CYBERSPACE - Last July, two teams of teenage computer hackers known as MilwOrm and the Ashtray Lumberjacks infiltrated 300 websites run by nuclear and defense organizations around the world and plastered each home page with a picture of a mushroom cloud and an 800-word statement declaring: "This mass takeover goes out to all the people out there who want to see peace in this world."
The hackers provided links to a host of alternative non-nuclear sites devoted to such entertainments as Wimbledon, the World Cup and filmstar Drew Barrymore. The previous month, MilwOrm hacked into India's Bhabba Atomic Research Center to protest India's nuclear tests but the July intrusion was called the largest "mass hack" in computer history. These "hacktivist" attacks were not isolated events.
On Columbus Day, October 12, the New York-based Electronic Disturbance Theater hacked into Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo's website to protest "centuries of colonization, genocide, and racism in the western hemisphere and throughout the world."
In August, some Mexico-based hackers known as X-Ploit invaded the website of Mexico's Finance Ministry and installed a picture of Mexico's revolutionary icon Emiliano Zapata.
Also in August, a group of Portuguese hackers called Kaotik Team hacked 45 websites belonging to the Indonesian government to protest the invasion and suppression of East Timor.
"The technology is changing the equations of power," Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy observed.. "Where once, the pen was mightier than the sword, today, he noted, "The mouse is mightier than the missile."
Bob Paquin, writing in The Ottawa Citizen, notes that the US military is preparing to conduct "cyberwars." A Rand Corporation study subtitled "Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age" talks about the strategic importance of "disrupting or destroying information and communication systems."
The debate rages about what constitutes cyber-terrorism and what merely amounts to cyber civil disobedience. Paquin mentions The Hong Kong Blondes "led by a Chinese dissident known as 'Blondie' Wong' [that] claims to have affected the usefulness of a Chinese [military] satellite."
In an Earth First! Journal essay, Electronic Disturbance Theater co-founder Stephan Wray argues that political "hacktivists" have only extended the tactics of nonviolent protest (trespass and blockade) to the electronic format of the Internet.
Last January 1, a hacktivist manifesto announced: "Justice will only prevail through struggle. And we, netwarriors of the intercontinental Cyberspace liberation Army, are ready to launch a coordinated attack" to disrupt the electronic infrastructure of the Mexican government and US corporations doing business in Mexico.
Targets for past hack-attacks include the White House, the Pentagon and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. In some of these attacks, as many as 10,000 people simultaneously train their keyboards on a targeted website, immobilizing it with as many as 600,000 messages per minute.
The Pentagon and Mexican authorities have begun to strike back with programming that causes the hackers' browsers to crash. A Defense Department spokesperson assured the on-line version of Wired Magazine that DOD was prepared to take "appropriate counter measures" to frustrate "planned electronic civil disobedience."
York University Professor Reg Whitaker characterized hackers as "generally pretty harmless, if infantile and annoying." Whitaker's greatest fear, the Citizen reports, is that these hacking skills might be picked up by "states, corporations or terrorist organizations."
An international conference is planned for Amsterdam in March to hammer out a "political hacker code of ethics."
Electronic "Hacktivists" Proclaim Cyber War