NGOs and media artists are an important part of the contemporary enlargement and diversification of the political and cultural landscape. They enact a reconstruction of the public domain in a globalised world.

The Internet is a crucial tool of these social and political agencies. It facilitates a broad and potentially open system of communication and information.

At the same time, there is an increasing awareness that the Internet is encroached by concerns about security: data security, privacy, military security, etc.

The dilemma of these security concerns is that they seek to protect a public domain which is corrupted by the very attempts to secure their functionality.

This dilemma is the central theme of this project. By scanning the ports of the NGO’s and media artists servers we are trying to pinpoint the dilemma of NGOs and media artists having to protect an independent and progressive political and social practice through security measures which are constantly being tried, tested and attacked with ever new invasive tools. In the project, we are only using non-invasive scanning tools, which are essentially harmless and much milder than the tools that crackers and the NGO’s and media artists systems administrators alike use in order to detect security holes on the Internet servers.

In this project, we are also interested to determine the borders of what is and what is not legal in the (US) public domain, and we are trying to seek out the areas of friction between an active construction of the public domain, the expansive US legal system, and the debilitating dimensions of an intensively patrolled, supposedly open communication and information infrastructure like the Internet.