To browse Academia. In this book, Luca Follis and Adam Fish examine the entanglements between hackers and the state, showing how hackers and hacking moved from being a target of state law enforcement to a key resource for the expression and deployment of state power.
Analyzing the evolution of the state's relationship to hacking, they argue that state-sponsored hacking ultimately corrodes the rule of law and offers unchecked advantage to those in power, clearing the way for more authoritarian rule. Follis and Fish draw on a range of methodologies and disciplines, including ethnographic and digital archive methods from fields as diverse as anthropology, STS, and criminology. In the context of Russian bot armies, the rise of fake news, and algorithmic opacity, they describe the political impact of leaks and hacks, hacker partnerships with journalists in pursuit of transparency and accountability, the increasingly prominent use of extradition in hacking-related cases, and the privatization of hackers for hire.
Hacking is a set of practices with code that provides the state an opportunity to defend and expand itself onto the internet. Bringing together science and technology studies and sociology scholarship on boundary objects and boundary work, we develop a theory of the practices of the hacker state. To do this, we investigate weaponized code, the state's boundary work at hacker conferences, and bug bounty programs. In the process, we offer a depiction of the hacker state as aggressive, networked, and adaptive.
The contemporary networked state is dynamic and process-orientated. It is a logistical and informational assemblage composed of technological infrastructures like 4G networks, surveillance satellites, internet exchange points and fiber optic cables as well as official bureaus concerned with areas like law enforcement, environmental protection, national security and diplomacy.
These domains of competence and action are populated by researchers and scientists, police officers and policy analysts, military contractors and covert operatives-that is, an assortment of humans with differing mandates, levels of agency, expertise and proximity to official structures and objectives. This circuitry of power is increasingly underwritten and interwoven with the nonhuman components of the networked age. Software and malware, algorithms, viruses, exploits and zero-days increasingly form a connective tissue that links these state actors.
