Hacktivism in the Cyberstreets

In early May an activist calling himself "Reverend Billy" called for thousands of computer owners to fire up their modems for an assault on Starbucks. From unseen corners of the globe, they'd converge on the company's Web site -- hoping to overload it.

Though the media portrays hackers as secretive, destructive intruders, some individuals and groups are openly committing online attacks in the name of furthering specific causes. It can be a symbolic massing on a Web page which, with enough participants, makes it inaccessible to others -- or more invasive "monkey-wrenching" to disable a site's equipment. Others just want to bypass government restrictions they see as unfair. But they're all trying to fuse their passions to their technology, using the power of the Internet to discover new forms of social protest.

In December a group called the Electrohippies (www.gn.apc.org/pmhp/ehippies) organized a "WTO virtual sit-in" that overloaded the machines keeping the World Trade Organization's Web pages on the Internet. The five U.K. activists estimate that over 452,000 people swamped the site. (During the action the group says participants sent them up to 900 e-mails each day.) Paul Mobbs, the group's co-founder and media liaison, says they accomplished their goal -- disrupting the World Trade Organization's online presence for four- to five-hour stretches -- and reduced that site's overall speed by half.

In April the group launched an even more ambitious series of events protesting genetically modified crops. If you had a computer equipped with a modem, you were already a potential co-activist in their radical action. A surprise "special action" began April Fool's Day with the media-friendly name "Resistance is Fertile." The Electrohippies called for an e-mail campaign from the 3rd to the 7th targeting 78 officials listed on the Hippies' Web site, including U.S. Department of Agriculture communications official Vic Powell -- to build public pressure against genetically modified foods. But the tactics remain so controversial that they called off their main event that had been scheduled for the next week -- "an email and client-side denial of service extravaganza" -- after an online vote for the action failed to muster a simple majority.

Symbolism vs. Damage

It's a new breed of activism -- wired and confrontational. Some question whether it's really a desirable form of protest, but the Electrohippies are hoping to defuse criticism by popularizing not just their tools, but a code of ethics. They publicized their intentions before the attack -- and also issued a lengthy paper on the philosophy of it. "These type of actions are directly analogous to the type of demonstrations that take place across the world," read "Occasional Paper No. 1." The group has always argued that the large numbers needed to have an impact mean a "democratic guarantee" is inherent in the technique. "One or two people do not make a valid demonstration," their Web site argues. "100,000 people do ... If there are not enough people supporting then the action it doesn't work."

They're seeking nothing less than a world where e-commerce is balanced by e-protest -- or at least, where cyberspace isn't immune from public pressure. Henry David Thoreau's "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" is displayed prominently on the group's Web site -- surviving 152 years only to be taken up by Internet activists. But Mobbs acknowledges that much of the practical theory began with various U.S. groups like the Electronic Disturbance Theatre who were supporting the Zapatista National Liberation Army in 1998. Using tactics hardly more complicated than repeatedly hitting the button on a Web browser to reload a Web page, the group created a form of activism that was also part poetry. It was often, as one Web site described it, "a symbolic gesture created to increase awareness about the low intensity war in Chiapas, Mexico." Together four activists, calling themselves an internet performance art group, had created a Web interface that would access the page for Mexico's President Zedillo seeking bogus addresses, so the browser would return messages like "human_rights not found on this server." The project -- which they dubbed "FloodNet" (www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ZapTact.html) -- also filled the page's access log with the names of people killed by government troops. "In an artistic sense, this is a way of remembering and honoring those who gave their lives in defense of their freedom," Ricardo Dominguez wrote in an online remembrance. There were nine actions between April and December of 1998, adds Boston-based hactivist Carmin Karasic, culminating with a mass action on the Web site for the Mexican Stock Exchange.