from the New York Times

      October 31, 1998

`Hacktivists' of All Persuasions
Take Their Struggle to the Web

      By AMY HARMON

     Until they declared "Netwar" against the Mexican government,
     Ricardo Dominguez and Stefan Wray earned their activist credentials
     the old-fashioned way, attending rallies in support of the
     Zapatista rebels, handing out pamphlets, shouting political
     slogans.

     Now, the two New Yorkers organize "virtual sit-ins" and recruit
     computer programmers to attack the World Wide Web sites of any
     person or company they deem responsible for oppression. Their new
     rallying cry: "The revolution will be digitized."

     Wray, 37, and Dominguez, 39, are co-founders of the Electronic
     Disturbance Theater. It is one of several groups around the world
     that are beginning to experiment with computer hacking, so far
     largely nuisance attacks and the equivalent of electronic graffiti,
     as a means to a political end.

     "We see this as a form of electronic civil disobedience," Wray told
     a group of about 75 people who had gathered in New York's East
     Village for an "anti-Columbus Day" event in October. "We are
     transferring the social-movement tactics of trespass and blockade
     to the Internet."

     The notion is a departure for both radical activists and hackers,
     whose distinct, subversive subcultures have rarely intersected
     until recently. In some ways, the two psychologies are polar
     opposites.

     Hackers, while reliably anti-authoritarian, tend to limit their
     critique of the military-industrial complex to its imperfect
     computer security apparatus. Enamored of their image as the cowboys
     of the electronic frontier, most at least pay lip service to the
     hacker mantra, "information wants to be free."

     But whatever capacity they might have to disrupt the social order
     has so far been largely restricted to pointless vandalism and
     pinching the occasional credit card number.

     Political activists, on the other hand, preoccupied as they are
     with the power structure, have typically paid little heed to the
     information infrastructure on which it rests. Motivated by the
     desire for social change, they generally see building communities
     of support and cooperation as essential.

     But the rapid growth of the Internet has transformed what was once
     a hacker playground into, among other things, a far-reaching
     political platform. What's more, the tricks invented by hackers
     have become easier for activists to learn and adopt because they
     are now widely published on how-to Web sites.

     As a result, radical groups are discovering what hackers have
     always known: Traditional social institutions are more vulnerable
     in cyberspace than they are in the physical world. Likewise, some
     members of the famously sophomoric hacker underground are finding
     motivation in causes other than ego gratification.

     In recent months, groups as diverse as the Animal Liberation Front,
     a militant animal-rights group; Radio4All, which supports pirate
     broadcasting, and international teams of teen-agers with cyber
     pseudonyms like Milworm and causes like anti-imperialism have
     increasingly begun pumping political protest through the Internet's
     security holes.

     On Oct., 27, a day after China's human rights agency announced its
     new Web site, the official view of that nation's human rights
     record was replaced with an electronic trespasser's manifesto:
     "China's people have no rights at all, never mind human rights. How
     can the United States trade millions and millions of dollars with
     them and give them most-favored trade status when they know what is
     happening?"

     Earlier in October, computer intruders scrawled "Save Kashmir" over
     the opening screen of a Web site that the Indian government set up
     last summer to provide information about the region, whose
     ownership is disputed by Pakistan and several separatist groups.
     The hacked site included photographs of Kashmiris allegedly killed
     by Indian forces, overlaid with the words "massacre" and
     "extra-judicial execution."

     In June, after the Indian government conducted nuclear tests,
     college students in Britain and the Netherlands claimed credit for
     placing the image of a mushroom cloud on the Web site of India's
     major nuclear weapons research center.

     In September, Portuguese hackers modified the sites of 40
     Indonesian servers to display the slogan "Free East Timor" in large
     black letters, and they added hypertext links to Web sites
     describing Indonesian human rights abuses in the former Portuguese
     colony.

     No slouches in packaging and self-promotion, the burgeoning
     computer underground has adopted a catchy term for the trend: they
     call it "hacktivism."

     "Hacktivism is a way to be heard by millions," a group of three
     Mexican hackers known as X-Ploit wrote in an e-mail message to a
     reporter. "We want to speak out about what we and many, many people
     disagree with in this treasonous and corrupt government. If we
     protest both on line and off line, we'll have better chances to see
     a change."

     The tactic is not limited to one end of the political spectrum. A
     group of Serbian computer hackers this month claimed responsibility
     for crashing a Web site promoting the ethnic Albanian cause in the
     Serbian province of Kosovo. The Serbian newspaper Blic quoted one
     of the hackers as saying, "We shall continue to remove ethnic
     Albanian lies from the Internet."

     Wednesday, the group, called Black Hand, after a clandestine
     Serbian military organization at the turn of the century, attacked
     the site of the Croatian state-owned newspaper Vjesnik. Croatian
     hackers counterattacked the next day, inserting messages like "Read
     Vjesnick and not Serbian books" on the Web site of the Serbian
     National Library, Vjesnik reported Friday.

     Guerrilla attacks on Web sites may seem more of a headline-grabbing
     ploy than true information warfare. But security experts said the
     recent spate of digital vandalism underscores the risk to companies
     and governments that increasingly rely on the Internet for commerce
     and communication.

     "What this demonstrates is the capacity of groups with political
     causes to hack into systems," said Michael Vatis, chief of the
     National Information Protection Center, a new federal agency formed
     to protect the nation's crucial infrastructure. "I wouldn't
     characterize vandalizing Web sites as cyber-terrorism, but the only
     responsible assumption we can make is there's more going on that we
     don't know about."

     Established by Attorney General Janet Reno this year, the center is
     in part a response to the perception that "political forces which
     could not take on the United States in conventional military terms
     stand a better chance on an electronic battlefield," said Vatis.

     The potency of the sling-shot approach is not lost on would-be
     hacktivists, either. "If you have 10 people at a protest, they
     don't do much of anything," said a Toronto-based computer jockey
     who calls himself Oxblood Ruffian. "If you have 10 people on line,
     they could cripple a network."

     Oxblood is a member of Cult of the Dead Cow, a hacker group that
     recently reserved the Web address www.hacktivism.org as an Internet
     distribution hub for tools to assist others in subversive digital
     activism. He said the group was planning to attack the Internet
     operations of U.S. companies doing business with China.

     But the effectiveness of such actions is unclear, prompting a
     debate over how best to implement the hacktivist brand of political
     protest.

     Under U.S. law, terrorism is defined as an act of violence for the
     purpose of intimidating or coercing a government or a civilian
     population. And breaking into a computer system and altering data
     are felonies.

     For that reason, the members of the Electronic Disturbance Theater
     emphasize that the software they use to attack Web sites disrupts
     Internet traffic but does not destroy data. In the tradition of
     civil disobedience protests, they encourage mass participation and
     use their real names.

     The group was forged in an online discussion among several American
     supporters of the Zapatistas, the first armed revolutionaries known
     to have solicited public sympathy for their struggle by publishing
     their communiques over the Internet.

     On Nov. 22, the group says, it plans to attack the Web site of the
     School for the Americas, a U.S. Army training center for foreign
     military personnel, some of whom have been accused of human rights
     abuses.

     Recent targets have included the sites of Mexican President Ernesto
     Zedillo and of the U.S. Defense Department.

     When online activists heed the call to "commence flooding!" they
     visit the group's Web site and click on an icon that launches a
     program called FloodNet. The software points their Web browser to
     the target of the attack, where it requests the same page over and
     over again at a rate of about 10 times per minute.

     This tactic is a variation of what is known in Internet
     security-speak as a "denial of service attack." An unusually large
     volume of requests will overwhelm the computer that is serving up
     the target's Web pages. This can cause legitimate visitors to see
     error messages instead of the pages they are seeking, and it can
     even crash the server computer.

     "This isn't cyber-terrorism," insisted Carmin Karasic, a Quincy,
     Mass., software engineer who designed the FloodNet program. "It's
     more like conceptual art."

     The U.S. Defense Department does not agree. Alerted to a planned
     FloodNet attack on its public site on Mexican Independence Day, the
     agency responded by diverting the requests to a nonexistent
     Internet address, a spokesman said.

     "If it wasn't illegal it was certainly immoral -- there are other
     constructive methods of electronic protest," the spokesman said.

     The victims of such attacks are not the only ones to criticize the
     digital desperados. In their quest for support from a public
     already suspicious of hackers and anxious about online safety, some
     political activists deride such methods as counterproductive.

Photo credit:
                                     Barbara Alper for The New York Times

Photo caption:
         Increasingly, activists have adopted computer hacking as a tool.
      Stefan Wray, Carmin Karasic and Ricardo Dominguez of the Electronic
         Disturbance Theater spoke at a panel discussion in New York this
                                                                   month.
     _________________________________________________________________

     And hackers faithful to the ethic of electronic exploration for its
     own sake deride Web site intrusions as the work of "script
     kiddies," an epithet for people who break into systems by using
     schemes developed by others rather than by searching out new
     security holes of their own. Script kiddies have been responsible
     for a recent surge in attacks throughout the Internet -- of which
     politically motivated hacks are a small fraction.

     But in e-mail and telephone interviews, several hackers promoting a
     political agenda -- all of whom refused to give their real names --
     insisted that their motives were pure.

     "We have hundreds of servers we could hack, and we don't," said
     Secretos, a Portuguese hacker in his early 20's whose group, the
     Kaotik Team, has taken up the cause of East Timor independence. "By
     contrary, we even help them to fix their bugs. The main objective
     of our hacking pages is to transmit the message. It is not, 'We are
     groovy, we have power."'

     John Vranesevitch, editor of Antionline, an Internet publication
     that tracks hacker activities, said the apparent political
     awakening among hackers reflects a generation's coming of age.

     "We're starting to see right now the first generation of people who
     have grown up on the Internet," said Vranesevitch, who at 19 counts
     himself among that group. "These hackers are entering the ages
     where people are most politically active. This is their outlet."

     And some are trying to make that outlet more accessible. A
     26-year-old University of Toronto dropout calling himself Perl
     Bailey, after a computer language popular among Web developers,
     said he had earned a living as a software developer and had dabbled
     in not entirely legal computer exploration for several years. Now,
     he is writing a tool to arm computer novices with basic hacktivist
     techniques.

     "After you reach a certain point, it feels like you are dressed up
     with nowhere to go," he said. "I want to make people doing
     questionable business dealings with countries that have no respect
     for human rights worry that someone who doesn't have a grade school
     education can sit down and go click-click and create havoc. To me
     that to me is very powerful."


   Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company