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December 2,
1999
Fight the Power – From
the Comfort of Home!
For many ex-hippies,
campus radicals and street-theater lovers, missing the protests in
Seattle must be painful indeed. Luckily, just as the Internet has
allowed us to do so many other things remotely, you can now stick it
to the man without leaving the house. As journalists from
MSNBC and ABC
reported, the Net is playing an important role in disrupting the WTO
talks.
"Can't get to Seattle to wreak havoc on city streets near this
week's WTO ministerial meetings? There are virtual alternatives,"
wrote Bob Sullivan at MSNBC. Sullivan and ABC's
Michael J. Martinez focused on three aspects of online dissent:
sites used for organizing real-life protests, parodies of official
Web pages and a site designed to bring down the real WTO site by
flooding it with hits. In fact, Martinez implied that the Internet
made the Seattle demonstrations possible. "Protesters from around
the globe have used the Internet to organize protests and to speak
out against the violence surrounding the trade talks currently under
way in Seattle," he wrote. "With the number of organized and
semi-organized protests around the city this week, it appears they
have been successful. Indeed, disparate groups from the Direct
Action Network to the AFL-CIO
to various environmental and human-rights groups have organized
rallies and protests online, allowing for a global reach that would
have been unthinkable just five years ago."
But the Net has been more than a rallying tool; it has allowed
those who can't take time off from their day jobs to engage in cyber
civil disobedience. It seems that crafty activists control the
domain names Gatt.org and SeattleWTO.org. According to Sullivan,
Gatt.org is run by the culture-jamming organization RTMark, the same
group that operates protest pages GWBush.com and yesrudy.com. That
last one is aimed at New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose real
site is at rudyyes.com.
Even more mischievous is a "virtual sit-in" run by a group called
the Electrohippies, which both Sullivan and Martinez covered. The
site opens multiple browser windows on a visitor's computer, all
requesting information from the WTO servers, thus eventually
overloading and crashing them. Sullivan reported that the
Electrohippies have also promised "an e-mail-based attack on the WTO
or a 'related target'" on Friday. The revolution may not be
televised, but it will certainly be Netcast. - M.G.
WTO
Webcast a Wash
The Industry Standard
WTO Protest Spills
Onto the Web
MSNBC
Networked
Protests
ABC News
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