Networks and Resistance: Investigating online advocacy networks as a modality for resisting state surveillance

This paper explores the network of relationships that emerge from the online activities of privacy advocates. It argues that this advocacy network, through its linking practices, may potentially become a network of meta-surveillance that has the potential to transcend the agency of the individual actors. By reducing the degrees of separation between the actors, through their linking practices, the network can foster links between different sets of data, create links between information about incidents, corroborate information (making it more credible), direct the attention of the public and the traditional media to particular state surveillance practices, and so forth. Through these linking practices the network can draw upon the emergent positive network externalities to realise an information politics that is beyond what any single actor can achieve. Through the use of social network analysis and a webometrics methodology (supported by web-based crawling applications) we attempt to reveal this emerging online advocacy network. Through our data collection and analysis we show that the online advocacy network seems somewhat fragmented with a relatively small but stable, and geographically biased, core. This tentative analysis and conclusion may have important implications for the way privacy advocates view their online practices.