"The invisible hand of cyberspace is building an architecture that's quite the opposite of what it was at cyberspace's birth. The invisible hand, through commerce, is constructing an architecture that perfects control - an architecture that makes possible highly efficient regulation." (Laurence Lessig)

Cyberspace is under constant transformation by political, technical, and psychological pressures. If you wanted to follow nuclear tests in India, the fate of indigenous Mexicans in Chiapas, or the protests against the World Trade Organization, you were underserved by TV or print journalism; you probably turned to the Internet. And when energy activists, sympathizers of the Zapatistas, or anti-globalization protesters sought to attract your attention to their causes on that medium (by means of disrupting or defacing websites associated with Indian physics research, the Mexican government, or the World Trade Organization and its members), their electronic civil disobedience gave rise to the term “hacktivism”. Internet users alerted to the concept of Echelon, an electronic communications scanner filtering any and all satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic traffic, had to wonder why, and how, capitalism had morphed into a fully integrated surveillance apparatus that could treat the world like a company town. To pull the veil of secrecy and ignorance aside, hacktivists coined the notion of Jam Echelon Day, trying to disrupt the surveillance and alert the public to its presence in one stroke. Chinese computer hackers protested NATO’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in Kosovo with attacks on US websites. Critics of sweat shop labor, techno-libertarians uncomfortable with certain politicians, and people harboring curiosity or vested interests in commercial, military, or even trivial secrets try every day to manipulate computers to their ends. A concerted denial of service attack on e-commerce websites in February 2000 coincided with an atmosphere of growing unease about the dot-com boom - both on the side of those who knew nothing about it and those who lived by it. The story made the cover of half a dozen weekly news magazines, and of numerous daily papers. The media were eager to characterize companies like Yahoo and eBay as victims "crippled" by the dastardly work of "vandals". It did not matter that no permanent damage was done to these sites. It was enough that so-called "cyberterrorists," even for a few hours, seemed to have threatened e-commerce, a giant shopping channel experiment on steroids, pumping up the American economy on anabolic expectations that people would be doped up by the rapturous possibility of spending entire paychecks, with a click of a mouse, on stuff they can only see in pixels. In each of these cases, the authorities in the end succeeded in making the net a safer place for business transactions, but by the same token, non-commercial use of the Internet appeared increasingly under threat by the sledgehammer of mercantile paranoia. The obvious comment, that this increased focus on protection and secrecy will bring about more tests of (and protests against) the restrictions imposed, seems unwelcome in most parts.

Now that the messianic promise of e-commerce has been debunked, the clipper chip fended off, and open source software gained the support of major corporations, one question galvanizing legal, historical, and political analysis is how to distinguish hacking from hacktivism. If hacking was understood initially as experimentation by mostly young, male, expert computer users, it is important to note that there were, at first, no connotations of such activity with disruptive or intrusive, let alone criminal, intent. But every time a new technology is introduced, something about it must be tamed and made secure so that consumers can adapt and develop their mass relationship with the new medium. Once innovation, as a function of modernity, has been fully commodified, every space, online and off, is increasingly under threat of full saturation with booming, busting business. Disregard for profit angles has become increasingly suspect – it is considered a virtue of the past, a philosophical category handed down from times when time was still a plentiful resource and not a fissured, fractured trace element of commerce. Even universities, once bastions of research as disinterested pursuit, are giving up on knowledge for its own sake in favor of whatever profits are to be had, for instance in distance education. Conversely, the distance many citizens keep from educational issues may explain why consumers were frightened when there was no online shopping for a few hours. The openness of the Internet had to be made safe for commerce, and guaranteeing its security became the prime occupation of both business and government.