DedSec — a hacktivism movement acts as watch dogs in the middle of a vortex of big data whose impact is not to that extent calculated by humans.
So lately I’ve been doing flashbacks to one of Ubisoft’s masterpieces, Watch Dogs 2. It’s been almost a decade, but this video game remains most people’s favorite than its latest sequel, Watch Dogs: Legion.
Packed with colorful pop culture and having plenty of vibes, Watch Dogs II has a San Francisco, California backdrop depicted in considerable detail by Ubisoft. Skyline of San Francisco, Coit Tower, Chinatown, Pier 39, Golden Gate Bridge are also complete to enliven this game.
DedSec consists of Marcus, Sitara, Josh, Wrench, T-Bone, and Horatio (Rest in peace pal). These six people are masterminds as well as executors for all hacktivism related to watch dogs activities. What’s the definition of watch dogs anyway? Quoting from Cambridge Dictionary which says:
Interestingly at the first glance, DedSec conducts this watch dogs activity unethically but supported by its followers. How come? As part of its hacktivism, several illegal activities were carried out by DedSec such as theft of government data, leaking confidential information with the aim of exposing large corporate secrets (Blume) that used the data of many people for the benefit of one party such as: presidential elections, heroin smuggling, to weapons manufacturing.
If relevant to the real-world definition of ethical or not hacktivism by DedSec, Jaquet-Chiffelle & Loi in Ethical and Unethical Hacking, it is found that DedSec does something ethical. Why? We can view the actions of hacktivists as unethical as it works against the interests of the people or organizations they target. However, if the actions lead to the targets being held accountable for their unethical behavior and prevents them from continuing their behavior, then we can view the hacktivist as acting ethically (Jaquet-Chiffelle &; Loi, 2020). If privacy ought to be a universal right, then breaking into a system and leaking the secrets of a corporation to the public would be a violation of that right and therefore unethical. However, if a company is secretly doing unethical things, then one could make the argument that exposing the secrets to the world would be ethical.
Watch Dogs 2 is a video game that is close to what we face today. Gadgets, Algorithms, Advertising, Digitization, it’s all connected. One thing that is actually interesting to see further is the relevance of each mission in the DedSec storyline, is it inspired by the current cyberterrorism problem? We’ll discuss it later!