The war in Yugoslavia is being fought on the Internet as well as in the skies above Belgrade. There are impassioned pleas from young Serb mothers begging for an end to the NATO bombardment, while ethnic Albanians post accounts of mass graves and concentration camps in Kosovo.

"Please, in the name of God, stop bombing. Save my children, and all children here. We did nothing wrong to anyone," pleads Ms Emilija Nackov, a young mother on www.egroups.com/kosovo, a free Web-based newsgroup dedicated to the crisis in Kosovo. "PS Please, forward this message to everyone you know."

Another Yugoslav mailing list called www.egroups.com/decani is run by Father Sava Janjic - a Serb Orthodox monk in a 12th Century monastery in Decani, near the Albanian border. Despite NATO assurances to the contrary, Father Janjic, an outspoken critic of Mr Slobodan Milosevic, asserted that civilians are also being killed in the raids.

Meanwhile an ethnic Albanian website www.alb-net.com/index.htm. shows photographs of mass-graves and carries descriptions of concentration camps.

"A concentration camp is near the city of Malisheva where over 15,000 men, women and young women are being kept for about five days and treated barbarously like in Nazi camps of World War Two," said Mr Hasan Brojku from Peja.

But when Mr Alex Fowler, Director of Public Affairs for the privacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation read messages from critics of Slobodan Milosevic on these news groups he was concerned for their safety.

"I think its great that the Web provides one of the only means of free speech in this crisis," said Mr Fowler. "But I was disturbed to see that some of the people posting messages not only had their e-mail addresses but often their phone numbers and places of work as well." So EFF got together with www.Anonymizer.com an Internet site designed to hide the identity of those posting messages to news groups.

"There are generally two different types of messages posted. Those describing the horror of being bombed and those providing details of troop movement," said Mr Fowler. "Posting information like this could be dangerous given the current situation in Serbia." The military often refer to such information as information warfare because such accounts serve to muster political opinion and carry snippets of military intelligence.

However, political activists regard these sites as an essential tool of activism providing a vent for information that is otherwise often overlooked or inaccessible to the mass media.

Nonetheless the use of the Internet for political, military or strategic purposes is on the rise. The Zapatista rebels in Chiapas in Mexico were one of the first political movements to start describing their mistreatment by the Mexican government on the Internet.

Last year, a group of US protesters called the Electronic Disturbance Theatre targeted the website of the Mexican president, Mr Ernesto Zedillo, in support of the Zapatistas. Nearly 8,000 people participated in the digital sit-in, which attempted to overwhelm the Mexican president's Web servers.

This new form of demonstration is often referred to as Hacktivism - a term usually applied to civil disobedience on the Internet. It can be just a form of protest or it can include cracking (breaking and entering a computer) to steal or deface information.

In the last year, some well-known groups of hackers in the US attacked computers networks in China. A cracker going by the Internet name of Bronc Buster broke into and defaced the Tianjin City Network of Information of Science & Technology site, which explains what the people of China are entitled to access legally over the Internet.

As the Internet becomes an essential tool of commerce, it is likely that Hacktivism will become more prevalent. It is unlikely be long before some terrorist organisation has the bright idea of using a virus such as the Melissa to publicise its cause. Such a virus could just send out a message or it could destroy information held on the computer and cause millions of pounds of damage.

So far there are not many reports of crackers being involved in the Yugoslav conflict. Some Serb crackers defaced the NATO home page for a few hours last week.

However, cracking is not the exclusive domain of the computer geek or political organisations. The military are also getting in on the action.

The US Air Force has a special division with `Red Teams' dedicated to breaking into computers networks. Red Teams are trained to steal information and generally wreak havoc by bringing communications, banks and airline computer networks. But of course Red Teams are not cyber-terrorists or crackers. They are information warriors, or are they?

Niall McKay can be contacted at irish-times@niall.org