The United States' National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) has posted an advisory to its website, warning potentially "patriotic" hackers to keep their exploits at bay.

Although Iraq itself has little connectivity to the Internet (aside from several satellite connections in the Kurdish-controlled north), Iraqi sympathizers in other countries are potential targets for hacktivism. Hackers around the world have for years voiced an array of political views through different types of hacktivism.

The February 11th advisory carries the United States' usual indifference to the impetus behind a hacker's actions, but is the first to address hackers so directly. "Regardless of the motivation," it reads, "the NIPC reiterates such activity [hacking] is illegal and punishable as a felony."

Why would the U.S. government threaten to punish its own hackers for targeting a supposed enemy? The NIPC offers just one argument in favor of this strange position. Even patriotic hackers, it says, "can be fooled into launching attacks against their own interests by exploiting malicious code that purports to attack the other side when in fact it is designed to attack the interests of the side sending it."

The NIPC advisory says that, by this notion, patriotic hackers risk "becoming tools of their enemy." But the scenario is hardly realistic. Sophisticated exploit tools allow their operators to specify individual targets. They are not pre-programmed for a particular address. Patriotic hackers in the U.S. are likely to select their targets carefully, from the abundance of pro-Iraqi websites and e-mail hosts which exist on the Internet today.

What then is the NIPC attempting to accomplish with this advisory? If the U.S. has no desire to promote pro-Iraqi assets, then why the apparent attempt to protect them? The answer could lie with the U.S. government's own hackers, who may already be engaged in clandestine operations against Iraq. If this is the case, any attention drawn by hacktivism would indeed be highly undesirable.

Internet servers subjected to such overt tactics as hacktivism are often thoroughly "swept out" in an attempt to evict the intruders -- intruders who might include U.S. operatives from the CIA or the National Security Agency.

The NIPC's advisory comes less than a week after President Bush ordered development of what will be the country's first cyber-warfare doctrine.