| Summary: | "The first part of the 21st century will likely go down in history as the era when ethical hackers opened governments. The line of transparency is moving by force. The twitter page for Wikileaks demonstrates this ethos through its motto "we open governments" and its location to be "everywhere". At the same time, we see a battle between major technology companies such as Apple trying to make more secure products and to protect customer data, while at the same time governments moving to restrict and decrypt new secure encryption technologies. Meanwhile, the market for security vulnerabilities grows with computer security experts able to sell software vulnerabilities from key technologies such as Apple and Google from $10,000 to $1.5 million dollars. Security activism is on the rise. Ethical Hacking is the non-violent use of a technology in pursuit of a cause, political or otherwise which is often legally and morally ambiguous. Ethical hacking may involve the acts of professional penetration intrusion testers and computer security experts, as other forms of emerging actions such as hacktivism and online civil disobedience. Increasingly, Hacktivism is a form of ethical hacking and also a form of civil rights activism in the digital age. Hacktivists believe in two general but spirited principles: respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms including freedom of expression and personal privacy, and the responsibility of government to be open, transparent and fully accountable to the public. In practice, however, hacktivists are as diverse in their backgrounds as they are in their agendas. How courts and governments will deal with hacking attempts which operate in a grey zone of the law and where different ethical views collide remains to be seen, as there are no exceptions to the cybercrime/computer crime provisions for security research or public interest in most jurisdictions around the globe. It will be equally difficult to determine how civil rights will apply to hacktivism. A fundamental discussion of key societal questions."--
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