Digital Immolation - New Directions for Online Protest

The current literature and experience of online activism assumes two basic uses of the Internet for social movements: straightforward extensions of offline organising and fund-raising using online media to improve efficiency and reach, or “hacktivism” using technical knowledge to illegally deface or disrupt access to online resources. We propose a third model which is non-violent yet proves commitment to a cause by enabling a group of activists to temporarily or permanently sacrifice valuable online identities such as email accounts, social networking profiles, or gaming avatars. We describe a basic cryptographic framework for enabling such a protest, which provides an additional property of binding solidarity which is not normally possible offline.