecture, that make it impractical or ideologically problematic to regulate, has been remarkably persistent. Hofman (2009) identifies it as part of a 'utopian vision of autonomy and creativity' (p. 2) associated with the early internet. This vision stressed the potential of the internet to delegitimize the existing modes of telecommunications operations by creating autonomous networks that could interconnect in a network of networks: an Internet. This network of networks was meant to oppose a centralized telecommunication network, the organization of which Hofman describes as a bureaucratic model which emphasizes collective security, stability and regularity (p. 5-6). The assumption that there is some political or ideological salience in the design of a network has been surprisingly persistent, particularly as Zittrain and Hofman have identified that the libertarian ideals supposedly carried by the decentralized design of internet networks were equally available to the developers of spam, viruses, malware and cybercrime. Yet, in governance terms, the expectations established by original arguments-by-technology made by internet developers who shared a common culture have now landed in the realm of statecraft. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's 2011 Internet Freedom Agenda states, The internet has become the public space of the 21st century the worlds town square, classroom, marketplace, coffeehouse, and nightclub. . . The value of these spaces derives from the variety of activities people can pursue in them, from holding a rally to selling their vegetables, to having a private conversation. These spaces provide an open platform, and so does the internet. It does not serve any particular agenda, and it never should (Clinton, 2011). Within a decade, arguments specifically related to technical function became arguments for a foreign policy agenda, with the expectations originally related to technical function recast as political values that could be exported from America to the world. Despite the evidence to the contrary, that the same basic features of internet design could be used to limit the freedom of internet users, either by cybercriminals or by state-level actors themselves (Morozov, 2011), the articulation between a particular libertarian type of democratic freedom and the design of the internet remains. This gives rise to the Hillary Clinton paradox whereby the actions of WikiLeaks are decried as threatening to the legitimacy of the United States, due to the ability of the cyberlocker system to store and share information that wouldn't be released by that country's government, even as the Secretary of State herself promotes a freedom agenda with strong ties to a utopian, libertarian internet. At the core of this paradiox is the unstable relationship between exploits of Internet design features and the existing features of control that are used by states and other actors and which are often the

subject of structured debates within formal internet governance fora. Indeed, the recent influence of WikiLeaks and the associated actions of the emergent group Anonymous illustrate how exploits of internet design features are not straightforward disruptions: rather, they reinforce the legitimacy of existing institutions in some ways, while calling them into question in others. This suggests that the function of network power is uneven. The exercise of networked power, especially by actors without strong institutional power, has recently been described as consisting of 'exploits' of particular technical capacities. The idea of an 'exploit' as a disruption of networked power is developed by Galloway and Thacker (2007). The exploit is the event, within a network, that takes advantage of the features of the network to undermine on challenge its power. The concept of the exploit again takes a technological and organizational structure as its central metaphor, linking to Mueller's (2010) identification of transnational advocacy networks as a new social formation contributing to internet governance. Yet the concept of the exploit captures an additional nuance of political action in an era of networked communication. It acknowledges that resistance is not necessarily organized, even when it takes advantage of organizational structures. Previous theorizations of emergent social and ontological forms have included Deleuze and Guattaris (1980) understanding of rhizomatic forms of organization and cultural expression as emerging in contrast and challenge to hierarchical forms. The rhizomatic form has been used to explain tactical media and open-source movements, as well as other emergent social phenomena. However, Galloway and Thacker argue that control in a network society has shifted from oppositional force (involving state actors) to control via protocol (and the more complex set of actors that this introduces). Instead of the resistant block, or the rhizome, they suggest 'the swarm' as a metaphor for contemporary resistance. In a swarm, individual particles are interconnected but autonomous, and the direction of movement is influenced by a larger law or principle of collective intelligence. Institutional disruptions: WikiLeaks and media power According to co-founder Julian Assange, WikiLeaks existed to disrupt the control of information by states. Using the technology of an encrypted internet drop box that could be accessed from anywhere, the organization invited anyone to submit leaked information that was of public interest but that would not otherwise be published. According to Lovink (2010) this early incarnation of WikiLeaks fit the profile of a 'single person organization' like so many others found on the internet. Indeed, the premise that WikiLeaks existed to collect and share information that was important but that otherwise would not be released reflects Assange's writing on the illegitimacy of state power, produced around the same time as the foundation of WikiLeaks (Assange, 2006). Most small SPOs do not achieve the level of notoriety or influence of Wikileaks. What made so much difference was not Wikileaks as it is (or was) but the way that Wikileaks as a phenomenon operated within the networks of mass media and new media. Beginning with the publication of the Afghan war logs, but certainly by the time of the release of the Collateral Murder, WikiLeaks began to more consciously push leaked information to the mass media. As luck would have it, Assange convinced the Guardian newspaper (and, eventually, others) to work with them on redacting the leaked diplomatic cables. The publication of the stories based on these redacted cables, and the resulting and continuing media furore, constitutes what I consider the WikiLeaks phenomenon. WikiLeaks as a phenomenon draws attention to several aspects of our highly mediated contemporary experiences. Castells (2009) argues that the major force of power at present is communication power, and he also conceives of the main model for our society as the network. Cardoso (2009) goes even further, claiming that communication taking place within a networked organizational model creates communicational paradigms that link mass media forms of communication and interpersonal forms through a globalization of communication and a greater interactivity. In this context, the WikiLeaks

phenomenon includes two elements: First, the disruption of news production that resulted from the partnerships between WikiLeaks and mass media organizations; and second, the technical and legal measures taken to shut down WikiLeaks (mostly by US commercial and state actors) and the reactions mounted against these measures by individuals associating themselves with Anonymous. Overall, this phenomenon or drama, as Coleman (2010) claims illustrates the interrelated elements of mediation, communication, and power, especially within the organizational structure of the network. Wikileaks presented an apparent challenge to the mediating and gatekeeping power of the mass media, but through its partnerships and connections with mass media, beginning with the Guardian and secondarily a set of other leading broadsheet newspapers, first in Europe and then around the world. The leaks that were released up until the diplomatic cables in 2010 were discussed by those who read them, but were not generally part of a broader discussion about state secrets. The partnerships with news organizations became important in advancing Assange's purpose, but also created new ways of 'doing' journalism, as Leigh and Harding (2010) report in their book on the Wikileaks partnership with the Guardian. These new ways of 'doing' journalism included working with Assange and other WikiLeaks members to select relevant cables, doing fact-checking, and constructing narrative from the deluge of data that the cables represented. The partnerships, as they expanded beyond Assange's goals, began to attract significant attention to the leaks. Whereas the leaked information about Afghanistan was so voluminous that only a few media stories broke based upon it, the diplomatic cables were redacted by journalists working with large newspapers. In journalistic terms, the leaks acted like a kind of raw data wire service. The cables had a generative effect, in that they were associated with changes to media production: Beckett (forthcoming) describes how Guardian staff sorted through the raw materials of the cables to extract the relevant background to stories, and then how the journalists created the narratives and checked the facts so that the story accorded with their journalistic values. WikiLeaks thus facilitated a move towards the practice of 'data journalism' where writers are no longer involved in sourcing scarce material but rather in adding value, through context and background expertise. This aligns with a broader change in the nature of research and news-making in a networked context, as Luker (2009) points out. This change encompasses a shift in the way that legitimacy of information is measured it is no longer done through the selection of information by journalists associated with major media organizations. Instead, exploits of the opportunity to share and reproduce digital data easily have led to a data glut in which the value added by analysts or media is related to the context and fact-checking that these individuals and organizations can do. Thus, as an exploit of the capacity to store and share digital information, WikiLeaks contributes to a shift in the nature of the mass media's institutional power. Regardless of its transformation of news-making institutions holding traditional media power, WikLeaks was still perceived by other state-level and corporate institutional actors as a threat to their legitimacy. After the release of the diplomatic cables, the organization was the target of what Benkler (2011) described as 'systemic threats' whereby the organization was undermined by legal threats, denial-of-service attacks, and censure by banks and other companies controlling funds directed towards the support of WikiLeaks. This 'drama' is discussed in more detail in the following section, but it is worth noting that the threats served to draw more attention to WikiLeaks and similar projects as unique or novel, focusing media attention for a short period of time on the unfolding drama between a small organization and large ones, but also focusing attention on the leaks actually released on the WikiLeaks site. The evolution of the WikiLeaks project beyond the partnerships with leading Western media outlets actually reveals more about the overall disruptive capacity of the project and its . Since the initial release of the diplomatic cables, stories based on leaked cables have been running in paper around the world. Secrets have always been an excellent foundation for news; now secrets can be more

easily delivered to those responsible for framing the news, eliminating the expectations of state secrecy and changing the responsibilities of journalists. Secure cyber-locker technology is not itself revolutionary to the established forms of media power. WikiLeaks' disruptive potential is in articulating the release of secrets with the legitimacy of newsmaking organizations. The continuing and unsurprising revelations that have resulted from the release of two sets of diplomatic cables nourish existing functions of mass media while adapting them to an age of distributed information as well as to the increasing importance of the contexts of digital information, in contrast to the scarce information unearthed by journalists and researchers in previous eras of media power. Anonymous and Networked Disruption In addition to facilitating the reproduction, storage and sharing of digital information, the internet provides potential for newly networked, transnational forms of engagement. This paper's second example concentrates on the recent activities of the hacker collective known as Anonymous. In particular, it considers how Anonymous contributed to a mediated drama involving state-level and corporate responses to the WikiLeaks release of US diplomatic cables in December and January 2010. In this drama, a 'swarm' of loosely affiliated participants appeared to exploit the opportunity to temporary shut down web sites using distributed denial-of-service (DdoS) attacks, or 'mirror' websites themselves being blocked by such attacks. These contributions to the WikiLeaks drama (Coleman, 2010) provide another illustration and a challenge to the expectations about networked activism employing technical exploits. Anonymous, as an apparently leaderless, loosely organized, and entirely internet-based group, provides an interesting case study to examine how expectations about swarms and their tactics might contribute to internet governance. Coleman (2011) provides an historical review of the organization and actions of Anonymous, noting that rather than describing an actual organization, the name acts as an 'improper name': The adoption of the same alias by organized collectives, affinity groups, and individual authors" (Deseriis, 2010). This shared name was originally attached to online actions like trolling, and then to a series of actions taken against the Church of Scientology. Coleman describes how participants often describe themselves as being in it for the lulz or for the pleasure of doing something disruptive and subversive online. She notes how a wing of Anonymous protesting Scientology began organizing protests outside of the internet, even if these still retained the 'grotesque, humorous, and offensive elements that are part and parcel of the lulz' (Coleman, 2011, n.p.). Eventually, some of these members also began to participate in other politically motivated actions. Anonymous has very low barriers to participation, and a large diversity of types of members and types of participation. According to Coleman, some associated with Anonymous are hackers with specific and deep technical skills, and a political philosophy dedicated to information freedom, and others are geeks who are willing participants in technical culture with a more narrow range of skills. Others still may not self-identify as hackers or geeks but seek to contribute or simply to observe. Anonymous claimed credit for 'Operation Payback' a set of politically motivated distributed DdoS actions. In December 2010, after WikiLeaks released a set of US diplomatic cables, commercial organizations tried to shut down the WikiLeaks website, also using DdoS. Other online service providers such as PayPal, Visa and Amazon threatened to withdraw service and support to WikiLeaks. These actions, along with threats of legal ramifications, comprised what Benkler (2011) calls 'systemic threats' to WikiLeaks. These were performed in response to a call from Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman. Anonymous contributed to the drama by staging DdoS counterattacks, succeeding in shutting down Visa's website temporarily. Following these retaliatory actions, thousands of individuals some claiming affiliation with Anonymous - set up mirror sites of all of the

wikileaks.org content, defeating the purpose of cutting off access to the site. The response to some of these 'systemic threats' by Anonymous, who had no formal connection with WikiLeaks and who appeared to take down websites effortlessly, were seized upon by mass media as an example of online anarchy. This particular action appears to align with the metaphor of the swarm. Instead of networked, organization-based resistance that directly countered state power, or rhizomatic political organization, Anonymous (as well as thousands of site mirrorers) came out of nowhere. It leveraged some of the functionality of a protocol-controlled network to disrupt entities with many more financial and material resources. Through these actions, and their representation in the media, Anonymous contributed to debates about the legitimacy of states in controlling their own information, the extent to which private companies should respond to state pressure, and the extent to which individuals and emergent entities could continue to disrupt internet function. Did the actions of Anonymous contribute to internet governance ideas? The response depends on how such actors are positioned, especially relative to more conventionally constituted (or networked) organizations. Some commentators, like Crenshaw (2011) consider Anonymous to be a 'meme, rather than a group'. Others stress the potential political content of their actions: Morozov (2011) suggests that they might be a kind of social movement, likening DdoS to sit-ins intended to disrupt institutions. Yet based on empirical observation of the actions of people who identify themselves with Anonymous, Coleman (2011) claims there is more political agency at stake, arguing that participation in Anonymous actions can act as a gateway for geeks to become politicized. Certainly, the political action of such distributed organizations does not need to be labelled as 'politics' in order for it to be political. Events like the recent riots across England demonstrate that even seemingly chaotic actions are responses to underlying political situations. It is impossible to specify individual motivations for participating in a phenomenon such as Anonymous. This makes it very difficult to locate actions such as the DdoS within governance frameworks that focus on networked organizations or rulemaking. Equally, while the actual DdoS actions exploit technical features of the internet, they are largely symbolic. The Anonymous DdoS in part helped to highlight questions about the legitimacy of DdoS as a tactic, especially when used by corporate or state-influenced entities against groups like WikiLeaks. Discussion Exploits such as WikiLeaks and the cyber-vigilantism of Anonymous trouble the historical arguments that link specific design features of the Internet with its specific politics. The cyberlocker technology that allowed WikiLeaks to gather information that would never have previously been published disrupted the control of information that previously characterized both the regimes of the state and the mass media. The ongoing circulation of diplomatic gossip and low-level critique taking place around the world wherever WikiLeaks cables are published by a partner newspaper is evidence of this disruption. The contributions of Anonymous to the WikiLeaks drama are perhaps less significant if we take them individually: DdoS is not a particularly sophisticated technical tactic indeed, the Anonymous actions served to highlight the superficial and retaliatory way in which DdoS was used as to construct 'systemic threats' and particularly how this systemic threat included DdoS activities conducted by private companies including PayPal. Subsequently Anonymous have been described as being involved in attacks of government websites including Zimbabwe, Egypt and Tunisia and in more sophisticated actions in support of political uprisings in the Middle East including delivering information to activists and helping dissidents to evade state surveillance. Yet due to the distributed and amorphous nature of Anonymous, it is difficult to ascribe a political motive to any individual action or set of actions. Coleman's (2010) insight that endeavours like Anonymous may perhaps act as a staging point for future political action is one reason to continue to support policy and governance decisions that favour the generative internet. A counter-argument comes from the fact that responses

to Anonymous actions have been harsh: many individuals have now been arrested, and it is clear that governments worldwide are wary of the disruption that Anonymous actions can create, especially when they are amplified by dramatic mass media reports. The emerging regulatory problems presented by these two examples of technology activism cut across the two original definitions of governance. The features of generativity that allowed WikiLeaks (and many others of its ilk) to challenge the existing modes of information exchange is indeed positive, but it also undermines the authority of existing institutions, including states and the media. Of course, this is not a straightforward relationship: WikiLeaks, through its partnerships with major media organizations, also reinvigorated the conventional news media, by producing a mediated 'drama' as well as by facilitating an increase in 'data journalism' based on large corpuses of documents that are contributed by non-experts but reviewed by journalists. There is a kind of dialectic tension between the disruption to institutional systems that is caused by the exploit of features of the network, and the eventual transformation of the same systems. Similarly, the cyber-vigilantism of Anonymous served to reveal to the public the potential illegitimacy of states using techniques such as DdoS. One way of accounting for the influence of technology activism on governance may be in broadening the scope of analysis. The frameworks currently available for understanding governance are limited in their ability to take into account the nuanced ways that different forms of technical advocacy contribute to governance. One alternative framework to consider is Dutton's (2004) evocation of an 'ecology of games' of internet governance. This framework considers governance not in terms of rule-making but instead as a set of games in which various actors negotiate their status as players. In any discussion, people might play roles as parents, business owners, taxpayers, or neighbours. To determine how to resolve a governance issue, they would have to negotiate among each other with reference to the various (and multiple) roles they might play. The advantage of this perspective is that it conceives of a much broader range of things as being 'governance', since all of the players are acknowledged as playing different roles simultaneously. Developing it further to reflect the influence of design and the impact of expectations about design could allow for descriptions of governance ecologies, rather than only governance processes. Governance ecologies would consist of a range of things including states, non-state actors like official 'civil society' and corporate entities, as well as technical designs and the features that they promise (for example, generativity). Ideally, it would also take into account the elements of culture and difference that are so often left out of discussions on technical activism or design1. Such a governance ecology would allow for a fuller consideration of how contexts for internetrelated decision-making happen. Conclusion This paper has reviewed how arguments by technology are at the core of some of the original, historical ideas about the internet. They have formed the foundation for many of the ideas that we now associate with the governance of the internet: a valorization of design features, particularly openness, and an assumption that internet users are peers. These original arguments are evoked by contemporary technology activism, but as institutions like states are threatened by the use of Internet features like the one that WikiLeaks employed, the relationship between design and governance becomes more contested. The actions of Anonymous and others in response to systemic threats to WikiLeaks appeared to constitute a swarm of resistance to forms of control executed through protocol.
1

Technical cultures like the ones described here are noted for being culturally narrow: Dunbar-Hester (2010) reports on contemporary media activism including wireless communities, identifying that technology activism is deeply gendered: It is difficult to cultivate forms of technical affinity and expertise not associated with White masculinity, though the activists are more successful with regard to inclusion of women than of people of color (p. 121).

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But the results of such actions are not straightforward recastings of resistance. Instead, through various articulations between technology and politics, projects and actions influenced by the possibilities of various technologies create other outcomes. These can include new potential forms of local governance or draw into question the legitimacy of DdoS tactics used by corporations responding to pressure from parts of the US government. To better conceive of the relationship between these kinds of activities and other kinds of governance debates, it is important to consider the entire governance ecology. Within this ecology, argument-by-technology can be understood as making a contribution to governance, without over-determining the social impact of design decisions.

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