Intervasion of the UK

1994 electronic civil disobedience and collective action against John Major's Criminal Justice Bill which sought to outlaw outdoor festivals and music with a repetitive beat. Launched by a group called The Zippies from San Francisco's 181 Club on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, 1994. Resulted in government websites going down for at least a week.^[1] Utilised a form of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) known as the Email bomb in order to overload servers as a form of online protest and Internet activism.^[2] The first such use of the Internet and technology as a weapon of struggle and/or civil disobedience. Preceded the 1995 Italian NetStrike. This fact has yet to be acknowledged by the Electronic Disturbance Theater which claims to have pioneered the technique or the Free Range Electrohippies in the United Kingdom, who appear to have taken most of the credit for the event.

Campaign against the CJB

Under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, the definition of music played at a rave was given as: "music includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats".^[3]

Sections 63, 64 & 65 of the Act targeted electronic dance music played at raves. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act empowered police to stop a rave in the open air when a "ten or more people are attending, or where two or more are making preparations for a rave". Section 65 allowed any uniformed constable who believes a person is on their way to a rave within a five-mile radius to stop them and direct them away from the area; "non-compliant citizens may be subject to a maximum fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale (£1000)".

The Zippies sought to jam the mailboxes of UK politicians associated with the Bill in order to bring their attention to the issue of natural justice involving basic rights and freedoms. In effect, the collective action was saying: "If you take away our freedom, we have the power to take away something you take for granted, and to do this in a way which deploys the Internet as a weapon".

Several "hackers" not directly associated with the group launched all-out penetration and load testing operations against several UK government sites, resulting in a tit-for-tat battle, as the Zippies mailbox on morph.com went down, along with the entire morph server. Morph was a well-known Bay Area BBS.

The online protest culminated with a protest rave in Hyde Park.^[4]

Media Coverage

The event was broadcast on Radio Free Berkeley.

The protest action occurred during the manhunt for Kevin Mitnick and was thus partly an underground event. The media also refused to entertain the implications of electronic civil disobedience, with public attention focused on the problem of illegal raves and black-hat hackers, prompting scare stories about "evil hackers" and "young hoodlums" penetrating the British defences while the zippies were written off as nothing more than electrohippies.

Criticism

Some criticism of the Intervasion was expressed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation who complained about the "lack of a cutoff date". Other criticism on the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL) BBS centered around the use of militant language. The online protest action also suffered from conflict between its stated aims: "To clog the servers of the UK government", and its call to send email messages to UK politicians. Thus jamming mailboxes with email and large file attachments defeated the purpose of the exercise which was essentially an early form of hacktivism. The nature of the collective action was also not articulated well enough. For instance, the digital be-in which occurred during the launch of Tim Leary' s Chaos and Cyberculture, in which Leary was "kidnapped" without the consent of his publisher, and "forced" to DDoS the UK government, was simply a protest message, sent repeatedly to mail-boxes around the world.

Tools

Distributed Denial of Service

Email Bomb

UUCP

VT100 Terminal Emulator

Powerbook 180

Ping of Death

Communication

From David_Dei@cyberden.com  Sun Nov  6 17:55:52 1994
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Date: 07 Nov 1994 00:30:47 GMT
From: David_Dei@cyberden.com (David Dei)
Organization: The CyberDen - 415.472.5527
Reply-To: David_Dei@cyberden.com
Subject: Fwd: LEARY LAUNCHES INVASION OF BRITAIN
To: WThomas@Netcom.Com, habs@panix.com, jmittell@students.wisc.edu,
        davidmin@crl.com, mike@hyperreal.com, Internet@nbn.nbn.com
Status: OR

ccat@netcom.com,
     dhchung@us.oracle.com,
     megatrip@af36.cityscape.co.uk,
     mdm12@psu.edu,
     za,
     gary.gorka@cas.org

Tonight, Timothy Leary officially launched the cyberinvasion of Britain by
sending the following message to pres Bill Clinton at
president@whitehouse.com
MR PRESIDENT

YESTERDAY THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT, AN ALLY OF THE UNITED STATES DEPRIVED ITS 
CITIZENS  OF THE RIGHT TO GATHER IN GROUPS OF MORE THAN TEN PEOPLE ON PUBLIC
LAND. THIS HIGH HANDED MEASURE THREATENS SIMILAR RIGHTS HERE IN THE USA AND
MAY PROHIBIT INTERNET GATHERINGS IN THE PUBLIC LAND OF CYBERIA. 

IN THE ABSENCE OF ANY PUBLIC RESPONSE FROM YOU TO THIS DESTRUCTION OF BASIC
HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE WEST, WE THE FREEDOM LOVING CITIZENS OF THE INTERNET
HEREBY DECLARE OUR WILLINGNESS TO PREVENT THIS HEINOUS GLOBAL DEGENERATION 
AND IMPLORE YOU TO DO ALL IN YOUR POWER TO HELP ERASE THIS SHAMEFUL BILL AND
ITS INTENTION FROM PLANETARY CONSCIOUSNESS.

Signed: Dr Timothy Leary,
SAN FRANCISCO 11/5/94

^[5]


PRESS RELEASE FROM CYBERIA
Silicon Valley NOV 5: Today saw the launch of the First "Intercontinental
Ballistic Meme" (ICBM) and the Virtual Invasion of Great Britain. Speaking
aboard "US Yellow Cyberine" in port at Mothership Megatripolis, "Cyber
Commodore" Timothy Leary, defined the aims of the Cyber Task Force: "to
protect the peace and to work with true local representatives to halt the
British Criminal Justice Bill" ."We want to establish, before the eyes of the
world, the basic human right to dance barefoot on the grass or in the forest,
whenever and wherever the whim overtakes us. Its as simple as that" He
continued.

"The issue is abundantly clear to the least developed among us. Either you
need a license to dance or you don't. There are no two ways about it. Think
For Yourself And Question Authority shall be the whole of the Law." Said
Leary

Led by popular cyberhero, Leary, (banned from Britain 25 years ago because of
his threat to the security of the British empire.), and with full support of
guerrilla CyberMailing attacks and partial landings around the Cyber Coast of
the British Islands by YOU the Hacker Light Infantry. The group aims to Clog
cyber Britain with the multiplicity of their protests. We are calling upon
all cyber citizens outside of the United Kingdom to email as many British
Government addresses as possible with this protest.

THIS IS THE FIRST EXERCISE OF A GLOBAL VOTE. In the age of the information
superhighway, all attempts to usurp freedom and destroy democracy will be met
with a staggering world wide personal response. Everyone with an e-mail
address can participate and launch this Info ICBM to impact history. 

This is the major reason why the rave-u-gee Zippies have come to America in
the first place, fleeing injustice back home, from a country lacking a
defendable Bill of Rights: to invade America where there is at least a
semblance of freedom. From Coast to Coast, the plan has been to secure
America's heartland and then to raise a psychic cyberarmy of zippy moles and
warrior hackers to CyberInvade Britain from the West Coast, the least
expected location, but where internet connections are the densest in the
world. The downloading of e-mail from the west coast and the rest of the
world is likely to saturate the system, precipitating a major evolution of
normal consciousness and thinking patterns in the UK . 

-ends-

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