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such as the World Summit for Sustainable Development. Some bloggers engaged in
''Google bombs,'' campaigns designed to catapult their target blog to the top of the
behemoth search engine's rankings (Kahn and Kellner
2004
). Today, Daily Kos is
easily the largest blog in the world: founded by Markos Moulitsas in 2002, it averages
over 600,000 hits per day, supports and raises funds for progressive political can-
didates and serves as a forum for a wide variety of leftist groups. Similar blogs
include Democratic Underground, FireDogLake, Raw Story, Talking Points Memo,
Americablog, and Metafilter.
A virtual sit-in is the cyberspace equivalent of a physical sit-in or blockade.
A group calling itself Strano Network conducted one of the first such demon-
strations as a protest against French government policies on nuclear and social
issues. On December 21, 1995, they launched a one-hour NetStrike attack against
the web sites operated by various government agencies. On September 9, 1998 the
Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) took the concept of electronic civil dis-
obedience a step further; they organized a series of web sit-ins, first against
Mexican President Zedillo's web site, then against the Pentagon and the Frankfurt
Stock Exchange, delivering 600,000 hits per minute to each (Denning
2002
); they
also targeted the GOP convention in New York in 2004.
Social movements' uses of the internet also include aggressive instances of
hacktivism, a series of cybertactics that includes denial-of-service attacks,
defacement of websites, information theft, and virtual sabotage (Jordan and Taylor
2004
). For example, in 1998 the group Milworm hacked into India's Bhabha
Atomic Research Center in Mumbai, posting an anti-nuclear message on its
website. The 1999 meeting of the G8 in Cologne, Germany, was attacked by a
group called J18, including hackers from Indonesia, Israel, Germany, and Canada
who launched 10,000 denial of service attacks in a five hour period against the
computers of at least 20 companies and the London Stock Exchange (Ungoed and
Sheehan
1999
). In 2000, a group of ''electrohippies'' overloaded the webpages of
the World Trade Organization (Langman
2005
). Tamil guerrillas swamped Sri
Lankan embassies around the world with thousands of electronic mail messages
that read ''We are the Internet Black Tigers and we're doing this to disrupt your
communications'' (Denning
2002
). Cult of the Dead Cow, one of the largest and
most famous hacktivist groups (with spin-offs such as Ninja Strike Force and
Hacktivismo), launched repeated denial-of-service attacks against the Church of
Scientology, and also cooperated with Hong Kong hackers working against
Chinese internet censorship. Other anonymous hackers have attacked websites of
conservative commentators Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin. Of course, this tactic
works both ways: Chinese hackers, for example, have launched attacks against
CNN and film festivals deemed to be critical of the Chinese state. Still other
hacktivists released open source software such as OpenOffice, a shareware version
of Microsoft's Office suite, to challenge the behemoth's dominance in this sector.
As Huschle (
2002
) points out, cyberspace transforms the nature of civil disobe-
dience, allowing small groups or even single individuals in one country to have far
larger significant impacts at a distance in other countries than is possible through
conventional tactics such as demonstrations and sit-ins.
