DOI: 10.36347/sjet

Pages: 123-126

In the view point of human rights, the importance of the cyberspace is shooting up day by day as the conventional media hides many information that pertain into the violation of human rights. When the media is either afraid of the after-effects, or fond of the violators, the cyber activists take out the sword of bravery. This paper analyses the reflections of social networks, blogs and sites such as WikiLeaks in the age of mass surveillance and attacks on privacy. The pros and cons of the “Information Panopticon” and the arguments on the ethics of hacking are studied. Contributions of persons such as Julian Assange and Aaron Swartz in the fight for internet freedom are studied. The politics and poetics of hacking as a tool in this freedom fight are brought to the focus. A case study has been conducted in the light of democratic uprisings in the Middle East, on the correlation between social media and political change. The ethics and practices of Hacking in the present world, where powerful countries are masking the information about their attack on the rights of people as well as that of other countries, is studied in this paper. With special reference to “Nilppu Samaram” in Kerala, the power of social media as an agent of change and as an element of the fourth estate has been analysed. The paper concludes that cyberactivism has a hopeful future to complement the continuing fights for justice and human rights.