`Are you with the Independent Media Centre?" the haggard attendant in the Prague Internet bar asked us - then looked like he regretted he had, as if he'd just revealed some dark Masonic secret.
"Er, no, we just wanted to check our e-mails," we replied, our curiosity aroused. "Who are you on about?" Gesturing to the cohort of conspiratorial faces reflected in the screens of the PCs behind him, he murmured resentfully: "These guys, they've been here all week."
We approached them, asking, "who are you?". A nameless IMC member from Dublin warily told us the group were in Prague for the IMF/World Bank summit protests. Having built their website in this dingy bar, they were trying to orchestrate and document the progress of thousands of protesters from wildly disparate groups arriving in the city.
By loading jpgs, mpegs, and ram files, while muttering into mobile phones, they had set themselves up - anonymously - as the front line of electronic activism.
From the arrival of protesters to the legal battles to get them out of Czech prison cells, the spectacle was documented on praha.indymedia.org, which then vanished like so many hooded anarchists through mists of CS gas.
On September 26th, 2,000 - D-Day for the protests - IMC's covert use of technology became even more vital. For in the midst of the standard teargas, stun grenades, petrol bombs and assorted missiles of an anti-capitalist riot, individuals distanced themselves to fervently tap out text messages detailing activists' progress and police movements to other groups scattered about the city. Meanwhile others pointed digital cameras at the police, who were in turn pointing digital cameras at them.
It is debatable whether the efforts of the IMC had any real impact in Prague. Of the 12,000 or so anti-capitalists present, there is little doubt that many would have scoffed at the use of the Internet, seeing it as anathema to their ideals. It can, after all, be viewed as the ultimate tool of international capitalism.
But it is precisely because of the Internet's global nature that IMC volunteers have been able to document every major event on the dissenters' circuit in recent years - from Seattle to Prague, and from Nice to Davos - and no doubt they will ensconce themselves in some suitably secretive Barcelona or Genoa Internet cafe this summer. The Internet is being used to expound views and encourage action on every issue and ideological matter imaginable. While the dotcom revolution may be on the decline, online radicalism is only in its infancy.
The US military innovators of the system which developed into the Internet could hardly have imagined the impact their invention would have. But they did see its potential for two things: the spread of information and the decentralisation of the sources of information, two facets of the medium that could have been purpose-built for political activists.
The 1997 pronouncement by Justice Stevens of the US Supreme Court, that the Internet is a forum where "any person can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox", becomes truer daily, as it subverts the printed, televised and spoken word as a means for public dissent, agitation, debate and resistance. Or, in the words of www.unamerican.com: "We, the kids, ARE the media. YOU and I can send messages to the world that may open a mind or two."
This dissent, no longer dismissable as shadowy underground resistance, is growing exponentially. Its global nature, the apparent lack of censorship on the Internet, the relatively low costs of access - all these factors lend themselves to the dissemination of ideas on the Net.
AMONG the most tangible successes of activism using the Internet was the campaign of resistance by Serbian students against dictator Slobodan Milosevic last October. While the collective would be loath to take the kudos for this triumph of the power of the people over the power of power, its use of the Internet, as archived on www.otpor.net, to motivate protesters towards civil disobedience played a valuable part in the campaign's success.
Also well-known are the "Reclaim the Streets" groups that stage demonstrations against the use of automobiles in various cities (including Dublin) throughout the year. From humble origins, RTS happenings have grown up through web campaigns and media coverage into massive displays, where RTS crews hijack city streets, halting traffic in a display of resistance.
The use of the Internet for anti-corporate action is not, however, without irony among its more astute exponents. For, despite being the most anarchic and uncontrollable media, it is also implicitly the most potent marketing tool since the birth of television. The paradoxical nature of Internet activism is no more evident than in the recent "denial of service" attack on Microsoft websites, where pranksters briefly crippled MSN.com and Microsoft.com, almost certainly using a platform developed by the company itself. For every new security feature developed by such large corporations, there are 10 kids out there itching and able to crack it, perhaps for profit, perhaps on principle, but mainly just to get one over on the Big Guy.
Which brings up the downside of online activism - the Big Guy may be watching you electronically as you plot his downfall, be it the Big Guy of national government, of big business, the political party Big Guy, or whoever.
Think Echelon, think cookies, think the new British Terrorism Act 2000. Now try to fool yourself that nobody's watching your "innocent" search for the Anarchist's Cookbook.
Cookies we know - the little "info-grabbers" fired into your hard-drive every time you access a website, lodging your preferences, web access habits, etc. In practice, these pose no real threat to the technically proficient, as they can easily be disabled or deleted.
But Echelon is different. It sounds like something generated in the mind of a chronic paranoiac. Maybe it is, maybe the ominous US high-security installation on the moors of northern England is just a weather centre. But, according to a disturbing European Parliament report in 1998, the site at Menwith Hill hosts a surveillance system of eavesdropping equipment, dubbed "Echelon". The system is thought to be capable of simultaneously intercepting millions of European telephone conversations, faxes and e-mails.
If the scaremongers and conspiracy theorists are even half-right, then notions of privacy on the Internet, without individuals having to resort to their own personal security encoding - the use of which negates the come-one, come-all nature of the web itself, are mere naivety.
In China, a regime not renowned for its liberal approach to dissenters, new software to "purify" the Internet has recently been introduced, designed to limit user access to "unhealthy" content. China routinely blocks websites of the Falung Gong group, Western media groups and Tibetan exiles in the name of national security.
Britain's Terrorism Act 2000, an element of which will outlaw so-called cyberterrorist websites, raises further fears for the freedom of legitimate protest. Such measures will no doubt be adopted by other countries as Internet activism gains further momentum. Although welcomed in certain cases - the RUC has said that the design for pipe bombs being used by loyalists in the recent spate of attacks in Northern Ireland was obtained from an easily accessible website - the implications for sites such as the IMC's, or for others like protest.net, could be devastating.
The definition of seditious content that can lead to subsequent clampdowns are unclear, even arbitrary. A question worth asking is, who is watching the watcher?
The global democratisation promised by the Internet may be illusory. After all, limits to the right to legitimate dissent can never be justified. Thomas Jefferson once said, "Information is the currency of democracy". The way things are going he could well be turning in his grave.
kdoyle@irish-times.com