Everybody's favorite government supplier got a new look this week with the launch of the Halliburton Contracts web site. (Thanks to Peter Shane for tipping me off.)The site features Halliburton's new solution to global warming, the SurvivaBall:

The devices - looking like huge inflatable orbs - will include sophisticated communications systems, nutrient gathering capacities, onboard medical facilities, and a daunting defense infrastructure to ensure that the corporate mission will not go unfulfilled even when most human life is rendered impossible by catastrophes or the consequent epidemics and armed conflicts.

If this sounds implausible -- even by Halliburton standards -- then you won't be too surprised that the folks behind this site are the ever-lively Yes Men. I got a chance to dig into some of their work -- most notably, their WTO parody site -- when I wrote my dissertation on hacktivism.

Until now, I'd shared the full results of my research only with the folks I interviewed. But the Yes Men's latest foray into hacktivist territory has been a good reminder that hacktivism is still alive, well, and important for citizens, businesses, governments & NGOs to understand.

That's why I'm making my complete dissertation, Hacktivism and the Future of Political Participation, available for download as of today. Depending on your interests, you might want to download the whole enchilada, or to look at selected chapters:

• Chapter 1: Introduction provides an overview of the dissertation & methodology; it's useful for folks who want a quick overview
• Chapter 2: A taxonomy of hacktivism is a beast (65 pages) but provides a very comprehensive picture of the three main types of hacktivism: political cracking (like site defacements), performative hacktivism (like the Yes Men's work), and political coding (like folks trying to circumvent Chinese firewalls)
• Chapter 3: Collective action among virtual selves looks at hacktivism in the context of political science research on political participation; this is the research that most directly shaped my thinking about how to encourage citizen participation in online communities
• Chapter 4: Hacktivism and state autonomy looks at how hacktivists get around policy and legal decisions with the real effects of code; it's useful for organizations trying to understand how the Internet changes the bounds of their effective authority
• Chapter 5: Hacktivism and the future of democratic discourse looks at how hacktivism illuminates hopes for an online "public sphere"; it's useful for folks thinking about issues like free speech and anonymity online
• Chapter 6: Conclusion pulls it all back together and reflects on how hacktivism has been wrongly conflated with cyberterrorism as part of of the post 9/11 age of anxiety; it may interest folks who want to understand the impact of security anxieties on the space for online expression