DEMONSTRATORS are a tiresome lot. They block streets and clog traffic, costing other people time and money; they divert police attention, draining budgets and perhaps helping criminals. But decent countries allow disruptive protests and even deploy the forces of law and order to protect them. That is the price of political freedom, negotiated over many years and subject to many checks and balances.

Now the issue has arisen in cyberspace, with online protests both in defence of and in opposition to WikiLeaks, a whistle-blowing site. Working out which sorts of activities deserve protection and which prosecution is tricky—and the details of prosecution even more so (see article).

Two ends of the spectrum are clear. Consumer boycotts are a matter of individual choice. There is nothing wrong with people expressing their disapproval of companies that have dumped WikiLeaks, such as Visa, MasterCard, Amazon, PayPal, by stopping doing business with them. But using the internet to try to disrupt, say, power supplies or the fire service, as happened in Estonia in 2007, is a crime.

The difficult areas lie in the middle, especially around the “hacktivists” who are the main actors on both sides. Their favoured technique is a “denial of service” (DOS) attack, from one computer or a distributed network of many (hence the acronym DDOS). This involves bombarding computers that run the target's website with more traffic than they can handle. As a result the website becomes hard to reach, or crashes completely. That hurts the victim and signals to the world the strength of feeling of the perpetrators. It causes no direct physical harm but may be disruptive and costly.

In many countries DDOS attacks are illegal. In Britain, for example, they carry a maximum ten-year jail term. That does not necessarily make them wrong: civil disobedience, against British rule in India, or against segregation in America, has a long, honourable history. Such tactics may even be useful against authoritarian regimes (even if more often it will be the governments that use them against their opponents).

The closest equivalent to a DDOS attack in the offline world would be a mass sit-in or a mob milling around a building, making entry and exit impossible. In most countries the police would respond to such cases by clearing a path to the door, arresting protesters if they resisted violently, but allowing the protest to go ahead. Some argue that DDOS attacks are, similarly, a legitimate expression of dissent. Governments should have computers large and sophisticated enough to deal with such attacks; if necessary, they should help vital commercial services such as banks and energy companies to resist them.

But in a free society the moral footing for peaceful lawbreaking must be an individual's readiness to take the consequences, argue in court and fight for a change in the law. Demonstrators therefore deserve protection only if they are identifiable. Some countries (like Germany) even prohibit protesters from wearing masks.

The name and shame game

Protesters in cyberspace, by contrast, are usually anonymous and untraceable. The furtive, nameless nature of DDOS attacks disqualifies them from protection; their anonymous perpetrators look like cowardly hooligans, not heroes. This applies to those attacking WikiLeaks too—a point American politicians calling for reprisals against Julian Assange's outfit should note. Posses and vigilantes, online and off, mete out rough justice, at best. That is no substitute for the real thing.