Hacktivizm'in çerçevelenmesi: Türkiye'de Redhack'in suçlulaştırılması

This dissertation examines the criminalization of Redhack, a popular hacktivist group in Turkey in the 2010s. The multi-dimensional study is based on an analysis of the construction and the perception of crime frames about hacktivism, by focusing on the case of Redhack. With a qualitative approach, the dissertation analyzes political actors, news media agents, actors involved in the judicial processes related to the hacktivist group, the audience interacting with the group in the social media platform Twitter, and the hacktivist group itself. In dialogue with the hacktivism literature, this dissertation contributes to critical criminology and to critical terrorism studies, beginning with the question of whether Redhack is considered as a source of "moral panics" in Turkey. The examination exhibits that Redhack is criminalized through the activation of the older frame of terrorism instead of newer frames of cybercrime and cyberterrorism. The dissertation finds that this emergence of the terrorism frame for a hacktivist group is the joint product of the contemporary political context in Turkey, the residues of sociopolitical anxieties from the Turkish history crystallized in the "folk devils" of terrorism, the characteristics of the group itself, and the worldwide rise of the terrorism discourse. The dissertation also shows that the abstention from constructing cyber related crime frames for Redhack implies a positive framing – even an imagery – of cybercrime and cyberterrorism in Turkey that is not preferred to be activated for an existing group. This positive framing is closely related to the fascination with information and communication technologies (ICTs) for actors involved in the crime framing of Redhack. Moreover, the criminalization of Redhack indicates the effort of the state and the power elite to make more legible this challenging new development – hacktivism – through the terror frame. In that sense, the dissertation provides insight into the duality of techno-fetishism and anxieties felt for ICTs in the national scale. Without being limited to the domain of ICTs and to the national scale, the study sheds light on the wider processes of criminalization constructed upon the discourse of terrorism worldwide.