Hacking into Heaven

Computer hackers are no longer just 19-year old geeks having fun at the keyboard. The mature hacker is an idealistic activist, a hackitvist and cyberterrorist with an attitude and an agenda. Are we coming to prayer like these hackers with an agenda of our own, something other than the only agenda that matters? That agenda: "Thy will be done."

Once upon a time, the Internet was a hacker playground, a place for electronic cowboys to commit pointless vandalism and pinch an occasional credit card number. Now the Net is becoming a far-reaching political platform, a place for radical activists to attack social institutions. Political hackers are finding that institutions are more vulnerable in cyberspace than they are in the physical world. If the revolution in the '60s was televised, "the revolution," they say today, "will be digitized."

"In recent months," reports The New York Times, "groups as diverse as the Animal Liberation Front, a militant animal-rights group; Radio4All, which supports pirate broadcasting, and international teams of teenagers with cyber pseudonyms like Milworm and causes like anti-imperialism have increasingly begun pumping political protest through the Internet's security holes."

A day after China's human rights agency announced its new Web site, "the official view of that nation's human rights record...