The keynote address at a typical hacker convention is delivered by the "Wizened Security Guru," usually an ex-CIA spook who wows the crowd with cloak-and-dagger tales. If he's not available, then the honor may fall to the "Hot Young Programmer," invariably a cocky coder who recounts his latest "eureka!" moment. But at last weekend's third-ever Hackers on Planet Earth convention, nicknamed H2K, the featured speaker was a confessed techno-idiot, a man who denies ever having so much as pressed an "ESC" key: Jello Biafra, ex-frontman for punk provocateurs the Dead Kennedys.

Decked out in a "D.A.R.E. to Keep Kids Out of Church" T-shirt, Biafra enraptured hundreds of hackers with a 90-minute diatribe against, among other things, the World Trade Organization, the Philadelphia police, "Al Gore, Inc.," USA Today and Taco Bell's value meals. "Use the Internet to create a generation that sees through corporate bullshit like never before!" he exhorted the crowd at New York's Hotel Pennsylvania. "Don't hate the media; become the media!" And though most audience members were not yet in diapers when "Holiday in Cambodia" debuted, Biafra's address was frequently punctuated by high-decibel applause and "Preach on, brother!" shouts.

Biafra's star turn at H2K was a bombastic symbol of the computer underground's growing zeal for political agitation -- whether it be greeting would-be visitors to a hijacked Nike.com with "Global Justice is coming -- prepare now!" while redirecting them to an Australian labor rights site, or disabling the Chinese government's censorware. Already adroit at rallying around their persecuted peers, many hackers are now awakening to the world beyond Internet Relay Chat. Ideological kin to the coalition of anarchists, Teamsters and Earth Firsters who spearhead the anti-globalization movement, these self-styled "hacktivists" dream of furthering social justice while comfortably ensconced behind their Linux workstations.

Just last weekend -- as about 100 hackers gathered for a "Cyber Civil Disobedience" discussion at H2K -- a group calling itself "Gforce Pakistan" defaced 11 pages belonging to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. The usual weather-related pabulum was replaced with pleas for Kashmiri independence. "When the people of Kashmir want to be independent, why not let them?" the protesters wrote. "US, take some steps."

But even as the ranks of techno-pranksters on political missions swell, a number of veteran hackers categorize such "protests" as sloppy and counter-productive. "Ninety-five percent of it is bullshit," says Andy Mueller-Maguhn, an associate of Germany's Chaos Computer Club. "[The message] will be there for about five minutes. Then we've got a police investigation. Then we've got that Kevin Mitnick shit." In other words, more ammunition for anti-hacker hysterics to demand get-tough measures, with little to show for the sacrifice.

Critics of the strategy also question whether the defacers are truly committed to fighting the good fight, or are more interested in showing off their technical chops. "A lot of these kids, they're like, 'Cool, I just hacked a Web page and got my little political message up,'" says "Izaac," a cohost of "Off the Hook," a weekly radio show produced by 2600, the hacker quarterly. "Then you ask them what their message is, and they're like, 'Huh?'" The majority of Web page vandals, he points out, prefer to get their messages across with bawdy "yo' momma" jokes rather than well-argued dissertations on Nike's labor policies.

The truth is that while the hacktivist slogan, "The revolution will be digitized!" is certainly catchy, most techno-protestors have yet to prove themselves anything more than pests. Disorganized and occasionally reckless, many are content to deface Web pages with "Break the Bank!" graffiti; they are not engaging in powerful acts that might set the mandarins of globalization aquake in their boots. And right now, with the underground so fractured, and the hacktivist agenda so hazily defined, it's hard to imagine these techno-activists having any appreciable impact on global politics.

Though the word was recently coined, hacktivism can trace its roots to the prankster counterculture of the 1960s. The hacker ethos originated in the "Steal This Book!" culture-jamming hijinks of the radical Youth International Party and Abbie Hoffman, who pulled proto-hacking stunts by crafting payphone slugs. And the early "phreakers," who used their technical acumen to pilfer phone service, espoused the same anti-corporate beliefs as the pepper-sprayed protesters of Seattle.

Greg Newby, a professor of information science at the University of North Carolina, argues that many hacktivists also have a bred-in-the-bone inclination toward social justice. Filled with folks who wear the "misfit" label with not-so-subtle pride, the underground is a come-as-you-are club. "Hackers have always been blind to things like color and race and accent," he says. "There might be some prejudice against people who don't type fast, or have a slow connection, but we're blind to what is very important to the other people in the world."

Yet the bulk of hacker activism has been narrowly focused on pet causes. The "Free Kevin" movement, for example, which prevented