An new breed of citizen activists is conducting digital espionage to monitor how traffic is routed through countries, where Web sites are blocked and why it's all happening. Now they are turning their scrutiny to a new weapon of international warfare: cyber attacks.

Players in online role-playing games such as Everquest and the Sims are increasingly organizing online to protest events in the real world, like the possible U.S. war with Iraq.

Pro-Islamic hackers are on the frontline of a potential new cyber-war after the end of a ceasefire by "hacktivists" and virus designers that followed the September 11 attacks on the United States, according to Internet experts.

The Defense Department was braced for a new onslaught of cyber attacks from Chinese hackers in May 2002 but they never materialized: the Chinese government asked private hackers not to repeat the 2001 defacement of U.S. government Web sites according to U.S. defence officials.

Western hackers are developing peer-to-peer programs to defeat the Internet censorship barriers of repressive countries overseas such as Iran or China. These programs will allow Western users to act as an anonymous channel for individuals in repressive countries, raising interesting questions about the involvement of web volunteers in active information warfare against foreign governments.

A survey of major hactivism projects, the loose-knit movement consisting of a handful of grass-roots organizations and small companies that are uniting politically minded programmers and technologically asute dissidents to combat Internet surveillance and censorship by governments around the globe.

This paper scrutinizes the language of government reports and news media sources to shed light on their role in forming a negative image of politically motivated hacking in general, and online political activism, in particular. It is argued that the mass media's portrayal of hacking conveniently fits the elite's strategy to form a popular consensus in a way that supports the elite's crusade under different pretexts to eradicate hacking, an activity that may potentially threaten the dominant order.

The author, a leading hacker in the prominent group Cult of the Dead Cow, defends hactivism as a way of allowing people in repressive regimes to access the wealth of information on the internet.

Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 the speculation of the potential for cyber attacks has varied, from low-level nuisances to an all out "cyber war." What has been seen thus far is on the low side of the threat spectrum. Both pro-U.S. protesters and anti-U.S. protesters have been active.

Hackers around the world have picked sides in the recent U.S. campaign against terrorism, forming hacker groups like the pro bin Laden group "GForce" or the anti-terrorist hacker group, YIHAT (Young Intelligent Hackers Against Terror). So far, the attacks have been limited to defacing webpages.