[4] Stefan Wray writes about ECD: "As hackers become politicized and as activists become computerized, we are going to see an increase in the number of cyber-activists who engage in what will become more widely known as Electronic Civil Disobedience.
[1] Jeff Shantz and Jordon Tomblin write that ECD or cyber disobedience merges activism with organization and movement building through online participatory engagement:Cyber disobedience emphasizes direct action, rather than protest, appeals to authority, or simply registering dissent, which directly impedes the capacities of economic and political elites to plan, pursue, or carry out activities that would harm non-elites or restrict the freedoms of people in non-elite communities.
Examples include PeaceNet (1986), a newsgroup service, which allowed political activists to communicate across international borders with relative ease and speed using Bulletin Board Systems and email lists.
[4] The term "electronic civil disobedience" was first coined by the Critical Art Ensemble in the context of nomadic conceptions of capital and resistance, an idea that can be traced back to Hakim Bey’s (1991) "T. A.
[1] Before 1998, ECD remained largely theoretical musings, or was badly articulated, such as the Zippies 1994 call for an "Internet Invasion" which deployed the metaphor of war albeit within the logic of civil disobedience and information activism.
Some commentators pinpointing the 1997 Acteal Massacre in Chiapas, Mexico, as a turning point towards the internet infrastructure being viewed not only as means for communication but also a site for direct action.
The Electronic Disruption Theatre exhibited its SWARM project21 at the Ars Electronic Festival on Information Warfare, where it launched a three-pronged FloodNet disturbance against web sites of the Mexican presidency, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and the Pentagon, in solidarity with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, against the Mexican government, against the U.S. military, and against a symbol of international capital.
[6] The term electronic civil disobedience and hacktivism may be used synonymously, although some commentators maintain that the difference is that ECD actors don’t hide their names, while most hacktivists wish to remain anonymous.
His recent project the Transborder Immigrant Tool is a hacktivist gesture which has received wide media attention and criticism from anti-immigration groups.
[7] In order to draw attention to John Major's Criminal Justice Bill, a group of cyber-activists staged an event in which they "kidnapped" 60s counter-cultural hero Timothy Leary at a book launch for Chaos & Cyberculture held on Guy Fawkes Day 1994, and then proceeded to "force him to DDoS government websites".
[8] On February 24, 2004, large scale intentional copyright infringement occurred in an event called Grey Tuesday, "a day of coordinated civil disobedience".
The flourishing of information technology gives amateurs and homerecording artists powerful tools to build and share interesting, transformative, and socially valuable art drawn from pieces of popular cultures.
The Border Haunt action was organized by Ian Alan Paul, a California-based new media artist and was reported on by Al Jazeera English[14] and the Bay Citizen.
[15] In response to the political assassination of Zapatista teacher Jose Luis Solís López (alias Galeano),[16] in Chiapas, Mexico, Ian Alan Paul and Ricardo Dominguez developed a new form of Electronic Civil Disobedience that was used as part of a distributed online performance on May 24, 2014 as part of the week of action and day of remembrance in solidarity with the Zapatista communities.
As a kind of E-Graffiti and form of Electronic Civil Disobedience, floods of HTTP traffic were sent from around the world as the books and communiques were written onto the error logs of their servers several thousand times by different users.