Hacktivism
(Or as Subcomandante Marcos stated "What governments should really fear is an expert in communications technology").

The hacker-activist alliance, what Critical Art Ensemble suggested was the science fiction avant-garde of political activism in 1994, became a concrete reality in 1998, the year hacktivism (the term and a public awareness of the activity) hit the Internet and the front pages of main stream media.

One year earlier, in 1997 a Hamburg based museum announced the first ever museum sponsored net art competition entitled "Extension". In response, Cornelia Sollfrank created an electronic disturbance she called Female Extension, which consisted of flooding the museum's network with three hundred net art submissions from international female net artists (all fakes) together with their automatically generated net art. The museum was so pleased with the positive response to their call - so many entries, from so many countries, and in this male dominated field - so many women - that they sent out a press release boasting about their success. Soon after, in another press release, the results of the contest were released. Despite the unusual volume of female artists, three men received the top three awards for their net art.

In 1998, The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), their name and tactics derived from the theoretical base laid out four years earlier by CAE,(one member of EDT had been a part of the latter collective), developed a free web based software called FloodNet. The software, once directed at its target site, repeatedly attempts to contact its target, so that enough users pointing to the same site will cause a temporary denial of service (DOS), that is, temporarily deny users access to the site.

EDT's first large scale action, called SWARM, was carried out in support of the Mexican Zapatistas. Participants were asked to use FloodNet to target the Web sites of Mexican President Zedillos, the White House, the Pentagon and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. An estimated 10,000 people participated in the action and delivered 600,000 hits per minute. In response, the US Defense Department launched a counter-attack. When their server noted the presence of the FloodNet servers, it redirected the user's browser to a site containing an Applet program that incessantly tied up the user's machine until rebooted. But both the attack and the counter attack were in and of themselves inconsequential compared to the amount of media attention subsequently directed towards the action and thus towards the Zapatistas, and as a result, a disturbance was achieved.

A similar FloodNet attack was used during the collective Internet protest last December against the on-line toy store eToys, which was legally pressuring a small art collective, etoy, to give up its domain name. Flooding the corporation's server days before the Christmas holidays, together with various concerted efforts from numerous on-line groups resulted in a "flood" of mainstream media coverage. This effectively served to embarrass the e-commerce company into withdrawing their lawsuit against the European art
group etoy (and paying all their legal fees).