Years ago there was a “rise of hacktivism” paper at Georgetown, but it’s a PDF and mashes a lot of things together with no references. It seems like the Web needs something better.

One of the hard parts about documenting these events is a lack of agreement for terminology, such as “patriot” hacking. Anyone have a hacking dictionary handy? I’m kidding, of course, because the first thing it would say is “crackers”.

Some say being patriotic means defending one’s own country, yet of course that’s too simple. For example would a kid living in Holland with Russian parents who are from Iraq… going to identify along one or more of those lines? Or how many Russian patriots are actually Americans living in Beirut?

Here’s a good one: does an Italian organizing a global political protest to knock France offline (1995) seem less patriotic than the Chinese organizing a global political protest to knock Indonesia offline (1998)? It all depends on interpreting an Italian motive of defending one’s “own” assets versus interpreting the Chinese one.

Without getting into all that, here’s a quick and simple list of early politically motivated hacking:

1986 Patriot Hacking (although arguably corporate espionage for money, there’s definitely a power angle)

Three West German hackers were found guilty today of selling Western military computer codes to the Soviet KGB and given suspended sentences ranging from 14 months to two years. […] A fourth man, 30-year-old Karl Koch [tasked with handing floppy disks to the KGB], who was also arrested in the case, [mysteriously died in a fire] in May. At the trial, which began Jan. 11, all three admitted guilt in obtaining the codes to sell them to a Soviet KGB agent in East Berlin.

1989 Anti-science Hacking (disgruntled worker)

An evolutionary biologist named Joseph Popp came up with a computer-based questionnaire he said would help determine patients’ risk of contracting AIDS, and he distributed 20,000 copies of it to researchers in 90 countries. But the surveys on Popp’s floppy disks were a ruse. When participating scientists loaded the disk, their computers became infected with what would come to be known as a digital version of the AIDS virus.

1989 Anti-nuclear Hacking

Just as NASA began the launch of the Galileo space probe in October of 1989, a controversy began growing around the probe’s nuclear power. Amid this backdrop of international interest, NASA’s top scientists started noticed something odd happening with their work computers. Dr. Suelette Dreyfus, technologist at Melbourne University describes the scene in this way, “The scientists would come in in the morning and put down their cup of coffee and try and log in and they would find that instead of their scientific data, there was a screen that would appear that said “your system has been WANKED!”

1990 Patriot Hacking

Dutch computer hackers stole U.S. military secrets during the Persian Gulf War and offered them to Iraq, computer security experts for the United States said Monday.

1994 Civil Disobedience Hacking

…Guy Fawkes Day, a group of ravers and new-age ‘technopagans’ targeted the UK government with a kind of DDoS attack. “Email bombing” clogged up government PCs, while fax machines spat out sheet after sheet of spam. The act was a protest against Prime Minister John Major’s Criminal Justice Bill, which sought to crack down on raves by outlawing outdoor gatherings playing music “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”

1995 Anti-nuclear Hacking

A group in Italy called Strano Network led by Tommaso Tozzi used a “net-strike” to gather global protest against the French government.

1996 Civil Disobedience Hacking

Beginning Sept. 6 and continuing through at least last Tuesday, a hacker intent on shutting Panix down successfully did just that, by bombarding the service provider’s servers with a flood of phony connection requests that prevented real requests by legitimate customers from getting through.

1997 Civil Disobedience and Patriot Hacking

Chinese hacking group that last year claimed to have temporarily disabled a Chinese satellite is now forming a new global hacking organization to protest Western investment in the country. In an interview with the Boston-based hacking collective, the Cult of the Dead Cow, the hacker, who calls himself Blondie Wong, said the new group is forming in the US, Canada, and in Europe to take up the cause of fighting human rights abuses in China. […] “Blondie wants anyone who agrees with the strategy of attacking American companies doing business in China to get involved,” [UN consultant] Oxblood said.

1998 Civil Disobedience Hacking

On the eve of Sweden’s general election, Internet saboteurs targeted the Web site of that country’s right-wing Moderates political party, defacing pages and establishing links to the homepages of the left-wing party and a pornography site.

1998 Civil Disobedience Hacking

The hackers, who are part of groups called “Milw0rm” and “Ashtray Lumberjacks,” reportedly broke into the database of a British Web page hosting company called EasySpace. The perpetrators then hijacked the sites listed in the ISP’s database and redirected users to their protest page, which contains a strong antinuclear message along with an image of a nuclear mushroom cloud and a Milw0rm graphic.

1998 Terrorist Hacking

“In 1998, a terrorist guerrilla [the LTTE] organization flooded Sri Lankan embassies with 800 e-mails a day for a two-week period. The messages simply read “We are the Internet Black Tigers and we’re doing this to interrupt your communications.” Intelligence departments characterized it as the first known attack by terrorists against a country’s computer systems.

1998 “Hacktivism“, Civil Disobedience and Active Countermeasures

EDT planned a series of actions for 1998, starting with a response to the Chiapas massacre. In April, Dominguez sent out a series of notes alerting people to the plan: “FLOODNET: TACTICAL VERSION 1.0.” would target the website of President Zedillo, with the goal of bringing attention to the killings. The group bristles now at the idea it intended to bring down the site, but did foresee the possibility that access would be disrupted. […] …a Defense Department spokesperson obliquely took credit for shutting down the digital attack. “Our support personnel were aware of this planned electronic civil disobedience attack and were able to take appropriate countermeasures,” the spokesperson said.

1998 Patriot Hacking

The first Patriotic Hacker communities were established when individuals interested in “cracking,” organized into online communities to share interests and develop expertise. In 1997, a Shanghai hacker known as “Goodwill” founded the first Patriotic Hacker organization known as the “Green Army” from this online community of early hackers. In 1998, the first major Patriotic Hacker attack was triggered by anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia.

1999 Patriot Hacking

A concerted attack involving simultaneous hacking from five countries caused an Irish Internet Service Provider (ISP) to switch off its systems last month. Connect-Ireland, the company affected, believes the Indonesian government is behind the attack. The company has hosted the East Timorese domain–.tp–for the last year and posts material critical of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor. […] A spokeswomen for the Indonesian embassy in London denied speculation that the Indonesian government was behind the attack. “How could we organise all those hackers? It is baseless,” she said.

U.S. General Sherman in 1864 famously helped end the Confederate concentration camps, a huge victory for American liberators followed with public campaigns of “do not forget”. Then 80 years later in 1944, 10s of thousands of American-made M4 tanks named after him famously helped end the Nazi concentration camps, followed with public campaigns of “do not forget”….

How did Sherman’s name come to represent an unmistakable force of good in two similar efforts so far apart?

The answer is Winston Churchill.

Way back in 1915 Churchill funded development of a novel giant “landship” concept meant to break through trenches, barbed wire and machine gun nests.

Prime Minister Herbert Asquith received a suggestion from a colleague: “It would be quite easy in a short time to fit up a number of steam tractors with small armoured shelters, in which men and machine guns could be placed, which would be bullet-proof. Used at night, they would not be affected by artillery fire to any extent. The caterpillar system would enable trenches to be crossed quite easily, and the weight of the machine would destroy all barbed-wire entanglements.” The writer was Winston Churchill. His letter marked the first step toward the practical evolution of the tank in World War I.

Initial engineering, of what essentially was an armored Ford tractor, impressed the British War Office so much by February 1916 they ordered hundreds built under the strictest secrecy.

In other words the “landship” concept was prohibited from being called that in order to deny German spies any insight. A “Landships Committee” had been flagged by late 1915 as a risk — requiring rename. A senior officer (likely Major General Ernest Swinton) then proposed documents and designs use instead the phrase Water Carriers (WC).

Churchill (and others) supposedly reacted to this with such laughs, given the idea of government committees and departments using the comical initials WC (toilet), that a synonym was immediately injected — the result was “water tanks”. A Tank Supply (TS) Committee was deemed acceptable as cover for quickly increasing “landship” production.

An alternative story (always possible given such secretive history) is that shop orders managed by Sir William Tritton (landship designer and builder) used the phrase “water carrier for Mesopotamia” while managing hull production (developed in secrecy and only later to be mounted).

Either way the super secret project went from WC to WT. And that’s how the codename was born and continued onward… water obviously had to be dropped once people realized what was being built, and to this day we still say tanks.

Fast forward to WWII and Prime Minister Churchill told the Americans shipping tanks to Britain that they needed to use a simple name convention.

The British took the American M3, for example, and named it a General Grant. An American configuration of the M3 was named the General Lee. There’s a lack of documentation for how and why Lee’s name was brought in *cough* to honor segregation/racism *cough*.

Several of [America’s] most prestigious army posts honor the enemy. The War Department named them during WWI and WWII when the army was a segregationist institution, and the South was a racial police state. Black people did protest these names, but they had been violently excluded from voting and could not change it. But to me it’s outrageous that the US Army, the most diverse workforce in the country, honors the enemy. An enemy who fought for slavery and killed US Army soldiers. […] Lee served in US Army for over 30 years before choosing treason to preserve slavery.

Because the M3 configuration assigned to Americans (a turret change obvious to any onlooker) was called the Lee, it meant British associated Grant’s name to their own deployments, which seems exactly backwards except for the part about winning battles. Grant was one of the best generals in history. Lee was one of the worst.

You have to wonder why any American even at this time would agree to serve in a tank named for their historic enemy, the awful and traitorous General Lee. Even if very overtly racist British military officers had named it as such, who enabled them? Lee was undeniably racist and pro-slavery, a ruthless butcher who tortured and killed American soldiers, even murdering POW, earning a record that should have made him unsuitable for any recognition.

Historian protip: Churchill was an opportunist racist. His opinions of Lee not only were wrong, but also reinforced Churchill’s own worst facets. For example when Churchill proclaimed he “did not really think that black people were as capable or as efficient as white people” his views of Lee gained important context.

Or who can forget Churchill’s War Cabinet decision of 13 October 1942?

…we need not, and should not, object to the Americans [segregating] their coloured troops.

Did anyone feel a need to object to Americans being put in a tank named after their enemy? Perhaps the U.S. Army should have instructed the War Office to name their M3 the Napoleon.

Churchill also is said to have removed “General” from names of tanks as he believed it a source of confusion in discussing military events.

After the M3 Grant, came the M4 and Churchill simply declared in early August 1942, as it arrived into Egypt (codename “Swallow”), that the new tank would be named for General Sherman. He had said he would not use what he called “gibberish” of American tank designations (e.g. the American Medium Tank M4 to M4A4 variants were renamed the Sherman I to V).

General Sherman was one of the best military leaders in American history, and served under the best (Grant), so such a name transition makes sense from that perspective. In addition Sherman had a rather important ethical advantage over the enemy, which would serve the British well in the years ahead.

His logic was indefatigable — bring peace quickly that would quell the heart of pro-slavery militias, end their domestic terrorism that had plagued America for decades.

Now, my friends, I know there are parties who denounce me as inhuman. I appeal to you if I have not always been kind and considerate to you. [Cheers.] I care not what they say. [Bully for you and cheers.] I say that it ceased to be our duty to guard their cities any longer, and had I gone on stringing out my column, little by little, some of your Illinois regiments would not have come home, but would have been crushed. Therefore I determined to go through their country, and so I took one army myself and gave my friend George Thomas the other, and we whaled away with both. [Loud cheers.] Therefore we destroyed Atlanta, and if we had destroyed all the cities of the South in order to bring about the result in view it would have been right. [Loud cheers…] Now I can go, and anybody can go with a single horse a way out to the limits of Kansas, or even to Colorado, without an escort, and that too at the close of a long and terrible war.

The considered thought about stability, prosperity and preservation of life comes through from Sherman as fundamentally opposite to the disloyalty and barbarity of Lee.

Sherman’s ethical foundations in war were to engage in the destruction of enemy infrastructure (constraining enemy ability to produce war) as far better than any loss of human life.

He endeavored to quickly end what he cited as inherent cruelty of war through decisive force as quickly as possible, focusing on what really mattered.

Union military strategy thus emerged not only victorious but also morally superior to the infamously selfish and corrupt Confederate Generals: in Sherman’s view the southerners should have been far less “outraged” when their “property” was seized or destroyed and far more concerned about the human beings they enslaved, murdered and sacrificed needlessly.

It’s not just history though. An important dichotomy highlighted by Sherman still is found in America even to this day. When “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) groups protest loss of human life they run into resistance from groups that are concerned primarily about streets being blocked or damage done to a car or building. Sherman would have no time for the latter, which is why so long ago he powerfully defeated racist expansionist reactionary forces to save lives and restore freedom.

With that in mind…

On the eve of the battle of El Alamein, Egypt in October 1942 over 250 American M4 Sherman tanks made their combat debut in the forward elements of the British Eighth Army. It was a very notable victory and a significant turning point of WWII — perhaps it even was the realization of British tank dominance over Germany that Churchill had dreamed about in 1915.

After their dominant start the Shermans continued to deliver huge contributions to Allied campaigns, driving the Nazis completely out of Africa before rolling across the world as one of the best tank designs.

The Sherman tank, like General Sherman himself, became highly symbolic of the kind of fortitude in war that could liberate the oppressed from tyrannical regimes.