From: "ricardo dominguez" <rdom at thing.net> To: <rtsnyc at lists.tao.ca> Subject: Econ Forum Site Goes Down Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 18:17:33 -0500
Econ Forum Site Goes Down By Noah Shachtman
1:35 p.m. Jan. 31, 2002 PST
NEW YORK -- The website of the World Economic Forum crashed from an apparent denial-of-service attack Thursday, just as the collection of business and corporate leaders began its meeting here. Internet demonstrators may have been the cause of the collapse.
Encouraged by the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), RTMark, Federation of Random Action, and other groups, online activists have been downloading software tools that continuously reload the websites of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and of a few of its corporate members.
The protest -- called a "virtual sit-in" by organizers -- began Thursday morning to coincide with the start of the WEF's meeting.
By 10 a.m., the WEF website was offline. EDT co-founder Ricardo Dominguez is not yet taking credit for the shutdown.
"EDT does not know if this sit-in against the WEF is the reason for the site going offline. (We) don't even have the numbers of online protesters right now," he said in an e-mail. Those numbers would be available by midnight, Dominguez added.
WEF spokesman Charles McClain confirmed that the group's "site is down. We don't know when it'll be back up," he said. "We're getting hits like we've never had before."
"We've been putting up the plenary sessions on the site, and that usually brings high traffic," McClain continued. "But whether it's because of that, or because someone hacked the site or crashed the site, we don't know yet."
Electronic Disturbance Theater has been spearheading these sit-ins for several years now, including ones against the President of Mexico and the Pentagon. But the group "has never attempted or wanted a site to go off-line. Our actions are not about technological force, they are about symbolic mass presence. The unbearable weight of human beings online disturbing the movement of virtual power."
Other websites targeted by the current sit-in, including those of Goldman Sachs and Investcorp, are still up and running.
<http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50159,00.html >