I don't know who started this dumb, inaccurate, and insulting "hacktivist" portmanteau.

[N]o one called technology-enabled political activism "hacktivism" until 1998, when cDc members Omega, Reid Fleming and Ruffin were chatting online and were, Ruffin said, "bouncing some wacky ideas around about hacking and political liberation, mostly in the context of working with Chinese hackers post-Tiananmen Square." "The next morning Omega sent an e-mail to the cDc listserv and included for the first time the word hacktivism in the post," Ruffin said. "Like most cDc inventions, it was used seriously and ironically at the same time -- and when I saw it my head almost exploded." http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2004/07/64193

Technology of all sorts continues to be a hot item. Wired News reports on a phenomenon called Hacktivism--electronic sabotage as a means of political protest. The story features the Hong Kong Blondes, a near-mythical group of Chinese dissidents that have been infiltrating police and security networks in China in an effort to forewarn political targets of imminent arrests, as well as an organization known only as the Cult of the Dead Cow whose spokesman (a former United Nations consultant) goes by the moniker Oxblood Ruffian. (I'm not making this up, honest.) In response to this threat, the FBI is establishing a cyberwarfare center called the National Infrastructure Protection Center which will involve the intelligence community and the military. Sounds like more tightrope walking for you and the ACLU.

The phenomenon is becoming common enough that next month, the longtime computer-security group, the Cult of the Dead Cow will launch the resource site hacktivism.org. The site will host online workshops, demonstrations, and software tools for digital activists. "We want to provide resources to empower people who want to take part in activism on the Internet," said Oxblood Ruffian, a former United Nations consultant who belongs to the Cult of the Dead Cow. Oxblood Ruffian's group is no newcomer to hacktivism. They have been working with the Hong Kong Blondes, a near-mythical group of Chinese dissidents that have been infiltrating police and security networks in China in an effort to forewarn political targets of imminent arrests. [http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1998/09/15129]

From the moment in 1995 that a commercial Internet provider first gave Chinese citizens access to the Web, the government has tried to maintain what some cyber surfers derisively call "the Great Firewall of China." This elaborate control system is supposed to block sites that the Communist Party considers morally or politically degenerate, from Penthouse to Amnesty International and CNN. But with a few simple tricks, ordinary Internet users are now making a mockery of the Great Firewall, tapping easily into forbidden foreign sites. Sabotage. Sophisticated hackers, meanwhile, are breaking into sensitive Chinese computers. Members of the Hong Kong Blondes, a covert group, claim to have gotten into Chinese military computers and to have temporarily shut down a communications satellite last year in a "hacktivist" protest. "The ultimate aim is to use hacktivism to ameliorate human rights conditions," says Oxblood Ruffin, a member of the Toronto-based Cult of the Dead Cow (www.cultdeadcow.com), one of the oldest hacker groups in North America, who serves as unofficial spokesman for the having-more-fun Blondes.

Until they declared "Netwar" against the Mexican Government, Ricardo Dominguez and Stefan Wray earned their activist credentials the old-fashioned way, attending rallies in support of the Zapatista rebels, handing out pamphlets, shouting political slogans. Now the two New Yorkers organize "virtual sit-ins" and recruit computer programmers to attack the World Wide Web sites of any person or company they deem responsible for oppression. Their new rallying cry: "The revolution will be digitized." ...No slouches in packaging and self-promotion, the burgeoning computer underground has adopted a catchy term for the trend: they call it "hacktivism." "Hacktivism is a way to be heard by millions," a group of three Mexican hackers known as X-Ploit wrote in an E-mail message to a reporter. "We want to speak out about what we and many, many people disagree with in this treasonous and corrupt government. If we protest both on line and off line, we'll have better chances to see a change."...The potency of the slingshot approach is not lost on would-be hacktivists. "If you have 10 people at a protest, they don't do much of anything," said a Toronto-based computer jockey who calls himself Oxblood Ruffian. "If you have 10 people on line, they could cripple a network." Oxblood is a member of Cult of the Dead Cow, a hacker group that recently reserved the Web address www.hacktivism.org as an Internet distribution hub for tools to assist others in subversive digital activism. He said the group was planning to attack the Internet operations of American companies doing business with China. But the effectiveness of such actions is unclear, prompting a debate over how best to implement the hacktivist brand of political protest.