Electrohippies

The Electrohippies Collective (Ehippies) is an international group of internet activist based in Oxfordshire, England. Whose purpose is to express its disapproval of government policies to mass media censorship, control and seeking to “police” the Internet “in order to provide a'safe environment' for corporations to do their deals.” [Cited The Electrohippies Collective, 2000 [http://www.iwar.org.uk/hackers/resources/electrohippies-collective/comm-2000-12.pdf] ]

The protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999 was a key event in the anti-globalisation movement. Thousand of people gathered to disrupt the World Trade Organisation conference by preventing delegates from entering the conference venue (Jordan, T & Taylor, P 2005, p.41). Simultaneously, a mass virtual direct action was taking place. The online protest was run by The Electrohippies Collective with what is now a familiar aspect of cyber space: a denial-of-service (DOS) action. This tactic blocked the computer network servicing the WTO meeting by flooding it with request. The Ehippies claimed the action was successful with the WTO conference network being constantly slowed and brought to a complete total halt and with 450 000 people participating over 5 days.

This claim is disputed by staff at Conxion, the ISP hosting the conference website. Using a simple mod_rewrite rule the attack traffic was redirected to the attack page itself, crashing the ehippies server within seconds of loading the rule, forcing them to move to another ISP. The majority of hits to their site were their own attack page attacking itself. Conxion logged well under 10,000 unique source IP addresses. The attack page consisted of 9 frames, 3 attacking the San Jose conference server, 3 against the Virginia server and 3 against the main WTO server. The Chicago conference server was not attacked and remained entirely unaffected. The WTO main website server, hosted by another provider, did not benefit from the mod_rewrite fix and did suffer significantly from the DOS attack. [Hack Back - Network World 5/29/00 [http://www.networkworld.com/research/2000/0529feat2.html] ]

The Ehippies justification for their denial of service strike is that their protest is a valid campaign tactic because similarly to the ‘real word’ there are tens of thousands of individual computer users involved in the action. The requests sent to the target server are generated by ordinary Internet using their own desktop computer. That means, if there are not enough people supporting then the action doesn’t work… demonstrated that there was significant support the for Ehippies action.Harv |Jordan,T and Taylor, A, P. |2004|p=77

After the WTO demonstration, The Ehippies and volunteers have tried shut down the IMF and World Bank web sites in conjunction with the 'real world' protests in D.C. in April 2000 with virtual sit-in. however, the action was a "half-success" that caused some intermittent slowdowns on the sites of the World Bank, IMF by 5000 participant. Far fewer participant compare to the WTO Seattle protest. Harv |Jordan,T and Taylor, A, P. |2004|p=25

According to a news letter by the Ehippies, the Collective have been inactive due to British government new Acts. [http://www.iwar.org.uk/hackers/resources/electrohippies-collective/comm-2000-12.pdf] The Terrorism Act 2000 and The Regulation of Investigatory Power Act 2000 significantly change the right of British citizen to freely use the internet for political and protest action. According to the Ehippies, the Acts stated that “the use or threat is designed to influence the government OR to intimidate the public or a section of the public” therefore objective to the noted above could be construed as “terrorism”.

References

*wikicite|id=idJordan 2004|reference=Jordan, T & Taylor, P (2004). "Hactivism and Cyber War, Rebel with a Cause?", Routlet, New York.

External links

http://cristine.org/borders/Ehippies_Essay.html