WikiLeakable

Victor Steinbok aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM
Thu Dec 9 10:58:30 UTC 2010


One more minor point. Because of the on-line retaliations against Visa
and MasterCard, in particular, but, more broadly, against ISPs and
financial institutions that have been interfering with WikiLeaks access,
the term "hacktivists" is making a comeback with a vengeance.
"Hacktivists" was first posted on ADS-L early in 2001 by Fred Shapiro
and generated a short discussion and clarification back then, tracing
the earliest appearances to 1995 (1994 for "hacktivism").

http://goo.gl/JpeKn

GNA shows a fairly small but consistent number of hits every years since
1998 (about 20 per year, on average). There are 345 ghits from current
news, although much of it is duplication that would not have made it
into the archives.

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1998/09/15129
> In the computer-security community, it's called "hacktivism," a kind
> of electronic civil disobedience in which activists take direct action
> by breaking into or protesting with government or corporate computer
> systems. It's a kind of low-level information warfare, and it's on the
> rise.

     VS-)

On 12/9/2010 4:17 AM, Michael Quinion wrote:
> Paul Frank wrote:
>
>> A new adjective: WikiLeakable. Or wikileakable.
> The print Guardian this morning has the verb in a letter ("Those who've
> been WikiLeaked may not exactly confirm the latter") and the corresponding
> adjective has been used several times in online reports, though I haven't
> yet seen it in the print edition ("Akhbar newspaper has an Arab world
> exclusive by getting its hands on a sizeable selection of Wikileaked state
> department cables from across the region"--3 Dec)
>
> --
> Michael Quinion
> Editor, World Wide Words
> Web: http://www.worldwidewords.org

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