This article explores this emergent phenomenon focusing on the case of the U.S. government's efforts to shut down WikiLeaks. In particular, it focuses attention on the various Anonymous activist groups and the International Pirate Party. I hypothesize about the future of this movement in light of the U.S. government's actions in the realm of intellectual property, given the lack of political power of many of the advocates of freedom of information—youth and the very small state of Iceland.

The push for freedom of information is not restricted to online spaces, but it appears to be born from such spaces, with the concept itself shaped by the presence of the Internet and its effect on networked societies (Castells, 2009 ). In this article I describe the emerging coalescence of “freedom of information” advocates pushing for a simultaneous liberalization and homogenization of freedom of information regulations across democracies. Among these advocates are a rising number of online activists as well as the state of Iceland, which may serve as a norm entrepreneur in the area of media freedom (Ingebritsen, 2006 ).

In online communities, the idea of freedom of information tends to encompass a range of freedoms, but it has at its foundation the argument that communication in any form should not be restricted. Online the concept of freedom of information means that accurate public information can be made widely available without fear of censure or punishment. The concept also includes an implicit argument for greater government and corporate transparency. In addition, in some cases it also includes an argument for the dramatic revision or removal of current intellectual property regimes. 3

In highly populated, youth‐dominated, English‐speaking online spaces, such as file‐sharing sites and the numerous “Anonymous” communities, a “radical” definition of freedom of information 2 is gaining strength (Beyer, 2011 ). This new way of thinking about freedom of information is informed by an old hacker ideology that argues against any restriction on the transmission of information (Levy, 1984 ). Over the past 3 years, discussion of and support for the idea of “freedom of information” have dramatically increased online. Online rhetoric about the potential of the Internet to change society, the need to reform intellectual property laws, and the evils of censorship of any kind is becoming increasingly similar across sites. Simultaneously, the ability of groups such as Anonymous to channel the power of like‐minded but not tech‐savvy allies is increasing.

A common thread that binds many internet users and impels them toward Anonymous is the concept that information, by its nature, is free; and that communication should be unfettered .

My methodology is drawn from political ethnographic research methods used in Political Science (Schatz, 2009 ), as well as by a lineage of technology researchers (e.g. Dányi, 2006 ) and new media researchers (e.g. Garcia, Standlee, Bechkoff, & Cui, 2006) who have long drawn on ethnographic research to record important online spaces (e.g. Schaap, 2002 ); build theory about communication, interaction, and information flow (e.g. Nahon & Hemsley, 2011 ); and generate the tools for large‐N analysis.

This article draws on data collected online between 2007 and 2011 as well as on secondary sources. To collect the original data in online communities, I used participant‐observer and observational research methods and textual analysis of materials in community spaces. In addition, I pieced together narratives from a range of Internet sites drawing on news reports of behaviors, archived community documents and artifacts, and published interviews of prominent community members. In any cases of contradictions between published accounts, I used accounts that were reported in more than one source or found an average point between reports.

Online activists are mobilizing around ideas that are organic to the Internet and information technology. As such, this work's empirical findings inform a broader literature about political behavior in politically oriented spaces online such as work by Bennett ( 2008 ) and Papacharissi ( 2004 ), as well as significant contributions made in the study of political blogs and email by scholars such as Karpf ( 2008 ) and important work on the transformative nature of the Internet on mass media and political campaigning by scholars such as Johnson, Braima, and Sothirajah ( 1999 ). Additionally, it contributes to the broader literature about oppositional politics online, such as important work by Kahn and Kellner ( 2004 ) documenting the historical impact of the Internet; work focused on hackers, such as that by Coleman and Golub ( 2008 ); research on hacktivists, such as that by Samuel ( 2004 ); and is part of the conversation about digital rights, such as that articulated by Postigo ( 2012 ).

The cases of freedom of information mobilization indicate that the social movement paradigm's approach to understanding large‐scale contentious politics needs to be revisited. Related to these limitations in the social movement literature, the online freedom of information issue is fundamentally different in form from the social movements previously studied. In contrast to the framework offered by transnational activist literature such as Keck and Sikkink's work ( 1998 ), in the cases I studied, there is no boomeranging of issues from international activist groups into authoritarian states. Unlike the argument made by Della Porta and Tarrow ( 2004 ), there is no diffusion of ideas from one country to another and no looking to an international organization to offer organizing resources.

Furthermore, social movement literature has tended to study the online world through the lens of traditional political behavior in two ways. First, as evidenced in Della Porta and Tarrow's ( 2004 ) work on transnational protest, the social movement literature has been slow to consider the online world as anything but a facilitating extension of offline campaigns. Second, as evidenced in the work of Earl and Kimport ( 2011 ), when looking online, social movement researchers often examine political behavior that very closely matches offline political behavior—such as petitions, letter‐writing campaigns, boycotts, and e‐mail letters—and focus on the affordances offered by the Internet to activists rather than on a wider range of online political behaviors, such as hacktivism. While all of this work highlights important aspects of political processes, social movements, and the Internet, there is still much room for additional empirical work.

What theoretical perspectives might be useful in explaining the online mobilization around radical ideas of freedom of information? Social movement theory is an obvious choice to explain political mobilization online, because online mobilization in cross‐national social sites should fit easily under the banner of work on transnational mobilization around common causes. However, most work within the social work paradigm articulates some type of social movement “life cycle” (e.g. Tarrow, 1998 ), and it is still unclear whether activists' actions and Iceland's proposed laws “count” as either a social movement or as a cohesive effort to reshape international norms. Although online activists have responded in support of WikiLeaks in large numbers, scholars such as Earl and Kimport ( 2011 ) have shown that the ease of online protest means more people can participate—and participate they do, as evidenced by the surges of new participants in Anonymous social spaces and by the increase in Pirate Party membership in states such as Sweden and Germany. However, it is too early to tell conclusively if this constitutes a social movement as it is possible that the ease of access may be a double‐edged sword, with mobilization efforts dropping off quickly after initial surges.

WikiLeaks and Freedom of Information

The idea of “freedom of information” expressed online appears to be a cross‐national online norm of freedom of information that is related to, but also often in conflict with, domestic legal practices. All liberal democracies adhere to some variation of a norm of freedom of speech—which, when considered in relation to the Internet, is usually a factor in information policy.4 The conflict between online conceptions of freedom of information and domestic legal contexts can be seen in the recent case of the U.S. government's sustained effort to remove WikiLeaks from the Internet and the corresponding backlash by actors advocating for freedom of information. These groups include the International Pirate Parties, online activists such as Anonymous, and some states, such as Iceland. Further, although I do not discuss them in this article, there are also a number of nonprofit activist organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation working on behalf of freedom of information.

What is WikiLeaks? WikiLeaks is a nonprofit, whistleblowing organization and website that publishes materials provided by anonymous sources. The site relies on the work of a multitude of volunteers and is run by Julian Assange, the main spokesperson and editor‐in‐chief. WikiLeaks has been responsible for a wide range of information leaks about many countries and corporations. However, the site gained notoriety in the US when it published footage from a July 2007 U.S. Apache helicopter strike that killed Iraqi journalists and when it published nearly 80,000 secret documents about the current war in Afghanistan. In November 2010, WikiLeaks released secret U.S. State Department diplomatic cables, and the site has also published other secret documents. At the end of November 2010, unknown entities began a sustained Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)5 attack on WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks' administrators moved the site to Amazon, hoping that Amazon's cloud service would protect it from the DDoS attacks, but after pressure from the US government, Amazon also removed service from WikiLeaks (O'Connor, 2010). As WikiLeaks continued to search for a home, it lost all corporate infrastructure, which disrupted its lifeblood of donations (CBS News, 2011).

WikiLeaks and the International Pirate Party By mid‐December 2010, the only reason WikiLeaks was still online was because of the work of Internet activists. A major source of support was the International Pirate Party—a party founded to advocate for the revision of current intellectual property regimes. WikiLeaks ended up on a domain registered to the Swiss Pirate Party and mirrored6 by the international network of Pirate Parties.7 After the Swiss Pirate Party donated its domain name to WikiLeaks, individuals and groups affiliated with the Pirate Party acted to support WikiLeaks, and the number of WikiLeaks' site copies began multiplying. In one week, 1,000 mirrors appeared (Beschizza, 2010), and as of March 2010, there were 2,552 mirrors of the site. The site ended up hosted by the Swiss Pirate Party, and it remained there after Swiss companies and the Swiss government refused to bow to U.S. and other government pressures to remove WikiLeaks (Halliday, 2010). The Swiss action was backed up by a collection of Pirate Parties who began hosting the site as well in various countries. The Pirate Party was not a newcomer to political activism. The Pirate Party was founded in January 2006 because of concerns over the effect of copyright and patent law on the privacy of individuals. The original Pirate Party's membership—the Swedish branch—grew from the increasing legal woes of the popular filesharing site, The Pirate Bay. Although the Party's membership was growing steadily prior to May 2006, a police raid on The Pirate Bay in May caused its membership to double overnight, bringing total membership to around 3,600 members.8 In April 2009, after the guilty verdict in the Pirate Bay trial, the party gained 3,000 members in 7 hours, and, within a week, it had 40,000 members, a large increase over the 15,000 members in the party before the guilty verdict (Pirate Party, 2009). Thus, the Swedish Pirate Party suddenly became the third largest youth organization in Sweden (Anderson, 2009). In 2009, the Swedish Pirate Party also won two seats in the European Parliament. There are now Pirate Parties in more than 38 countries.9 In September 2009, the party received 229,117 votes in the European Parliament election. In October 2009, the German party managed to gain 2% of the vote in parliamentary elections, amounting to around 845,000 votes (Pirate Party, 2009). The German Pirate Party also received 1.9% of the vote in the 2009 Saxony state election. It has won seats in local elections in Münster and Aachen. In the 2009 elections, around 13 percent of first‐time male voters voted for the Pirate Party (Allen, 2009). As of July 2012, the German Pirate Party had seen 209 members elected to office at various government levels, with 45 of these being seats held at the state level (German Pirate Party; Ernesto, 2011).10

WikiLeaks and Online Communities As the International Pirate Party mobilized to support WikiLeaks, another group of activists born from online spaces also geared up for battle (Vance & Helft, 2010). Anonymous, first covered in the press as an “Internet Hate Machine,”11 also began online protests on behalf of WikiLeaks. Both the individual members and the overall group known as Anonymous are the products of a posting board system that began with a loose focus on discussion of anime, manga, and related popular culture topics.12 The name now refers to many different subgroups of the larger Anonymous group (Beyer, 2011; Coleman, 2011). Because of the widespread use of the name “Anonymous,” the term can now mean any of a diverse number of groups pursuing different strategies online, some of which are at war with other Anonymous groups (Beyer, 2011). So many online spaces could be considered part of the Anonymous community that it is difficult to measure the size of the community. However, the most trafficked posting board system, 4chan.org, is one of the largest systems online. As of August 2012, the site had been accessed by 134 million unique visitors and had 4.5 billion page views (Poole, 2012). Julian Assange [the head of WikiLeaks] deifies everything we hold dear. He despises and fights censorship constantly, is possibly the most successful international troll13 of all time, and doesn't afraid of fucking anything14 (not even the US government)....Therefore, Anonymous has a chance to kick back for Julian. We have a chance to fight the oppressive future which looms ahead. We have a chance to fight in the first infowar ever fought. In the websites where Anonymous organizes and decides who will be targeted, users framed the WikiLeaks issue as an “infowar,” saying they would be fighting censorship on behalf of freedom of information. For example, one online flyer stated: 2010 When we all have access to information, we are strong. When we are strong, we possess the power to do the impossible—to make a difference, to better our world. This is why the government is moving on WikiLeaks. This is what they fear. They fear our power when we unite. Please, do not forget this. The intention of Anonymous is to protect free flow of information of all types from the control of any individual, corporation, or government entity. We will do this until our last dying breath. We do this not only for ourselves, but for the citizens of the world. We are people campaigning at this very moment for your freedom of information exchange, freedom of expression, and free use of the Internet. In a YouTube video viewed nearly 900,000 times, Anonymous stated (LetterfromAnon,): And, protest they did—bringing down Mastercard and Visa's service temporarily and slowing PayPal's service, all corporations that had removed service from WikiLeaks in response to pressure from the U.S. government (Cohen, 2010). While Anonymous has a long history of online mobilization, its impact in December 2010 on the normal business operations of multinational corporations such as Mastercard was the result of Anonymous employing a tool that overcame one of the principle barriers to mass online hacktivist protest—supporters' lack of technological know‐how. Every time Anonymous has been in the news—or news of Anonymous action online spread across online sites—new people flood to Anonymous community spaces. Many among the nonactivist Anonymous groups regard these new people as “the cancer that is killing” Anonymous, but for activist Anonymous members, these new users represent untapped potential. In the past, activists in Anonymous have hosted detailed guides for new Anonymous members aimed at teaching them to engage in activist behavior, such as DDoS attacks. However, for novices, the technical details are difficult to understand, and these new actors often put themselves at risk with their inability to remain unidentified online. However, with the WikiLeaks protests, activist Anonymous groups simplified and streamlined the education process to bring new Anonymous members to important information sources and coordination locations. Additionally, Anonymous participants more widely used a tool that they had first used on other attacks—the “Low Orbit Ion Cannon” or LOIC. The LOIC was a way for people who do not know anything about technology, but who want to help out, to engage in DDoS attacks. To use it, people downloaded an application onto their computer with a field in it to enter the target. The application also included a giant push‐button. Once the user had “pushed the button,” the application then managed the user's actions—either directly engaging with the site in question or routing through a person directing the traffic. LOIC targets were announced through various Anonymous websites and Twitter accounts. The use of the LOIC was monitored by Anonymous members who offered the community instructions about the safest way to participate. Although we now know that the LOIC used during the WikiLeaks action was not secure, the tool indicates the potential of tools that allow non‐tech‐savvy individuals to easily participate in hacktivism. The scale of the WikiLeaks protests capture both the support for Anonymous as well as the ways in which Anonymous members are able to create and adapt technology to further their goals. For example, various observers, including myself (2011), noted that during the WikiLeaks protests more than 10,000 people were logged into the attack coordinating IRC servers15 day after day. After a Dutch teenager was arrested for participating in the attacks, so many Dutch people logged into the servers that operators had to create “Dutch only” channels to handle the flow.

WikiLeaks and the Broader Offline Public As stated previously and illustrated by the examples of the Pirate Party and Anonymous, during political ethnographic research in multiple highly populated online communities, I observed discussion of and support for the idea of “freedom of information” increasing over time. My findings in this diverse group of highly populated online communities are supported by polls about WikiLeaks, as well as by the amount of money donated in support of the project. In many widely reported surveys, pollsters found that the majority of U.S. citizens did not support WikiLeaks. For example, a CNN poll (2010) found that 77% of people in the US disapproved of WikiLeaks for placing leaked diplomatic cables online. However, when public opinion polls were broken down by age group, a different pattern emerged. For example, in a telephone survey taken in December 2010, 59% of those interviewed said that individuals who publish secret U.S. documents should be prosecuted, with only 31% responding that the publication of such secret documents should be protected by the First Amendment. However, 52% of the individual respondents aged 18–29, agreed that publication should be protected by the First Amendment (Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, 2010). These numbers raise the question of whether the CNN poll results would be different if CNN had only polled people under the age of 30. American youth are not the only people who support WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. In Australia, 59% of the population supported WikiLeaks' choice to make the diplomatic cables public while 25 percent opposed that choice. The percentage of supporters increased among younger voters (Lester, 2011). In Britain, older individuals were far more likely to support Assange's deportation to Sweden as well as his prosecution for releasing secret diplomatic documents than were those between the ages of 25–34 (Martinez, 2010).16 These polls asked different questions, and so should be taken as illustrative rather than definitive proof of public opinion. For example, polls that asked about WikiLeaks' mission and then separately asked about the release of the secret diplomatic cables tended to find higher levels of support for WikiLeaks itself than for its choice to release the diplomatic cables. Support for the idea of “freedom of information” can also be seen in the financial donations WikiLeaks received in 2010. A German foundation, which processes most donations given to WikiLeaks, reported that in 2010 WikiLeaks received about US$1.9 million in donations—and that more than $700,000 of that was donated at the height of WikiLeaks' difficultly finding a stable home, in November and December of 2010 (Zetter, 2010). The foundation reported that the average donation was €25, but that they also occasionally received large donations, such as a donation from a single person of over €50,000.17