Chapter 16. Hacktivism: Online Activism
You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
Guess who has more political power in a democracy—an individual who can cast a single vote once every few years, or a major corporation that can shower politicians with campaign donations and other monetary favors any day of the week?
As much as the powers that be would like you to believe that your vote actually counts (when it’s not being lost by a voting machine), the reality is that most individuals feel powerless and helpless in the face of lobbyist groups and corporate influence. That’s why desperate people often resort to violence to force governments to deal with long-standing problems. For example, blacks protested against racial inequality during the April 1992 Los Angeles riots (sparked by the acquittal of four white police officers accused of beating Rodney King), and French immigrants rioted in October 2005 to protest high unemployment rates and police brutality in their community. Before riots brought attention to these issues, the problems were largely ignored by the governments that should have been actively looking for solutions.
Rather than waiting until situations reach such a boiling point, many individuals channel their energy into activist organizations. Before the Internet, activists had to rely on meetings, newsletters, and mass mailings to attract supporters and to keep their members organized and informed. However, the Internet has given them a medium for spreading their ideas and publicizing their goals to a worldwide audience.
To learn more about using the Internet to form or improve an activist group, read The Virtual Activist, a training course offered by NetAction (www.netaction.org). If you want to find a protest rally near you, visit Protest.Net (www.protest.net), which lists events around the world and offers an Activist Handbook to help people get involved, as shown in Figure 16-1.
Email, websites, and instant messaging let activists communicate faster and more conveniently, but the real promise (or threat) of the Internet is as a protest medium in and of itself. The Internet provides the opportunity for virtual sit-ins and blockades, email bombing, web page defacing, and the creation and spread of worms and viruses for a cause.
Virtual Sit-ins and Blockades
One common form of protest involves physically taking over or blocking access to an area or a building, such as the April 9, 1969, takeover of a Harvard University administration building by 300 students protesting the Vietnam War. Such sit-ins rarely cause any damage, but they help bring attention to the protesters’ cause, especially if the protesters can occupy and shut down a high-profile target like Harvard. (Taking over and holding the men’s room at a gas station in Barstow, California, wouldn’t have quite the same dramatic effect, no matter how many people might be involved.)
Because physical takeovers can be difficult to organize, many activists engage in virtual sit-ins and blockades that anyone can join, no matter where they are. The goal of such virtual protests is the same as for their offline counterparts—to shut down access to a high-profile target and gain publicity.
The world’s first Internet strike
On December 21, 1995, a group calling itself the Strano Network organized the world’s first Internet strike with the following announcement:
BOIKOTT THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT’S INSTITUTIONS!
French Goverment has shown a total contempt for French people, for international community, for common people who just would like to grow up their sons in a better world as it:
goes on with nuclear experiments in Pacific Ocean’s islands
goes on with use of nuclear energy as mainly source of “civil” energy
goes on with its projects of “social redrawing” without taking into account the enormous presence of people in recent demonstrations of protest against such kind of policy.
At a designated hour, the Strano Network asked that protesters visit a wide range of French government agencies’ websites, including Le Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres (www.france.diplomatie.fr), Le Ministere de la Culture et de la Francophonie (http://web.culture.fr), and the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (www.nea.fr). With such a massive flood of visitors, the Strano Network hoped to overwhelm the French government’s webservers and knock their sites offline, which, according to some reports, they succeeded in doing.
What was unique about the world’s first virtual sit-in was that it not only attacked a target and prevented legitimate users from accessing it, but it did so using completely legal methods. Participants in a physical sit-in risk arrest for trespassing, among other things, but there’s nothing illegal about individuals visiting a single website simultaneously. The result, however, is a denial of service attack for which one individual person cannot be held responsible.
Zapatistas on the Internet
Few people know where Chiapas is (it’s on the southern tip of Mexico), and even fewer people know who the Zapatistas are (they’re the indigenous people of Chiapas, named for Emiliano Zapata, an early–20th-century Mexican revolutionary leader who fought for land and freedom for his people). All that changed on January 1, 1994, when the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) declared war against the Mexican state and demanded the liberation of the people of Chiapas and Mexico. As part of the Zapatistas’ war declaration, they explained how the state of Chiapas was one of the poorest in Mexico, yet accounted for much of Mexico’s oil wealth, along with exports of lumber, coffee, and beef.
The Zapatistas initially tried communicating their mission to the world through traditional news media, such as CNN and the Mexican state-controlled TV network, Televisa, but they found their letters, reports, and stories severely edited, which prevented others from understanding the true nature of their rebellion. Only the Mexican newspaper La Jornada published the Zapatistas’ materials complete and unedited, but this newspaper rarely reached anyone outside of Mexico City. As far as the traditional news media were concerned, the Zapatistas didn’t exist and most people reading the limited news coverage concluded that they were simply troublemakers who deserved to be put down.
Even when the Mexican government rushed in 15,000 troops to suppress the rebellion militarily, the media continued to downplay news about the Zapatistas, effectively muzzling their pleas for freedom and ignoring their reports of government suppression and exploitation. To circumvent the indifference of the traditional news media, Zapatista supporters started typing or scanning information from the group and distributing it over the Internet.
People translated the Spanish text into English and other languages, and soon the Zapatistas’ plight began attracting attention from overseas newspapers and magazines that might never have bothered to cover the rebellion otherwise. When the Mexican Army surrounded 12,000 guerillas, the Zapatistas reported through the Internet that they had escaped the encirclement and conquered several nearby villages, which caused confusion in world markets and brought about a sudden drop in the value of the Mexican peso. As more independent news media sources confirmed the Zapatistas’ claims (to the embarrassment of the Mexican government), the Zapatista movement gained more credibility and garnered more interest. In this case, the Zapatistas didn’t have to stage a virtual sit-in to publicize their plight; they simply used newsgroups, email, and websites to broadcast the Zapatista struggle to the rest of the world.
To learn more about the Zapatistas, visit the Zapatistas Network (www.zapatistas.org), shown in Figure 16-2, or Chiapas Watch (www.zmag.org/chiapas1).
Disturbance on demand
A group calling itself the Electronic Disturbance Theater (www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/EDTECD.html) has taken the Zapatistas’ cause to a new level by developing virtual activism software and organizing Internet strikes, as shown in Figure 16-3.
To organize its Internet strikes, the Electronic Disturbance Theater created a special Java applet dubbed FloodNet that participants could install to reload the target websites automatically every few seconds. According to the Electronic Disturbance Theater, more than 10,000 people from all over the world participated in the Internet strike on September 9, delivering 600,000 hits per minute to each targeted site using FloodNet.
When the Pentagon detected FloodNet’s attacks, it redirected FloodNet users to another web page with a Java Applet program called HostileApplet, which would endlessly reload a document in the participant’s browser, effectively tying up his computer and preventing him from attacking the Pentagon’s site.
President Zedillo’s site didn’t retaliate during the September 9 attack, but later, during a similar attack the following June, his site caused protesters’ browsers to keep opening windows until their computers crashed. Despite these countermeasures, the Electronic Disturbance Theater declared their second Internet strike a success too, noting that “our interest is to help the people of Chiapas to keep receiving the international recognition that they need to keep them alive.”
On January 3, 2000, Zapatista supporters wrote messages to the Mexican soldiers fighting to suppress the Zapatista rebellion, folded these messages into paper airplanes, and then launched the Zapatista “Air Force.” To commemorate this event, the Electronic Disturbance Theater created the Zapatista Tribal Port Scan (ZTPS) program, which works in a similar way by scanning a random port on a target computer and sending it a text message as shown in Figure 16-4.
Besides the Zapatistas, the Electronic Disturbance Theater has supported a variety of other causes as well. To oppose US military strikes and economic sanctions against Iraq, the Electronic Disturbance Theater used its FloodNet program to attack the White House website, and in January 1999, it also helped organize animal-rights activists to protest different websites in Sweden. If you have a cause that needs worldwide publicity, consider contacting the Electronic Disturbance Theater for help.
Email Bombing
One way people can make their voices heard is by writing letters to politicians. Although one letter might not make much of a difference, hundreds or thousands of letters can cause even the most hardened politician to take notice.
Note
Since it’s so easy for individuals or organizations to send multiple email messages, many politicians take email messages less seriously than physical letters. Handwritten letters, written in your own words, are often more effective in reaching politicians than mass-produced form letters.
In the realm of the Internet, sending email is simple and easy. Indeed, it’s possible to send a barrage of messages, flooding a target’s mailbox and preventing the recipient from reading or receiving legitimate messages. Known as email flooding or bombing, the end result is one form of a denial of service attack. Figure 16-5 shows a typical mass emailing program that can be used to send multiple messages to a single target (mail bombing) or a single message to multiple targets (spamming).
The first known use of email bombing for political means occurred in 1998 when the Tamil guerillas of Sri Lanka reportedly swamped Sri Lankan embassies with thousands of email messages that read: “We are the Internet Black Tigers and we’re doing this to disrupt your communications.” Perhaps because of the uniqueness of the attack, this one email bombing attack generated more publicity for the Tamil guerillas than the multitude of suicide bombings they had carried out in all the years before.
In March 1998, a single hacker sent more than 2,000 messages a day to NATO’s website to protest the organization’s role in the Kosovo conflict (a friendly euphemism for war). When one California resident, Richard Clark, heard of this hacker attack against NATO, he reportedly co-opted the technique to retaliate, deluging the Yugoslavian government’s website with more than 500,000 messages a day until its site went down. (Richard Clark’s ISP, Pacific Bell, later canceled his service for violating its antispam policy.)
The Institute for Global Communications (IGC), a San Francisco–based Internet service provider, was hit by an email bombing attack in 1997 for hosting the website of the Euskal Herria Journal, an online publication supporting the Basque separatist movement in Spain and France. Protesters claimed that IGC supported terrorism because part of the Euskal Herria Journal site contained information from the terrorist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), which killed more than 800 people during its 30-year struggle for Basque independence.
In an effort to convince IGC to stop hosting the Euskal Herria Journal website, protesters bombarded the company with thousands of messages, which were routed through a multitude of different computers so ICG wouldn’t be able to block mail from a single source. To add further pressure, protesters also email-bombed IGC employees as well as any other company with a website hosted by IGC, and clogged up the online ordering forms of commercial websites hosted by the target with bogus credit card orders.
IGC finally took down the Euskal Herria Journal site, but not before archiving its web pages. Within days, several other sites had posted copies of the Euskal Herria Journal site on three different continents. Although the protesters succeeded in censoring IGC, they failed in their ultimate objective to shut out the Euskal Herria Journal from the rest of the world. In fact, they gave the journal international publicity.
Web Hacking and Computer Break-ins
Email bombing and virtual sit-ins can disrupt a target, but unless people know why you’re doing what you’re doing, it could come across as simply an act of electronic vandalism rather than a political protest. To deliver their message another way, hacktivists often deface the home pages of prominent websites such as NASA, the FBI, and even the White House. By defacing high-profile websites, hacktivists can ensure that a large group of people will read their message. Here are a few examples.
One of the earliest politically motivated web page defacements occurred in 1998, when Portuguese hackers broke into several Indonesian government websites to protest Indonesia’s treatment of East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, as shown in Figure 16-6.
In June 1998, a group of hackers calling themselves Milw0rm hacked into the website of India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC)—www.barc.ernet.in—and defaced it to show the distinctive mushroom cloud explosion of an atomic bomb along with the text, “If a nuclear war does start, you will be the first to scream. . . . "
In 1999, Pakistani and Indian military forces were engaged in combat along the Kargil region. Pakistani hackers targeted various Indian government websites including www.armyinkashmir.com, which provided factual information about Indian military forces in the Kashmir Valley. Pakistani hackers defaced the site and posted photographs showing Indian military forces allegedly killing Kashmiri militants with captions that read “Massacre,” “Torture,” and “The agony of crackdown.” Pakistani hackers also targeted India’s Department of Information Technology (www.mit.gov.in) site and replaced it with Flash movie images as shown in Figure 16-7.
Hackers on both sides of the 1998 Kosovo conflict targeted their opponents’ websites. An American hacking group called Team Spl0it claims to have defaced web pages of the Yugoslavian government with messages saying, “Tell your governments to stop the war.” The Serb Black Hand hackers group claims it retaliated by deleting all the data on a US Navy computer.
Perhaps more frightening is that hackers have targeted many sensitive US government websites and claim to have gotten in. In May 2001, the official White House site (www.whitehouse.gov) even shut down for three days due to a nonstop denial of service attack by unknown hackers. Another hacker group, Hong Kong Danger Duo, later claimed to have broken into the White House site and left the message, “Stop all war. Consintrate on your problems. Nothing was damaged, but we are not telling how we got in.”
After NATO accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in 1999, Chinese hackers entered the fray, targeting official US government websites. The Department of the Interior’s website was defaced with pictures of the three Chinese journalists who had been killed in the bombing, while the Department of Energy’s website contained a message that read:
Protest U.S.A.’s Nazi action! Protest NATO’s brutal action! We are Chinese hackers who take no cares about politics. But we can not stand by seeing our Chinese reporters been killed which you might have know. Whatever the purpose is, NATO led by U.S.A. must take absolute responsibility. You have owed Chinese people a bloody debt which you must pay for. We won’t stop attacking until the war stops!
Of course, the Chinese government has come under its own share of hacker attacks by hacktivists protesting the country’s lack of democracy and human rights. One hacker group, the Hong Kong Blondes, allegedly infiltrated police and security networks to monitor China’s intelligence activities and warn political dissidents of imminent arrests. Two hackers, called Bronc Buster and Zyklon, claimed they disabled five Chinese firewalls, allowing Chinese citizens uncensored Internet access.
After Taiwan’s President Lee Teng-hui declared on July 9, 1999, that China had to deal with Taiwan on a “state-to-state” basis, a cyberwar quickly erupted between each country’s respective hackers. The Taiwanese hackers planted a red and blue Taiwanese national flag and an anti-Communist slogan: “Reconquer, Reconquer, Reconquer the Mainland,” on Chinese Internet company websites. In turn, the Chinese hackers defaced the website of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (www.dpp.org.tw) and displayed digitally altered images of the President and Vice President, as shown in Figure 16-8.
Back in the US, on January 18, 2005, a hacker group called “the Internet Liberation Front (ILF)” defaced six Republican Party websites and left the following message:
In solidarity with the billions around the world who are being oppressed under the Bush agenda, The Internet Liberation Front has hacked and defaced six Republican websites who push forward the sick and violent ideology of warfare, capitalism, and profit over people.
Following the publication of a cartoon, in a Danish newspaper, depicting the prophet Mohammed carrying a bomb on his head, Muslims rioted around the world to protest. One hacktivist group, calling themselves the Red Devils Crew, took their protests to the Internet and on February 27, 2006, defaced the website of a company called Plasq.com, which sells a comic book–making program called Comic Life. In place of the original home page, the Red Devils Crew hacktivists posted the following message.
We were deeply shocked seeing a Danish newspaper (Jyllands Posten) offending almost 1.5 billion Muslims around the world by publishing a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed seen as a terrorist carrying bombs on his head!
I just wonder, would your government reaction have been the same if the cartoon displayed Prophets Jesus or Moses!? I don’t think so ...
Defacing web pages to promote a cause only works if people get a chance to see your message before the affected website administrator takes it down. The window of opportunity can be anywhere from a few hours to a few days.
Wherever there’s war, conflict, disagreements, and power, you’ll find web page defacements following closely behind physical force. Although it may be illegal, and breaking into a computer may be considered trespassing, it’s certainly a less destructive alternative to shooting, bombing, and slaughtering. In that regard, hacking could actually be considered more ethical than any traditional show of military force.
Computer Viruses and Worms
Another alternative for hacktivists has been to disseminate their messages via (sometimes benevolent) worms and viruses that can spread across the world and reach thousands of people for years to come.
One of the earliest hackivist viruses was the 1988 MS-DOS Fu Manchu virus, which buried itself in a computer’s memory and waited for the user to type in the name of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, or former South African President P.K. Botha. When one of these names was typed, the Fu Manchu virus would change it to an obscene word. Another early hacktivist worm appeared when anti-nuclear protesters tried to stop NASA from launching the Galileo probe toward Jupiter, because the probe’s booster contained radioactive plutonium as fuel. On October 16, 1989, hackers infected NASA’s network with the WANK worm, which NASA officials estimate cost a half a million dollars’ worth of time and resources to clean up. When run, the WANK worm displayed the following message:
W O R M S A G A I N S T N U C L E A R K I L L E R S
______________________________________________________________
\__ ____________ _____ ________ ____ ____ __ _____/
/ / / / / | | | | | / / /
/ / / / /__ | | | | | |/ / /
/ / / / / ______ | | | | | | /
\_ /__ /____/ /______ \____| |__ | |____| |_ \_/
\___________________________________________________ /
/
Your System Has Been Officically WANKed /
\_____________________________________________ /
You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war.In a hacktivist action to protest French nuclear testing, someone wrote the 1996 Nuclear macro virus to infect Microsoft Word and insert the text, “STOP ALL FRENCH NUCLEAR TESTING IN THE PACIFIC!” at the end of every document.
Computer viruses can spread from one computer to another, but they rarely match the distribution speed of an email worm. Two hacktivist worms include the Mari@mm worm and the Injustice worm. These worms work like many others; each can send a copy of itself to every email address stored in a target’s Microsoft Outlook address book. When the Mari@mm worm infects a computer, it puts a marijuana icon on the screen. If the user clicks on this marijuana icon, a dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 16-9, promoting the legalization of marijuana.
The Injustice worm emails itself to the first 50 email addresses stored in a Microsoft Outlook address book and displays the following message:
PLEASE ACCEPT MY APOLOGIES FOR DISTURBING YOU.
Remember that one day YOU may be in this situation.
We need every possible help.
Israeli soldiers killed in cold blood 12 year old Palestinian childMohammad Al-Durra, as his father tried to protect him in vain with his own body. As a result of the indiscriminate and excessive use ofmachine gun fire by Israeli soldiers, journalists and bystanders watched helplessly as the child was savagely murdered.
Palestinian Red Crescent Society medic Bassam Balbeisi attempted to intervene and spare the child’s life but live ammunition to his chest by Israeli fire took his life in the process. The child and the medic were grotesquely murdered in cold blood. Mohammad’s father, Jamal, was critically injured and permanently paralyzed. Similarly, approximately 40 children were slain, without the media taking notice or covering these tragedies.
THESE CRIMINAL ACTS CANNOT BE FORGIVEN OR FORGOTTEN!!!!
HELP US TO STOP THE BLOOD SHED!!
Some other examples of hacktivist viruses and worms include the 2002 Yaha-e worm, written by Indian hackers, which attempted a denial of service attack on a Pakistani government website (www.pak.gov.pk); and the 2001 Mawanella virus, which protests the burning down of two mosques and 100 Muslim-owned shops in Mawanella, Sri Lanka, as part of the ongoing conflict between Muslims and Buddhists there, as shown in Figure 16-10.
Unlike regular viruses or worms, hacktivist creations rarely destroy data deliberately; their intent is to spread a message, not harm users. That wasn’t the case in February 1999, however, when 14-year-old Israeli Nir Zigdon told the London Sunday Telegraph that he had single-handedly wiped out an Iraqi government website that, he said, “contained lies about the United States, Britain and Israel, and many horrible statements against Jews.” Nir Zigdon said, “I figured that if Israel is afraid of assassinating Saddam Hussein, at least I can try to destroy his site.”
Nir Zigdon reportedly sent an email attachment to the site and “claimed I was a Palestinian admirer of Saddam who had produced a virus capable of wiping out Israeli websites. That persuaded them to open the message and click the designated file. Within hours the site had been destroyed. Shortly afterwards I received an email from the site manager, Fayiz, that told me to ‘go to hell’.”
Activist Video Games
Since web page defacements, viruses, and worms can be destructive or, at minimum, annoying, some activists have turned to making political statements by creating video games. Molleindustria (www.molleindustria.it) offers a game called Tamatipico, wherein players control a factory worker to make him more productive. Watch out though. Work him too hard and let his happiness level drop, and he’ll actually become less productive (which is a lesson that too many managers seem to forget).
Newsgaming (www.newsgaming.com) offers two unique political video games called Madrid and September 12th. In Madrid, you must click candles held by people in a crowd to keep them lit, as shown in Figure 16-11. Click too slowly and the candles will burn out one by one.
The September 12th game depicts the hopeless struggle to kill terrorists without hurting innocent civilians. In this game, players aim missiles at known terrorists stalking the streets. If you accidentally kill an innocent bystander, you wind up creating more terrorists until, eventually, you end up with more terrorists than you started with, as shown in Figure 16-12.
During the 2004 Presidential elections, the Republican Party even released a political video game called Tax Invaders. The goal of the game was to shoot at an ever-increasing barrage of John Kerry tax plans using the face of President Bush, as shown in Figure 16-13. Failure to win meant John Kerry had succeeded in raising your taxes.
Perhaps one of the oddest activist video games appeared November 22, 2004, when a Scottish company called Traffic Management released JFK: Reloaded. The idea behind this game was to prove that Lee Harvey Oswald could have been a lone gunman who killed John F. Kennedy with his sniper rifle. The player assumes the role of Oswald and gets a chance to re-create history by trying to assassinate the president. The closer your shots mimic what Oswald did, the higher your score. Initially, Traffic Management even offered a $100,000 reward to the first person that could re-create Oswald’s shots most accurately.
By playing a video game like JFK: Reloaded, you can rewrite history and aim for Jackie Kennedy or even go for the driver, instead of JFK himself. If you kill the driver, the motorcade might stop and then you can pick off the stranded occupants one by one. Alternately, if you shoot the driver, the game might have the driver slump forward and crash the limousine into a lamppost.
Although the publisher claimed it had developed the game to debunk conspiracy theories about shots coming from other places, such as the grassy knoll, it caused a storm of controversy that eventually drove the company out of business. While derided as tasteless by many, JFK: Reloaded does raise an interesting question. If shooting an animated figure of a president is so despicable, why is it considered “entertainment” to shoot nameless animated figures in other video games?
Google Bombing
As the most popular search engine (at the time of this writing), Google controls which websites people find when they hunt for specific words or phrases. Search for Dell and Google responds with hundreds of results, although the top websites listed relate directly to Dell Computers. These results are determined by measuring the websites’ perceived popularity, which is partly based on the number of sites that link back to them. Google bombing entails artificially inflating a website’s Google ranking by fabricating links to that site and scattering them all over the Internet.
While it’s nearly impossible for one individual to create enough links to affect a website’s ranking, it’s pretty easy once you have lots of other people posting links on their websites, in newsgroups, in chat rooms, on blogs, in email messages, and so on, until the Internet is inundated.
In 1999, people found that if they typed the phrase more evil than Satan into Google, Microsoft’s home page came up in the top rankings. In 2005, Google bombing linked the words miserable failure to both George W. Bush’s and Michael Moore’s websites. Searching for the phrase worst President also returned George W. Bush’s website, so Bush supporters Google-bombed the Internet in retaliation so that great President would also point to George W. Bush’s website.
In another example, a search for Jew in Google ranks the top website as JewWatch, an anti-Semitic site run by white power nationalist Frank Weltner. (See Chapter 17 for more information about hate groups.) As a result, the editor of the blog Jew School (www.jewschool.com) is now soliciting websites to help him Google bomb the JewWatch site off its top ranking.
So the next time you search Google, check the list of results carefully. Some of the websites may be legitimate, but some may be benefactors of artificially inflated rankings. How can you tell the difference? You can’t, which is why you may have to examine every website to figure out its real political agenda.
Becoming a Hacktivist
If you want to use the Internet to promote your beliefs, you, too, can become a hacktivist. At the most basic level, you can petition your representative in Congress or debate current events at http://e-thepeople.com. In addition to email addresses for government representatives, this website lists various petitions you can support and even gives you a chance to create and post your own petition online.
Another site, Progressive Secretary (www.progressivesecretary.org), allows anyone to start or join a letter-writing campaign to petition various American government officials on topics ranging from the environment and arms proliferation to the death penalty and the Cuban embargo. By combining forces with thousands of other individuals, you can make your voice heard much faster than if you wrote a single letter on your own.
Of course, email is simply a faster version of the mass mailings and faxing that activists relied on before the growth of the Internet. However, cyberactivists have greater visibility due to websites that promote a particular group, its goals, and its philosophy to a worldwide audience. For greater influence, many activists have formed alliances with similar organizations. To learn more about networking with other activist groups over the Internet, visit the Coalition for Networked Information (www.cni.org), the Global Internet Liberty Campaign (www.gilc.org), the Digital Freedom Network (www.dfn.org), the Internet Free Expression Alliance (www.ifea.net), or, as shown in Figure 16-14, the People’s Global Action (www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp).
If you want to join a particular activist group, visit Action Without Borders (www.idealist.org), GuideStar (www.guidestar.org), or Activism.net (www.activism.net) for more information. Activism.net also provides more technical data about using a computer to promote your cause, including discussions about anonymous remailers and cryptography.
Of course, even activists need help once in a while, so Cause Communications (www.causecommunications.com) and Grassroots Enterprise (www.grassroots.com) provide consulting services to help activists achieve their goals. If you need facts to support your cause, try Political Research Associates (www.publiceye.org), which offers its research on various antidemocratic, authoritarian, and oppressive movements, institutions, and trends.
In case you have information that your government doesn’t want anyone to see, you can contact Cryptome (http://cryptome.org), which will post any secretive or banned information on its website.
To help learn specific tactics involving hacktivism, you can even attend a training camp offered by the Ruckus Society (www.ruckus.org), which has previously trained protesters for disrupting the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in Seattle. The Ruckus Society tends to attract all types of hacktivists, from those opposing Microsoft’s monopoly on the operating system market to those fighting to allow free speech on the Internet by all citizens, regardless of nationality.
Other sources of information and inspiration about hacktivism include Anarchist Resistance (http://anarchistresistance.org), Counter Inaugural (http://counter-inaugural.org), CrimethInc.com (www.crimethinc.com), Infoshop.org (http://infoshop.org), the Independent Media Center (www.indymedia.org), The Hacktivist (www.thehacktivist.com), and Hack This Site (www.hackthissite.org).
Of course, activists aren’t always right and their actions can be destructive regardless of the nobility of their intentions. Some activists have no qualms about breaking the law or aligning themselves with questionable organizations in order to further their agenda, which doesn’t make them morally or ethically superior to the politicians, governments, or corporations they’re attacking.
For another look at different activist groups, visit the ActivistCash.com site (www.activistcash.com), which provides “in-depth profiles of anti-consumer activist groups, along with information about the sources of their exorbitant funding.” Among its findings, ActivistCash.com claims that environmental group Earth First! formed in 1979 when its founder, Dave Foreman, was approached by the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, who wanted to fund a new extremist group that would make them look moderate by comparison. Foreman reportedly accepted a 10-year deal to act as the unofficial radical wing of the environmental movement. In this role, he was free to pursue controversial activities that neither the Sierra Club nor the Wilderness Society could publicly support, such as the torching of a housing development in San Diego and the burning of Hummer and SUV dealerships in Los Angeles. In his book Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, Dave Foreman even bragged that that “ecotage [economic sabotage] in the National Forests alone in the United States is costing industry and government $20–25 million annually.”
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has also come under the scrutiny of ActivistCash.com, which claims PETA paid $27,000 for the legal defense of Roger Troen, who was arrested for taking part in an October 1986 burglary and arson at the University of Oregon. Elsewhere, $7,500 went to Fran Stephanie Trutt, who tried to murder the president of a medical laboratory, and $5,000 went to Josh Harper, who attacked Native Americans on a whale hunt by throwing smoke bombs, shooting flares, and spraying their faces with chemical fire extinguishers.
Even Mothers against Drunk Drivers (MADD) is not free from criticism by ActivistCash.com, which claims that the group has unnecessarily expanded its mission to prohibit alcohol use entirely. MADD founder Candy Lightner even broke ties with the group, saying, “I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving.”
By examining ActivistCash.com’s claims, you can see different sides of the issues and pick which side you want to support. Then again, you might want to research the people behind ActivistCash.com to see what agenda they might be hiding, too.
No matter what causes you decide to champion, you ultimately need to take action to back up your point of view. Defacing web pages or writing computer viruses and worms will publicize a problem but never solve it. Take action now. You may be surprised at how much power you, as an individual, can wield if you only give it a try.