The war in Kosovo may not have escalated to a ground conflict yet, but it has certainly reached cyberspace. Both sides are fighting and preparing for electronic battles, but in this invisible and often unregulated medium there are also independents determined to play a part.
The official web site of the White House in Washington, US was offline throughout Sunday; White House sources said that the problem was due to hardware failure, but Russian online newspapers claimed that Russian anti-NATO hackers were responsible. Russian cyber-criminals also penetrated the home pages of other web sites, rendering addresses from California colleges and other American sites inoperable with graffiti.
On the front lines of the conflict in Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic has severed nearly all links with the West, for example in the recent Yugoslav police visit to independent Belgrade radio station B-92, but internet traffic is still slipping out, congested and precarious, over three land lines and a single satellite.
Aid from outside the country is filtering in. Anonymizer.com, an American surf engine that ensures the anonymity of its searchers, has opened the Kosovo Privacy Project, an opening in the wall which allows messages to be sent out without revealing the senderÆs name. In a Serbian monastery near the Albanian border, a 65 year-old priest, Father Sava Janjic, reports on the aftermath of the Allied bombing campaign, his Orthodox religious status giving him unusual immunity from state censorship.
