THE TERRORIST PROFILE

---

Sid-Ra, a 6-foot-4-inch, 350-pound giant of a man, paces between his “subjects” in the smoke-filled Goth club Click + Drag, located in the old meat-packing district of Manhattan. Inside the club are leather-clad, black-lipped females and young men dressed in women’s underwear.

Sid is a hacker-terrorist and an acknowledged “social engineer” with curious nocturnal habits. There are thousands of people like him, who by day are system and network administrators, security analysts, and start-up cofounders. When night comes, they transform into something quite different.

But, is this the profile of a “wanna-be terrorist”? Perhaps!

These are the self-proclaimed freedom fighters of cyberspace. They’ve even got a name for it: hactivism. And political parties and human rights groups are circling around to recruit hactivists into their many causes.

Recently, for example, the Libertarian Party set up a table at the HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference. The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) collected donations. And members of civil-rights groups, including the Zapatistas, a Mexican rebel group, spoke up at one of two sessions on hactivism.

But even without such civil-liberties groups trying to organize them, hactivists have been busy on their own. They have formed privacy-related software companies such as ZeroKnowledge Systems USA Inc. in Montreal. They’re developing anonymous, inexpensive e-mail and Web-hosting services through the DataHaven Project Inc. (http://www.dhp.com). And they’re trying to get the Internet out to Third World human rights organizations through groups such as Cult of the Dead Cow Communications (cDc; http://www.cultdeadcow.com/hacktivismo.html).

Caution 

URLs are subject to change without notice.

In fact, Sid feels hactivism’s pull so strongly that he makes a dramatic claim: “The Internet is the next Kent State, and we’re the ones who are probably going to get shot.”

---