from Wall Street Journal

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110010862

Back in 1998, the New York Times carried a story on "hacktivism,"
which it defined as "computer hacking . . . as a means to a political
end." Online vandals had broken into government computer systems in
China, India, Indonesia, Serbia and Croatia, and inserted their own messages.

Another tactic was the denial-of-service attack, in which "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." An outfit called Electronic Disturbance Theater had used
denial-of-service attacks against America's defenses:

On Nov. 22 [1998], the group says, it plans to attack the Web site of the School
of the Americas, a United States Army training center for foreign military
personnel, some of whom have been accused of human rights abuses.

Recent targets have included the sites of Mexico's President, Ernesto Zedillo,
and of the United States Defense Department.

Read the rest by clicking the title of this article or click read more below...

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,312239,00.html

Cyber Terror

During the late nineties media reports profiled an organization called
Electronic Disturbance Theater that staged cyber attacks on the Pentagon, the
Frankfurt Stock Exchange and other targets. It was called
"hacktivism" — and two of the group's leaders were Ricardo
Dominguez and Brett Stalbaum.

Now The Wall Street Journal reports the men not only were not punished —
they have obtained tenured positions at the University of California at San
Diego. Dominguez is an assistant professor teaching new media art, performance
art, hacktivism, artivism and nanoculture. Stalbaum is what's called "a
lecturer with security of employment" — teaching new media
environmental performance art.

Wall Street Journal article continued...

This worried U.S. officials, even during the Clinton
administration:

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 A. Vatis, chief of the National
Information Protection Center, a new Federal agency. ''I wouldn't
characterize vandalizing Web sites as cyberterrorism, 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 Mr. Vatis, deputy assistant director
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

A Forbes article at about the same time profiled Electronic Disturbance
Theater's Ricardo Dominguez and Brett Stalbaum, and described EDT's
"biggest event," a "simultaneous attack on Zedillo's web
site (again), the Pentagon and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange":

But this time, the protestors were attacked in their own right. Stalbaum
suspects that Pentagon programmers detoured FloodNet traffic into a
hostile applet of its own, which caused browsers to crash. "They even
called their applet 'hostile applet,' " says Stalbaum, who dissected
it.

Dominguez loves the intrigue. "As a person of the theater, I couldn't
have created a better script--the drama, the conflict."

Forbes called this an "art project" and quoted Dominguez
describing his actions as "electronic civil disobedience."

You still hear about "hacktivism"--this summer, for instance,
there was an attack on Estonian servers, presumably originating in Russia.
But in the wake of Sept. 11, and amid concerns that al Qaeda may employ
"cyber-terrorism" as well as the offline kind, this all seems a
lot less cute than it did in the innocent days of 1998.

Yet Dominguez not only is unrepentant but actually complained, in a 2004
interview with the Gothamist, that when he attacked the Pentagon, he was
the victim:

Take for example the Department of Defense. They attacked EDT during the
September 9th, 1998 VR Sit-In we did during the Ars Electronica Festival,
in Linz, Austria--the DOD used a counter-hostile Java applet against
FloodNet, which is the first offensive use of information war by a
government against a civilian server that we know of.

We believe we should be protected from such actions, that the government
cannot attack civilians using any kind of software or hardware. What has
become apparent is the kind of violence that these information war systems
are now implementing against civilians to control whatever public space
there is.

Dominguez is trying to have it both ways: When he attacks the government's
computers, it is an act of nonviolent "civil disobedience"; when
the government responds in kind, it is "violence . . . against
civilians."

Real civil disobedience--think Gandhi or Dr. King or Rosa Parks--is in
effect a dare: You defy an unjust law and, in doing so, defy the
government to punish you for it, thereby underscoring its injustice. But
there's nothing unjust about laws protecting government computer systems
from electronic vandalism.

And how have Dominguez and Stalbaum been punished for their actions? With
tenure. Dominguez is an assistant professor and Stalbaum a "lecturer
with security of employment" on the visual arts faculty of the
University of California, San Diego, a state institution. Real civil
disobedience is a dangerous act of idealism; Dominguez and Stalbaum's "hacktivism" was a risk-free act of self-promotion.

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