Electrohippies

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The Electrohippies Collective (Ehippies) is an international group of internet activists based in Oxfordshire, England, whose purpose is to express disapproval of governmental policies of mass media censorship and control of the Internet "in order to provide a 'safe environment' for corporations to do their deals."[1]

Significant actions

Against the WTO, 1999

The protest against the

denial-of-service (DOS) action. This tactic blocked the computer network
servicing the WTO meeting by flooding it with requests. The Ehippies claimed success for the action, saying 450,000 people participated over 5 days, resulting in the WTO conference network being constantly slowed and periodically brought to a halt.

Their claim was disputed by staff of Conxion, the ISP hosting the conference website, who deployed a

counter-attack "crashed" the Ehippies' server within seconds, forcing them to move to another ISP. The majority of hits to the Ehippies' site were thus their own attack page attacking itself. Conxion claimed to have logged fewer than 10,000 unique-source IP addresses. The attack page consisted of nine frames, three attacking the San Jose conference server, three against the Virginia server and three against the main WTO server. The Chicago conference server was not attacked and remained entirely unaffected. However, the WTO main website server, hosted by another provider, did not benefit from the rewrite-engine fix and did suffer significantly from the DOS attack.[3]

The Ehippies justified their campaign tactic as enabling tens of thousands of remote computer users to join the Seattle protest action. They pointed out that the action could not have worked without the support of sufficient people—purporting to demonstrate that there was significant support for their action.[2]: p.77 

Against the IMF/WB, 2000

As a follow-up to their WTO action, the Ehippies and volunteers tried to shut down the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank websites by a "virtual sit-in" in conjunction with 'real world' protests in Washington, D.C. in April 2000. Some 5000 online participants were able to cause only intermittent slowdowns on those sites.[2]: p.25 

Response to 'anti-terror' laws

The collective was forced to subside temporarily into inaction by the British government's The Terrorism Act 2000 and The Regulation of Investigatory Power Act 2000, perceived as significantly changing the right of British citizens to freely use the internet for political and protest action.[1] Now it "focusses on the use of technology by activists, mainly through organising workshops and quietly assisting 'behind the scenes' of other campaigns. Current campaigns are the "Simple" energy-focused campaign and the "Browser Alert" campaign against proprietary software abuses and Digital rights management.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Cyberlaw UK: Civil rights and protest on the Internet Archived 2008-07-25 at the Wayback Machine(PDF) December 2000 communiqué of Electrohippies Collective
  2. ^ a b c Jordan T & Taylor P Hactivism and Cyber War, Rebel with a Cause? Routledge, New York 2004
  3. ^ Radcliff D Hack Back Archived 2008-02-26 at the Wayback Machine 29 May 2000

External links