Guerrilla Hacks


"The police couldn't put you into their polarization structure. They know how to deal with real criminals, but somebody who puts eggplants on sticks - you're making a mockery of their social order, and that's worse than what most criminals are capable of doing."

- Andrea Juno

Here I'll discuss the culture jamming and pranks and such that seem to have been carried out in the furtherance of some at least vaguely political agenda.

I'll give the gold medal to the poet who managed to hide the phrase "Li Peng Step Down!" in the characters of a patriotic poem in the official Chinese Communist Party newspaper.

A silver to the Barbie Liberation Organization for switching the voice-generating units in talking Barbie dolls with the ones in talking G.I. Joe dolls and returning them to the store. The two then made strides against the tyranny of gender roles, Barbie yelling "Vengeance is mine" while Joe offers: "Let's go shopping!"

And a bronze to Veterans of Future Wars - founded at Princeton University in 1936 to parody the money-grubbing faux patriotism of organized veterans groups. Eventually the group would claim 50,000 members in chapters on hundreds of campuses.

An ongoing guerrilla hack in search of volunteers is the project to interrupt pathological, media-simulated social interaction. Care to sign up?

18th Century classics of the subgenre of literary guerrilla hacks include the satirical essays A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift and Shortest Way with The Dissenters by Daniel Defoe.

A more recent example is the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a politically-motivated guerrilla hack that has been used by governments as diverse as Czarist Russia, Nazi Germany, and Idi Amin's Uganda to whip up antisemitism.

Yet more recently, the Report from Iron Mountain was dreamed up by a pack of leftists during the Cold War as a satire of machiavellian governmental manipulation. It takes the form of a thinktank-analysis of the effect peace would have on the health of the state, and comes down firmly in favor of continual war as good for the country. The report simulated so accurately the voice of authority that anti-government militia types are fond of pointing to it today as evidence of a government conspiracy.

The Italian situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti piled an Iron Mountain of his own with his "The Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy."

A few things I'd like to think were guerrilla hacks include a couple of products sold to police departments. One, a database program called "Crime Tracker" eventually ate up the computer records of the police departments that purchased it (the hacker has since vanished). The other is the Quadro QRS 250G, a fancy sounding electromagnetic detective that some departments paid as much as $8,000 for - it turned out to be pretty much a plastic box with an antenna.

Also in this category are the antics of David Bowman, a "budget analyst" for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency who analyzed $6 million out of the budget and into his pockets between 1990 and 1997. David Bowman, synchronistically, is the name of the commander in "2001: A Space Odyssey" who has to crawl into the very guts of the out-of-control machinery that controls his life in order to shut it down.

The Black Panthers used an interesting tactic to redirect the police to less authoritarian pursuits. The intersection of 55th and Market in Oakland was dangerous, and people were getting killed by the traffic there. Alas, they weren't white people, so the government was in no hurry to put up a traffic light. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale of the Panthers came up with a creative traffic calming plan: They would go out with their guns drawn to direct traffic. When the police showed up, responding to complaints of armed negroes in the streets, Newton and Seale would retreat, whereupon the police would take over as traffic-cops.

The U.S. government's response to the Black Panthers could be equally creative. The Federal Bureau of Investigation covertly distributed what was purportedly a Black Panther Coloring Book for children full of illustrations of angry black men and children offing the pigs. This book was then sent to liberal supporters of the Panthers to undermine their support.

Environmentally-minded pranksters in Kingston, Ontario - upset that the government was clearcutting old-growth forests in Temagami - decided that public opinion might be influenced if the trees were being cut down in town where the voters lived. So they created a phony memo from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources explaining that in order to avoid "an exorbitant municipal tax," the government would "capitalize on the current high market values of oak and maple lumber" by hacking down "5,000 trees in city parks and along city streets." Naturally, the long-overdue outrage was provoked.

Another way they have of harassing the natives up in The Maple Leaf State is to test military aircraft in low-altitude bombing runs on their land. Again, the Kingston pranksters bring it home, posting official notices alleging that the overflights and bombings will be happening where the white people live!

A similar prank from the Kingston crew was a notice calling for immediate military draft registration that was posted at a war-happy college campus back when the U.S. and its allies were fighting to keep Kuwait safe for monarchy. The Call to Register was designed to sober up some of the rambo-talking (but draft-eligible) men on campus.

Upset at the way extrajudicial state killings were being covered up in Canada, some Kingston residents (hey, if you send me some stuff from your home town, maybe Kingston won't get all the press) made wanted posters for some of the death squad members - and were dragged into court by the government and charged with libel!

A letter, printed on city letterhead and distributed around town, started by saying "The Huntington Beach Police Department is again demanding your compliance on the Fourth of July 1998. To deter traditional holiday behavior on our nation's birthday, we will again be forced to suspend certain inalienable rights..." None too subtle, you say? Well, former Huntington Beach mayor Wes Bannister read all the way to paragraph three before getting the joke.

Some billboard improvements have a political message, like this modification of a military recruitment advertisement, or this hybrid of an anti-drug billboard and a wry commentary on the return of the George Bush political dynasty.

Promising, but still in beta, is the new art of Electronic Civil Disobedience (a.k.a. hacktivism). One notable example of the on-line hack came about when opponents of the Linux-based DVD player "DeCSS" won a court case and went around trying to eliminate the program from the net. Clever hackers wrote another "DeCSS," a mostly worthless program that had nothing to do with DVD technology, and spread it online far-and-wide to make it difficult to find the illegal version.

Another group encrypted the original DeCSS source code by splitting it up and hiding it in the image encoding of a picture of a cow - and then set up a service that attached alternate halves of this image to comments emailed to the U.S. Copyright Office, which will then become part of the public record, thereby enabling anyone with the encryption key to view the DeCSS source code. The DeCSS opponents would have to break the encryption to see that the 'illegal' code had been distributed, though, and their own argument is that this sort of encryption reverse-engineering is illegal copyright infringement, so although they'd rather squelch the distribution, they're in a bit of a bind.

Famous in U.S. revolutionary history is The Boston Tea Party of 1773, in which an American rebel group calling themselves "The Sons of Liberty" dressed up in disguise/costume and dumped imported British tea into Boston harbor as a protest against British control of the American economy. There's a first-hand report of the party on-line.

Tawana Brawley was the seed that grew into one of the most outrageous racially-based hoaxes we've seen in a while. And the campaign to Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide parodies the often scientifically illiterate warnings against frightening-sounding chemicals.

Governments live and die by disinformation campaigns, and they're getting pretty good at it. Is The Eremin Letter real, or just capitalist propaganda? When you read about the U.S. government's campaigns against enemies like Castro, or you remember The Maine or the Tonkin Gulf incident, you learn something about who you can't trust. (Not that the U.S. government is always on the winning side in disinformation warfare).

The ever-successful Arm The Homeless advocacy group provides a chance to make fun of society's attitudes towards poor people, as well as the rhetoric of philanthropy and of Second Amendment defenders. ATH is joined by satirical political action committees like The National Pochismo Institute, Ladies Against Women, and Always Causing Legal Unrest.

And a nod (and a wink) to Screaming Lord Sutch of Britain's Monster Raving Loony Party.

Many of the games that made TV Nation so fun at times were politically aimed; and the same can be said for the pranks of Jerry Rubin.

And speaking of Yippies, the political prankster clowns of the 1960s, here's a cartoon story of the Yippie invasion of Wall Street, the product of the creative genius of Abbie Hoffman.

I tried handing out copies of that old Yippie document The School Stoppers' Textbook to some schoolkids in my town, hoping that it would inspire the inmates of the public schools to acts of rebellion appropriate to their circumstance. I was met by five people with badges who informed me that the First Amendment did not apply to this particular piece of writing. I was held in prison on $40,000 bail and eventually convicted for (I kid you not) nothing more than handing out leaflets on a public sidewalk. So the people who publish this text on-line at places like here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here are in danger of prosecution if any California student clicks their way to the page.

®TMark has taken on a number of guerrilla hacking tasks, including making impressive parody web sites of Rudy Giuliani's and George W. Bush's election campaigns.

For other good ideas, check out the Political Hooliganism down under.

Those of you in the U.S. will be interested in the Copswatch project. If you've been liberated from television, you may not be aware that the police department has become an arm of the entertainment industry. Camera crews for TV shows like "Cops" ride along in police cars and film arrests, car chases and domestic violence - it's the biggest thing since the Lions vs. the Christians. Copswatch keeps an eye on the show, using the incidents broadcast to teach people "how to protect your privacy and confront illegal police tactics by knowing and invoking your constitutional rights."

A tip of the hat to Luther Blissett of San Luis Obispo, California, who responded to the first Rodney King trial's verdict by plastering official-looking flyers around town announcing that police brutality was now legal policy.

There's some incipient guerrilla webfare that involves flooding websites with spurious requests for data - the tactics and countermeasures are a virtual arms race that's interesting to watch. See the Zaps Net Interface for an example. And a 14-year-old guerrilla geek from Israel penetrated and wiped out an Iraqi government web site by impersonating a Palestinian bent on doing the same damage to Israeli sites.

Not to be outdone by freelancers, the government of Indonesia organized "lightning simultaneous attacks from countries as far apart as Australia, Japan, Holland and the United States" on computers in Ireland that were supporting the then virtual country of East Timor.

To trip up the spambots scanning the web for email addresses, some bright CGI artist has come up with a page that contains randomly-generated email addresses and a number of links that point back to the same page. (More anti-spam resources can be found at this page)

The use of memetic warfare - crafting self-perpetuating propaganda viruses - is emerging as an artform with thusfar mostly unharnessed potential.



The version of the sign above is found at the U.S. side of the Mexican border and is meant to warn drivers of illegal immigrants crossing the freeway. The version below is a guerrilla hack.

The BLO at work
Barbie Liberation

Arm the Homeless
Arm The Homeless

Warning: Cops at Work
Luther Blissett's flyers

Stormtroopers
Copswatch

See also:

  • Theory and Advocacy
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