The Electrohippies Collective (Ehippies) is an international group of internet activists based in Oxfordshire, England, whose purpose is to express disapproval of governmental policies of mass media censorship and control of the Internet "in order to provide a 'safe environment' for corporations to do their deals."
Cyberlaw UK: Civil rights and protest on the Internet
'(PDF) December 2000 communiqué of Electrohippies Collective

Significant actions

Against the WTO, 1999

The protest against the

World Trade Organization The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an intergovernmental organization that regulates and facilitates international trade. With effective cooperation in the United Nations System, governments use the organization to establish, revise, and e ...

(WTO) in

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

in 1999 was a signal event in the anti-globalisation movement. Thousands of people gathered to disrupt the World Trade Organisation conference by preventing delegates from entering the conference venue.Jordan T & Taylor P ''Hactivism and Cyber War, Rebel with a Cause?'' Routledge, New York 2004 Simultaneously, an online direct protest was run by The Electrohippies Collective with what is now a familiar aspect of cyber space: a

denial-of-service In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connect ...

(DOS) action. This tactic blocked the

computer network A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...

servicing the WTO meeting by flooding it with requests. The Ehippies claimed success for the action, saying 450,000 people participated over 5 days, resulting in the WTO conference network being constantly slowed and periodically brought to a halt. Their claim was disputed by staff of Conxion, the ISP hosting the conference website, who deployed a

URL rewriting In web applications, a rewrite engine is a software component that performs rewriting on URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), modifying their appearance. This modification is called URL rewriting. It is a way of implementing URL mapping or routing ...

rule to redirect attack traffic to the attack page itself. It was claimed that this

counter-attack A counterattack is a tactic employed in response to an attack, with the term originating in "war games". The general objective is to negate or thwart the advantage gained by the enemy during attack, while the specific objectives typically seek ...

crashed "Crashed" is the third U.S. rock Single (music), single, (the fifth overall), from the band Daughtry (band), Daughtry's debut album. It was released only to U.S. rock stations on September 5, 2007. Upon its release the song got adds at those stat ...

" the Ehippies' server within seconds, forcing them to move to another ISP. The majority of hits to the Ehippies' site were thus their own attack page attacking itself. Conxion claimed to have logged fewer than 10,000 unique-source IP addresses. The attack page consisted of nine frames, three attacking the San Jose conference server, three against the Virginia server and three against the main WTO server. The Chicago conference server was not attacked and remained entirely unaffected. However, the WTO main website server, hosted by another provider, did not benefit from the rewrite-engine fix and did suffer significantly from the DOS attack.Radcliff D
Hack Back
'' 29 May 2000 The Ehippies justified their campaign tactic as enabling tens of thousands of remote

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...

users to join the Seattle protest action. They pointed out that the action could not have worked without the support of sufficient people—purporting to demonstrate that there was significant support for their action.

Against the IMF/WB, 2000

As a follow-up to their WTO action, the Ehippies and volunteers tried to shut down the

International Monetary Fund The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a major financial agency of the United Nations, and an international financial institution, headquartered in Washington, D.C., consisting of 190 countries. Its stated mission is "working to foster globa ...

(IMF) and

World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. The World Bank is the collective name for the Interna ...

websites by a "virtual sit-in" in conjunction with 'real world' protests in

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

in April 2000. Some 5000 online participants were able to cause only intermittent slowdowns on those sites.

Response to 'anti-terror' laws

The collective was forced to subside temporarily into inaction by the

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...

government's The Terrorism Act 2000 and The Regulation of Investigatory Power Act 2000, perceived as significantly changing the right of British citizens to freely use the internet for political and protest action. Now it "focusses on the use of technology by activists, mainly through organising workshops and quietly assisting 'behind the scenes' of other campaigns. Current campaigns are the
Simple
energy-focused campaign and the
Browser Alert
campaign against proprietary software abuses and

Digital rights management Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures (TPM) such as access control technologies can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. ...

References

{{Reflist

External links

Ehippies: the free range electrohippies project
(1996-2009—open copyright licensed)

Ehippies essays Internet censorship Internet in the United Kingdom Political organisations based in the United Kingdom