While there is no doubt that the Internet has been the powerhouse behind activism in recent years, helping fringe organizations coordinate mass movements while increasing their influence. With that being said, Internet and activism haven't been a total match made in heaven as there have been several areas of weakness.
The open nature of the Internet has provided space for surveillance and infiltration by governing entities. As activists have developed a dependency on the Internet as their main communicative resource and tool for organization there has been the birth of “spoofs” which are organizations involved in surveillance: police organizations, local and foreign human intelligence organizations, local and foreign signal intelligence organizations and global corporations. These organizations have used special intelligence to collect information through email and other messages sent between social action groups while also hired to surveillance movement through websites, such forces have victimized groups like Greenpeace and Wellington Animal Rights Network (WARN)
Along with special intelligence, there have been a number of “Hacker Attacks” against social action groups. A good example was the Save Darfur Coalition that had been planning an action for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. A number of their accounts had been attacked and traced from China.
As Internet has become the new breeding ground for activist activity, it has become clear that corporate spies and government surveillance are not prepared to let active graze freely on the World Wide Web.
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