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.ooM CULT OF THE DEAD COW & Hacktivismo .ooM
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 21, 2026
- x X x -
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, STILL BURNING
Twenty-five years ago, Hacktivismo and CULT OF THE DEAD COW issued a
declaration grounding hacktivism in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. We named state-sponsored censorship as the enemy,
transnational corporations as its enablers, and argued that the international
hacking community had a moral obligation to act.
The situation is worse now than it was then.
Global internet freedom has declined for fifteen consecutive years, according
to Freedom House's Freedom on the Net 2025. The internet is more controlled
and manipulated today than at any point in the history of the report.
Citizens in at least 57 of the 72 countries covered were arrested or
imprisoned for online expression on social, political, or religious topics
during the coverage period. A record high.
Freedom House itself was nearly destroyed in the process of documenting this.
In January 2025, a US executive order froze foreign assistance funding and
terminated more than 80 percent of the organization's programs worldwide.
Freedom House lost most of its funding from a government that now appears in
its own report.
Further documentation of these conditions, including a country-by-country
account of restriction mechanisms from 2001 to 2026, is documented in "The
Great Decoupling."
Reporters Without Borders, whose research informed our original declaration,
classified the global state of press freedom as a "difficult situation" for
the first time in the history of its index.
We are issuing this declaration in that context.
- x X x -
...:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::...
::::: THE HACKTIVISMO DECLARATION: REBOOTED :::::
```:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::'''
In 2001, Hacktivismo and CULT OF THE DEAD COW issued a declaration grounding
hacktivism in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The right of every person to seek, receive, and impart information regardless
of frontiers.
We named state-sponsored censorship as the enemy, transnational corporations
as its enablers, and the international hacking community as having a moral
obligation to act.
Twenty-five years later the obligation stands. But the enemy has built new
tools.
We claimed that this was about human rights, not hacking or technology for its
own sake.
We believed that technology served something more important. The right of
every person to speak, listen, and reach across borders without asking
permission.
The internet we were promised was a liberating domain. What we got is more
complicated. The same network that routes around censorship also routes
around reality, and the platforms that connect dissidents connect demagogues
just as efficiently. The algorithms that determine what we see were built to
keep us on the platform. Bringing people together was never part of the
brief.
The algorithm runs on engagement, not ideology. That business model has done
more damage to free expression than most governments have managed through
explicit censorship.
Management engineered this outcome and knew exactly what they were shooting
for.
The companies that built these systems exercise power over public discourse on
a scale that most governments cannot match. They decide what reaches its
audience and what disappears.
Corporate boardrooms make these decisions behind closed doors. Without
accountability. We named them then and we name them now.
The surveillance apparatus tracking activists, journalists, and ordinary
citizens across the world was not built by governments alone.
China exports its template of repression to governments that want absolute
control without the cost of developing it themselves.
Western companies sell their own version through advertising technology,
platform architecture, and data brokerage. These are surveillance systems
whether or not they were designed as such. The person being tracked doesn't
care much about the distinction.
The exceptions we granted - recognizing the legitimate right of governments to
restrict state secrets, illegal content, and invasions of personal privacy -
were made in good faith. They were not received that way.
State secrecy became a weapon against journalists and a shield for illegal
government conduct. Child protection became a pretext for mass surveillance
and mandated backdoors into encrypted communications. Privacy law became a
corporate tool for managing the public rather than protecting it.
We granted exceptions in good faith. Those exceptions were picked up and
turned against us. That argument is forfeit.
Artificial intelligence is the newest field of play and the most unsettled.
The same systems capable of tracking, targeting, and suppressing dissent at
scale can be turned toward protecting it. The difference is who is deploying
them and what they built in before they ran.
An information environment engineered to bury truth under volume is a
censorship regime, whatever it calls itself.
You are reading this because you understand what is at stake. The internet we
were promised will not be recovered by institutions acting on our behalf. It
will be recovered by people like you.
- x X x -
Media Contact:
Oxblood Ruffin
Foreign Minister
CULT OF THE DEAD COW
oxblood@cultdeadcow.com
https://cultdeadcow.com
https://cultdeadcow.com/hacktivismo/
About CULT OF THE DEAD COW (cDc)
CULT OF THE DEAD COW lives somewhere between an algorithm and a different
idea. Part hacker collective, part cultural virus, part public service
announcement. We pioneered hacktivism before it had a LinkedIn profile and
built tools that made powerful people nervous while making everyone else
safer. You're welcome.
About Hacktivismo
Hacktivismo is a group of international hackers, human rights workers, artists
and others who seek to further the goals of human rights through technology.
They operate under the aegis of CULT OF THE DEAD COW (cDc). Hacktivismo is
committed to developing technologies in support of the highest standards of
human rights.
__//////\ -cDc- CULT OF THE DEAD COW -cDc- /\\\\\\__
Est. 1984 \\\\\\/ NINJA STRIKE FORCE * HACKTIVISMO \////// Est. 1984
####
We will have more to say.