Digital Surveillance/Militant Resistance: Categorizing the “Proto-state Hacker”

Abstract

Rapid developments in digital infrastructure have made all-encompassing surveillance all too possible. However, the same infrastructure has simultaneously enabled the use of new possibility spaces that react to, shape, and resist these structures of control and surveillance. The Israel/Palestine conflict is no different, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) has created an electronic unit with hackers to circumvent and resist the Israeli matrix of control and its surveillance. I argue that out of this dialectical relationship in Palestine, between new possibility spaces of resistance and structures of control, new phenomena arise in the gray area between the nation state hacker and the hacktivist as PIJ emulates the features of a modern state army. To understand the nature of its electronic unit, one must take this dialectic into account by introducing the category, “proto-state hacker.”