ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of hacktivism demonstrates the extent of the challenge of translating democratic discourse to the Internet. Hacktivism is, as the name suggests, the marriage of computer hacking and political activism. The first widely acknowledged example was a 1998 virtual sit-in against the Mexican government, in solidarity with the Zapatista rebels. The sit-in consisted of a simple script that participants could use to direct their Web browsers to constantly reload the government’s main Web page, overloading the site with traffic in the hope that it would slow or crash. This event, dubbed Floodnet, was created by a New York-based group of activists who called themselves the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT).
