Guerrilla action

After WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was held by a London court,a force of Internet freedom-fighters have rallied around,in protest and direct action. These hacktivists are part of a group called Anonymous,who see his arrest as part of the slow creep of censorship and corrupt institutions that cannot handle the truth. With Operation Payback,through a series of crippling distributed denial of service attacks,they partially paralysed Mastercard,PayPal and Visa for refusing to take donations for WikiLeaks,threatened Amazon which denied hosting services and even Sarah Palin for her criticism of Assange,and have let it be known that several others who refused to have any truck with WikiLeaks are on their radar.Hacking has a long and complex back-story,and many ethical nuan-ces and internal critiques even though now its associated with computer crime and a simple breaking-and-entering. Hacktivism really coalesced around the anti-globalisation movement though even before that,Digital Zapatismo created insurrectionary networks and its methods range from virtual sit-ins,vandalism,jokes and concerted attacks on a sprawling scale. This digital civil disobedience is very hard to counter,as government agencies and companies admit they are no match for crowdsourced vendetta. A member of Anonymous told the BBC that this siege was the only effective way to tell these companies that us,the people,are displeased. By which he means a bunch of hackers with an irrational investment in Assanges fate and simple ideas about the people and the elites are displeased most people,in fact,might prefer to be able to get on with daily transactions and not have their computers unwittingly enlisted in ideological battles. Either way,all the rest of us can hope for is they direct their displeasure elsewhere,as they have now indicated they might.