A few weeks ago, several members of a hacking group called Legions of the Underground declared an ''electronic war'' against China and Iraq. Citing violations of human rights, the hackers vowed to punish those countries by destroying their computer systems.
This virtual call to arms went largely unnoticed by most of the world, and the threat of destruction never materialized. But it created an uproar in the cyberunderground: A coalition of hacking groups, known for their staunch independence and insular rivalries, issued an unprecedented joint statement condemning the audacious declaration and ''any attempt to use hacking to threaten or destroy the information infrastructure of any country.'' Legions of Underground quickly backed down.
The incident intensified an ongoing debate about ''hacktivism'' - the use of computers to advance political causes. The term, coined in recent months, covers everything from animal rights groups defacing the Web pages of fur companies to the use of computers by dissidents to promote democracy in totalitarian regimes. Targeted Web sites have included government pages of Indonesia and India, Mexico and China, as well as sites operated by NASA, the US Army, and the Department of Defense. The tools range from legitimate e-mail campaigns to on-line graffiti to software programs with names like Back Orifice and Floodnet.
Political activists, who until recently got their message across through rallies and marches and sit-ins and slogans, are taking their causes on line in record numbers; they are now engaging in what they call ''electronic civil disobedience.'' At the same time, however, young hackers in their teens and early 20s are defacing Web sites and, apparently as an afterthought, attaching a political cause to their efforts. Such actions worry activists and veteran hackers alike, and raise several thorny questions:
What are the limits of political protest in cyberspace, where the boundaries between public and private space are murky? How far can activists go without infringing on the rights of the people against whom they are protesting? As international reliance on computer technology increases, can anyone with a little technical know-how declare their own war?
To some extent, varying views on those questions stem from the tension inherent between members of two generations. The older hackers - many of whom hold jobs and have families, and are known as the ''elites'' - fear trouble on the horizon. Meanwhile, some of the youngsters - called ''script kiddies,'' a term to describe cyberpunks who borrow other people's programs to seek on-line thrills - have no such reservations.
But at the very least, the emergence of hacktivism has created a tentative esprit de corps among some hackers and nonprofit political groups, who until recently inhabited vastly different worlds. Consider what happened in October: A 25-year-old computer science student who goes by the name Bronc Buster hacked into China's official human rights Web site on the day it was launched. He scrawled the words ''Boycott China,'' along with a screed riddled with obscenities, across the page and added links to such legitimate activist organizations as Amnesty International and the New York-based group Human Rights in China.
Bronc Buster, who does not give his real name and is a member of Legions of the Underground who criticized the war declaration, said in a telephone interview that he studied contemporary China in a college course and was motivated by both his outrage over human rights abuse and the fact that the Chinese computer system was ''pathetically easy'' to crack. ''Everything I read on that site was total baloney,'' he said. ''The idea of human rights in China is like the Nazis saying the Holocaust never happened.''
Xiao Qiang, executive director of Human Rights in China, a dissident group founded after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, said he does not endorse such political techniques but that his group benefited from the attention. Their Web site, which chronicles human rights abuses, received 5,000 hits the day after the hack and signed up scores of new members. ''They certainly did a brave thing in terms of exposing the Chinese government propaganda site,'' Qiang said. ''We don't officially encourage hacking activities, but it certainly helped our cause.''
Barry Steinhardt, outgoing president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union, says that electronic civil disobedience in the United States may be well-motivated, but it also may be an act of vandalism. An FBI spokesperson in Washington said there are no closed investigations to date, but Steinhardt predicts that test cases are inevitable - and perhaps imminent.
More and more hackers, particularly the older generation who got their kicks breaking into computer systems in the '70s and '80s, are becoming more politically motivated. ''It's a natural evolution,'' said Emmanuel Goldstein, editor of the hacking magazine 2600 and a member of the coalition that condemned the recent ''cyberwar'' call. ''People believe in something, and they do anything they can to get the word out.''
But some insiders in the hacking world see a need for a hacktivism strategy that goes beyond on-line graffiti and inflamed battle rhetoric. ''You may make yourself feel good and get a lot of attention, but when you crack a Web site, you are violating another person's rights,'' said a Canadian computer consultant who goes by the alias Oxblood Ruffin, and is a member of a hacking group called Cult of the Dead Cow. ''Sure, China is the worst place in the world, but if we can do that to them, what does that mean? We can yell louder. We can shout the other guy down. I believe there is a better way for political dissent. I believe we can make a better technical argument. We can mount a better moral argument.''
Some say that political activism could change the negative public perception of hackers, who are commonly seen as social misfits. The hacking underground became politicized in 1995, rallying around the cause of the infamous hacker Kevin Mitnick, who was arrested in 1995 on charges of obtaining unauthorized access to corporate computer systems and stealing and copying proprietary software. Mitnick, who is awaiting trial, had already done time on similar charges. Many legendary ''hacktivist'' actions, including the break-ins in China, refer to the Mitnick case.
''Why do people who are supposedly engaged in political causes have links to Kevin Mitnick?'' asked Michael A. Vatis, chief of the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, an agency formed last year to monitor computer terrorism and oversee FBI computer-related crime investigations.
''It's misleading to use the term `hacktivism' to apply to a broad array of conduct,'' Vatis says. ''People should be more specific about what they mean. It connotes some sort of legitimacy to what they are doing, and some people are using it to cloak activity that is potentially serious and dangerous conduct.''
The members of the Electronic Disturbance Theater are, in fact, quite precise about their activity, and like political activists who practice civil disobedience in the real world, they back up their action by using their real names.
Since last April, they have conducted on-line sit-ins to protest the Mexican government's treatment of the Zapatistas in Chiapas. They use a program called Floodnet, which repeatedly requests access to a targeted Web site, such as the home site of Ernesto Zedillo, president of Mexico, or the Pentagon. If thousands of people run the Floodnet software at the same time, it could tie up the server so that browsers would not be able to gain access to a targeted site.
''We're trying to create enough of a disturbance to talk about what is going on in Mexico,'' said Carmin Karasic, a Quincy digital artist and computer consultant who is one of the four members of the collective.
Karasic equates her group's virtual tactics with real-world sit-ins. ''If we had a civil disturbance at Neponset Circle, you wouldn't be able to get to my house,'' she said. ''But you wouldn't think that those people should be arrested. A sit-in means that someone is going to be inconvenienced. We're trying to push the limits of political interaction on line.''
Unlike other hacktivists, the members of the Electronic Disturbance Theater are well-versed in both political and cyber theory. Their on-line efforts, they say, supplement traditional forms of political dissent. ''There are things you can do on line that you can't do in real space and vice versa,'' said Stefan Wray, a New York-based freelance journalist and graduate student at New York University. ''On line, you can't have a virtual sense of group cohesion or the euphoria or camaraderie that you get with a large gathering in the real world. But that group of people on the street doesn't have the speed and sense of interconnectivity at the global level.''
The group on the street, however, does know the boundaries: If they choose to throw paint at a nuclear reactor or block access to a women's health clinic, they are willingly defying the law to promote their cause. ''In front of a building, you get to play your First Amendment card all the way to the door before you are dragged away,'' said Jonathan Zittrain, executive director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
''In cyberspace, you don't have clear public byways intersecting private spaces, so there is no place to camp out and play your First Amendment card. If you try to deny service to someone else, by whatever means you use, you could be in pretty big trouble.'' The FBI spokesperson said that the use of Floodnet could constitute a federal crime: It is illegal to intentionally block access to an Internet server. But the members of the collective argue that they are simply gathering at the gateway, not chaining themselves to the door.
Electronic Disturbance Theater's activities fall into a gray area of the law, but one thing is clear: Political activism is evolving as quickly as the technology itself. Karasic and her partners are speaking at a national conference on civil disobedience - they'll enlighten the group on hacktivism - that wraps up today at American University in Washington.
The worlds of the hacker and the activist are interconnecting in ways that civil rights organizers and antiwar protesters of other eras could never have foreseen. But members of both groups are concerned that they don't inadvertently start a war themselves by prompting zealots or thrill-seekers to mimic their actions and make sweeping threats like the one issued a few weeks ago.
In the case of the recent ''war'' declaration by the Legions of the Underground, the very hacker groups who advocate for free access to information on the Internet acted to police their own underground community, condemning the action and issuing a hacktivism manifesto of sorts at the same time. ''Do not support any acts of cyberwar,'' the statement said. ''Keep the networks of communication alive. They are the nervous system for human progress.''