Last July 30th, soon after terrorist group ETA killed 2 young policemen in Palma de Mallorca (Spain), social networks began to mobilize against the killings.

If in previous attacks this kind of protest was mainly expressed through individual blogs, especially through people posting black ribbons on their pages and commentaries, after this new attack online social networks were full of different tweets, images and status posts.

Around this time yesterday, I, along with countless others, tried to bring down the Web sites of Iran's information and justice ministries, and state-sponsored media outlets. The idea was to silence the pro-Ahmadenijad, anti-dissent messages coming from these outlets, and in so doing, strengthen the opposition protests in Tehran.

You didn't have to be computer smart to take part: a developer in San Francisco had set up a push-button tool that would, upon your click, immediately start bombarding 10 Web sites with requests. I clicked Start, and in the 10 little boxes below, I could see the pages load and reload. About half of them were already down.

This was exhilarating. The goal was to promote democracy, and I could actually watch as it happened. Empowering.

But there's more to it than that. I'm conflicted about the virtue of this idea. I'm still trying to sort out my thoughts about what happened, but I know that we will be talking about yesterday morning for years to come. We turned our collective power and outrage into a serious weapon that we could use at our will, without ever having to feel the consequences. We practiced distributed, citizen-based warfare. That is frightening. Here is how my thinking evolved throughout the day:

In Sunday's New York Times, there was an article about Verizon using volunteers to provide customer support. In the same way, I have suggested to government leaders that they can use the technologies inherent in the Web to facilitate collaboration among citizens themselves to deliver at least the first line of public services. Given the dim fiscal outlook of many state and local governments, citizen collaboration may be the only way that some public services can be adequately sustained in the future

That Verizon can get people to do this is a marvel to me. It should be much easier in the public sector, since people have a direct interest in the success of their community and government.