Hactivism: Are we there yet?

              After looking at several articles detailing the efforts of hacktivists and what has become as a result, I have came to the realization that there is a huge variance in opinions on whether hacktivism is a good thing or even effective.  I feel that even though hacktivism has had an absolute ton of press coverage, especially Anonymous, it's effectiveness has yet to be seen across the board.  One exception to this is the SOPA piracy bill that was removed from the table in Washington, but only after bigger names such as Google and Craigslist got involved.  With that said, I do believe that there exists a strong chance that hacktivism will become a mainstream form activism eventually as more of the youth, that basically lives there lives on the Internet, becomes involved in the near future.

              I have personally come to the conclusion that some forms of hacktivism such as DoS attacks are just the same as physical activism such as "sit-ins".  I would like to do more research on people who have stolen information and what kind of activism has been done with it.  I do not mean credit cards and personal info, I mean more of governmental documents and things that aren't supposed to be exposed to the public eye; such as the efforts by Wikileaks.  I am also curious about foreign laws and court cases outside of the U.S.  just to see a more well rounded view on the subject.  The Internet is world wide and so should be my research.  One final thought that I have is to think of what you can do.  Most people I talk to don't have any idea about most of the bills that are circulating Washington, even though the implications of them affect us all.  The Internet could literally change overnight and most people wouldn't have one thing they could do about it.  Write your state politicians and get involved because the Internet should be as free and democratic as we want our normal lives.  A piece of legislation I discovered through this exploration, that is on the table right now, is what I believe to be a huge problem for Internet freedom, the CFAA bill of 2013.  Take a look at my Terms of Use at the bottom of this blog.