Hacking as a practice of disputing online surveillance

With the rise of Internet behemoths and the surveillance of increasingly personal domains there is a trend of questioning life online. This talk draws attention to hacking practices that interrogate the diverse faces of online veillance. I will first introduce current debates about hackers as interrogators of surveillance. Instead of portraying hacking as a simple counterculture I seek to complicate dichotomies of power vs. resistance, online vs. offline, and technological system vs. social practice. Based on qualitative interviews I introduce the diverse sometimes ambiguous hacking practices that question online surveillance. I will then develop the concept of dispute as capturing exactly these multiplicities. The small, but constitutive dynamics of disputing online surveillance not only create political momentum, but call for a re-thinking of the totality of surveillance metaphors used today. The talk is part of larger project that explores dataveillance and answers to dataveillance.