THE technicians at the World Trade Organisation got a bit suspicious when "journalists" in an online press conference went by screen names such as, "NO-TO-WTO".
Still,
WTO director-general Mike Moore gamely answered all questions thrown at him - until he was knocked offline by anti-globalisation protesters with excellent computer skills.
Last week, similarly motivated hacktivists grabbed headlines, announcing they had collected credit cards and personal data on some 1400 business and political leaders by breaking into the database of last month's World Economic Forum.
Increasingly, social activists have turned to hacking to make their point, breaking into computer systems and wreaking havoc on organisations they oppose.
The internet has turned out to be a remarkable tool for non-violent protest on a scale activists could only dream of before.
The term hacktivist was first applied to supporters of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas, who have sabotaged Mexican government websites since 1998 and held virtual sit-ins designed to overload servers.
More recently, the tactic has been used in Serbia, Pakistan and India - and by both Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East.
In one case, Palestinian sympathisers broke into a website operated by a pro-Israel lobbying group in the United States, stealing credit card information and email addresses.
But the theft of private data is a relatively new tactic that goes beyond defacing websites and electronic bombardment of servers.
Anti-globalist protesters contend the WTO's trade treaties benefit big corporations and rich countries at the expense of the environment and workers.
They consider the World Economic Forum, which holds its high-profile annual meetings in the Swiss resort of Davos, to epitomise the elitist deal-making they oppose.
Protesters who showed up in person were largely stymied by a heavy police presence at last month's Davos meeting. But online they effectively surmounted physical barriers.
The net "is another frontier for people to engage in these types of activities", Foundstone security analyst Joel Scambray says.
The attacks against forum organisers showed just how far hacktivists could reach. They obtained the travel itineraries, including flight numbers, of politicians from around the world, and published them on the web.
"This poses operational security problems, and goes beyond what we've seen before," vice-president of London-based Control Risks Group, Kent Anderson, says.
Almost every major corporation and organisation has been hit at one time or another by hacking, with McDonald's, Starbucks and the WTO among the favourite targets.
During the WTO's last major meeting, in Seattle in December 1999, the organisation faced attempts to shut down its system.
"There were millions of bits of spam thrown at us, but we had a good defence that bounced these right back, WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell says.
People are still being misled by a copycat website using the WTO's old name, GATT, and looking nearly identical to the real WTO site.
"It's quite clever and quite funny. But it's less funny when people believe it, as has been the case, and go to a lot of trouble and then are deceived," Rockwell says.
But the malicious nature of some of the hacktivism troubles some. The editor of the Toronto-based online magazine, The Hacktivist, who goes by the pseudonym metac0m, says the "theft of personal info, credit cards and the like" bothers him. It discredits hacktivism as a form of protest and civil disobedience. I'd rather those who engage in cracking databases access the documents being crafted out of public view and scrutiny," he says.
Metac0m credits more effective hacktivists with the 1998 downfall of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Multilateral Agreement on Investment.
"When activists posted that on the internet it was a huge victory because the public saw what was in that agreement, realised it was not in their interest, that they had no input into it, and rejected it," he says.
The Associated Press
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