virtual sit-in
virtual sit-in, a tactic used by Internet activists to strongly inhibit or halt a Web site’s traffic. Conducted entirely online, the name virtual sit-in is drawn from the sit-ins that occurred during the civil rights movement in the United States, whose purpose was nonviolent civil disobedience. During a virtual sit-in, participants attempt to perform a distributed denial-of-service attack—in which thousands of activists access a particular Web site through computers and other electronic devices simultaneously and the resulting overload in Web site traffic slows the performance on the site’s server or shuts it down completely.
The popularity of virtual sit-ins has been attributed to the fact that often the only action required during the protest is to visit a Web site; they are an effective form of activism that is easy to participate in. The strategies behind virtual sit-ins evolved from organizing large numbers of users to simultaneously access servers to using software to query targeted servers so frequently that they keep legitimate visitors from accessing them. In addition, some attacks are performed by multitudes of “zombie computers” infected with malicious software (botnets) and forced to access the targeted Web site.
Three groups in particular—Electronic Disturbance Theater, the Electrohippies (now Electrohippies Collective), and RTMark—were known for their “hactivism.” In 1998 Electronic Disturbance Theater held one of the first virtual sit-ins. The action was in solidarity with the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), a Mexican guerrilla group, and was directed against the Mexican government. The Electrohippies, an international internet activist collective, orchestrated their first virtual sit-in to coincide with the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. The action amassed more than 450,000 people who could not attend the street demonstrations. In 2003 RTMark sponsored an effort to collect a list of product barcodes that could be replaced with others that code for less-expensive items, giving consumers the ability to set their own prices on various products.