Immediately following the January 1, 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, EZLN communiquΘs began to appear on e-mail listservs all over the world. This rapid widespread dispersal of communiques and other information, and the subsequent establishment of intercontinental networks of solidarity and resistance, are among the reasons the Zapatistas survive.

In the 1980s we saw the emergence of the computer hackers - people skilled in programming with the technical knowledge to break into computer systems in order to disrupt, remove, add or destroy information. Early hackers were seduced by the pure joy of figuring out ways to hack into the computers of the Department of Defense, banks or other large-scale computer-dependent institutions that maintain massive databases. Some young hackers later turned corporate, applying their sharply honed skills as security specialists. But the first generation of hackers is still around and active. Moreover, a second generation of hackers emerged in the 1990s. While all hackers are clearly not adverse to transgressing the boundary between the legal and the illegal, not all are political. The politicized hacker, however, is a growing subset of the larger hacker world.

We are witness to a convergence of the computerized activist and the politicized hacker. This coming together of forces will open up unforeseen doors and possibilities. As a way to envision what this hybridized activist-hacker might engage in, it is instructive to borrow the metaphor of civil disobedience with its tactics of trespass and blockade. When we apply this metaphor to cyberspace we imagine electronic civil disobedience.

The National Commission for Democracy in Mexico called for protests at Mexican consulates on April 10 to coincide with major mobilizations in Mexico City. Soon thereafter, the New York Zapatistas called a protest at the Mexican consulate in Manhattan and endorsed a call for electronic civil disobedience. That news moved swiftly across the Net.

Just as people may physically trespass upon real property, people may trespass upon virtual property. Just as people may blockade entranceways to buildings, offices or factories, people may blockade entranceways to portals in cyberspace, to the doors and bridges that allow entrance and egress into corporate or governmental computer systems. This level of cyber-activism is still in its incubation period. While radical social movements have used e-mail for the last ten years and website-based communication for almost five, the strategies and tactics of disrupting the electronic fabric are still being developed.

Electronic civil disobedience already occurred earlier this year. Following the Acteal massacre of 45 indigenous people in Chiapas, Mexico in late December 1997, there was a global upsurge of condemnation. Information about the massacre and announcements of protests at Mexican consulates and embassies were transmitted over the Net. The largest response was in the form of physical street protest, drawing crowds of 5,000 to 10,000 in places like Spain and Italy. But there were also calls for actions in cyberspace. On the low end of cyber-activism, people sent large amounts of e-mail to selected targets. In some of these instances, the intent may only have been to deliver a powerful message. But if pushed to its limits, massive amounts of e-mail can cause system overload.

In January, the Anonymous Digital Coalition issued a plan for virtual sit-ins on five websites of Mexico City financial corporations. They issued information about the time zones so people could act together at 10 a.m. Mexico City time. They instructed people to use their Internet browsers to repeatedly reload the websites of these financial institutions, requiring many people to repeatedly strike certain keys on their keyboards. If many people together send a reload request to a website, it can effectively blockade access to the site. The site becomes overloaded with requests.

Building on this relatively unsophisticated method of repeated simultaneous downloading, software has emerged that automates this action. These small programs are called ping engines. They are basically small looped programs that impart the same instructions repeatedly. Pinging some sites may have relatively little impact, especially sites that don't get much traffic. But pinging, and hence blocking, highly trafficked sites that contain "useful" information may cause a greater disturbance.

Another tool is the offshore spam engine, a form-driven website based in another country that enables a user to automatically distribute massive quantities of e-mail to particular addresses. One problem associated with the offshore spam engine is that once a targeted address becomes aware of an e-mail onslaught, a cyber security team can put up barriers.

Besides devices that act upon the entranceways, programmers are now developing intelligent agents that can crawl through a website. One such agent is called a spider. Good spiders are designed to crawl quickly through websites in search of pertinent information. But bad spiders are being designed to crawl very slowly with the intent of causing disruption.

Issues of personal security arise when considering tactics that go beyond sending messages with political content to an adversary, i.e. when the message form becomes a disruptive instrument. It is not illegal to send letters expressing dissent to government or corporate e-mail addresses. But questions of legality emerge with the application of more sophisticated techniques that automate dispersion of multiple electronic signals that cause an electronic disturbance. The higher a hacker is on the tactical scale, the more crucial it is to mask identities and not leave traces of actions. Having several different free e-mail accounts under assumed names is one way to accomplish this goal. A number of websites now offer free e-mail accounts where anonymity is possible.

Given that this politicized hacker/computerized activist hybridization is still in its incubation period, we can only expect that sophisticated tactics like ping engines, spiders and offshore spam engines are early prototypes of more to come. While these types of computerized tactics come out of people's experience within the context of the global pro-Zapatista movement, other radical social movements are also showing signs of interest in these new cybernetic direct action tactics. Urbanized environmental movements, like the efforts of the Lower East Side Collective in Manhattan to save community gardens from city encroachment, have started to go on-line using their computers and modems to send fax jams to New York City government offices [see article page 22].

There must now be thousands of activists throughout the world who are independently coming to similar conclusions about how we can use computers to take political action that goes beyond political communication. While valid arguments can be raised against the computer, and against the technological society that the computer engenders, it is foolish to turn one's back on that machine, especially when the machine offers possibilities for resistance to the very society that created it. Those already convinced of the efficacy of computers for political action should continue. Those with critical stances toward computers should take a second look and consider how computers might be used as instruments for committing widespread massive electronic civil disobedience against the corporate, governmental and financial institutions currently responsible for destruction of life on this planet.

Stefan Wray is a doctoral student at New York University, sjw210@is8.nyu.edu.