They have all taken to organising their activities via the Internet. As a result, Britain's coppers are wondering whether one side-effect of the information age is going to be an upsurge of civil disobedience. The National Criminal Intelligence Service blamed the increasingly sophisticated nature of football hooligans for the organised violence last weekend between fans of Millwall and Cardiff City. Rival bands of thugs are apparently prepared to co-operate by fixing venues for fights via the Internet.
Information is exchanged in closed or open websites.
The police now say they surf for such websites, hoping to discover other planned attacks. If so, they may have been stung into action by the City of London riot. The police say they were unprepared for the scale of protest on June 18th, in part because it was hard to gauge the number of possible participants. They later concluded that organisation via the Internet had helped to swell the number of rioters. The potential for organising violence or civil disobedience via the Internet is limited in Britain by the relatively confined access to cyberspace.