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Other Hacktivismo members are taking Mr. Villeneuve's concept and applying it into a more secure and flexible program that can be distributed to computer users around the world to help Chinese users gain access to sites if and when they are blocked. (Google's main site is no longer blocked by China, although search requests are being filtered. The words "Falun Gong," for example, the name of a spiritual sect that has been outlawed by the Chinese government, do not return search results.)

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Most groups are ad-hoc operations made up almost entirely of volunteers with shoestring budgets. The impact of their David-versus-Goliath struggles can be difficult to gauge. But lately these groups and companies have been receiving more attention from United States government officials. In August the House Policy Committee issued a policy statement that included a call for the United States to "aggressively defend global Internet freedom" by supporting nonprofit and commercial efforts.

Fighting restrictions on the use of the Internet can be difficult because the governments imposing the limits often control the technological infrastructure in their countries. The Saudi government, for example, filters all public Internet traffic. The Chinese government has public security bureaus across the county that monitor Internet use.

In its statement, the House Policy Committee noted that the Syrian government, for example, is able to monitor e-mail messages because it controls the single Internet service provider. Tunisia's five Internet service providers are also under direct government control, the statement said.

So the technology activists sometimes have to get creative to get around the restrictions. The activists include computer industry professionals as well as teenage geeks. (Hacktivismo's youngest member lives in India and says he is 15 years old.) Most are in their 20's and early 30's.

"There is a lot of apathy among my generation with political processes," said Ian Clarke, the 25-year-old founder of the Freenet Project. "The nice things about writing code to address the political issues is that we are playing the game on our own turf."

Some of the groups are careful to distance themselves from protest-oriented forms of hacking that attack or deface computer systems. Hacktivismo members, for example, say they are trying to be constructive rather than destructive.

"Hackers like to see stuff built up, not torn down or defaced," said the group's 51-year-old founder, who identified himself only as Oxblood Ruffin. "You don't want to attack the infrastructure."

So far many of the groups have focused on China, which with some 46 million users has the third-largest online population in the world (after the United States and Japan) and some of the most sophisticated controls over service providers (along with Saudi Arabia's).

Among Hacktivismo's current projects is an encrypted file-sharing technology called Six/Four, a name derived from the date of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. This technology would provide a layer of encryption that would allow computers to request and pass information without leaving an easily traceable trail.

Six/Four makes it difficult to determine whether a computer is requesting information or simply relaying a request on behalf of another computer, making it harder to trace the path that information is traveling.

The Freenet China project uses the publishing technology of a broader organization, the Free Internet Project, known as Freenet, to disseminate information about China on the Web. People who install Freenet software on their computers can anonymously place information in a global information library shared by the network of Freenet users. While users of the World Wide Web ordinarily make direct connections with Web sites to obtain information, Freenet users make indirect requests to other Freenet computers, which in turn send the request onward if they do not have the requested document.

Among the documents that have been released through Freenet China are the Tiananmen Papers, a compilation of transcripts of 1989 meetings among Chinese leaders about the protests.