The Catch 22 of Hacktivism

In the run-up to NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya, a Dutch radio hacker named Huub (@fmcnl) tweeted to the United States military that one of their F-16 fighter jets was mistakenly broadcasting its identity in the clear due to a misconfigured Mode S transponder. When a second fighter plane made the same mistake later that day, Huub joked that Moammar Gadhafi’s radar installations must be down for the U.S. Air Force to be so cavalier with its security protocols: “Hmmm, second fighter showing his ID, a USAF F-15E from 494FS Lakenheath UK, I presume Gadhafis radar equipment has destroyed :o).” Huub was not working alone; he was part of a network of amateurs who were tracking and narrating the chess match in which NATO planes and Libyan units jockeyed for position before the commencement of hostilities. The previous day, Huub had released audio of a U.S. EC-130J psychological warfare plane broadcasting a warning to the Libyan navy (“If you attempt to leave port, you will be attacked and destroyed immediately”). Other volunteers used off-the-shelf websites, such as flightradar24.com and commercial satellite images tagged on Google Earth, to track the movements of military jets, ships, and other potential targets for bombing.

In contrast to the 1990–1991 Gulf War, seemingly a spectacle that the public assimilated passively, the 2011 Libyan war offered a massive dataset for the public to actively sift through on the Internet. As a result, it gave us arguably the first cloud-enabled war. NATO spokesman Mike Bracken described a NATO “fusion centre” that>