Anonymous. WikiLeaks. LulzSec. Today's tech-powered politics includes renegade factions, outsider forces and merry pranksters who sometimes break the law and often break social norms in their desire to make change. Not to be confused with civic hackers, today's hacktivists are using new media as well as ingenious social strategies to disrupt and destabilize the existing order. Not everyone agrees with their tactics, and vibrant debates have broken out over whether this is genuine online civil disobedience, or disobedience of a kind that has chosen to stop being civil.

Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who set up a Facebook page that was a prominent force in helping galvanize the January 25, 2011 revolution in Egypt, has said, "If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet." While things aren't so simple, and authoritarian governments are also using technology to control their populations and suppress movements for change, there's no question that organizers and activists are using the net to rattle and in some cases help overthrow powerful regimes. Here's a select set of some of techPresident's best coverage and commentary.

In 2008, the Barack Obama campaign built an online juggernaut. With 13 million emails, nearly 4 million donors, 2 million members of the My.BarackObama.com social network, and tens of thousands of engaged activists, Obama's team broke new ground in using the internet to build a new kind of powerful political machine. Now, in 2012, they're hard at work re-engaging their base and re-inventing how campaigns can use technology to move voters and win elections.

We can't resist. Everybody's favorite social theorist and business writer, Malcolm Gladwell made waves in 2010-11 when he waded into the international debate on the role of social media in the Arab Spring and declared that "The Revolution Will Not Be Twittered." Below, our favorite responses to Gladwell.

If Facebook were a country it would be the third biggest in the world. For many of its 700 million users, Facebook is indeed their home base online. Everyone, from politicians to revolutionary movements, is using the site to advance their causes. And this raises all kinds of important questions, from how to make the most of Facebook, to how to make sure Facebook treats its users fairly.

Here comes everybody? Well, almost. As more people get their hands on the tools of communication and collaboration, it's become ridiculously easy to form a group and agitate around any case. But for all the multiplying ways that we're discovering to network and connect, online organizing still takes knowledge and practice. Giant e-groups like MoveOn.org, with its millions of email members, are constantly honing their approach.

The same youth-driven, hyper-networked wave of grassroots protests against economic inequality and political oligarchy that have been rocking countries as disparate as Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Greece and Spain have hit America. The occupation of the Wisconsin state legislature last winter was a harbinger, but now all kinds of previously disconnected individuals, loosely centered on a core of beautiful-style troublemakers and inspired by events and methods honed overseas, are linking up and showing up to occupy symbolically important centers in their cities and campuses.

If e-government is what happens when agencies use the web to deliver information to citizens, or make it easier for people to download a form or upload a filing, we-government is what happens when citizens and officials co-create better self-government by using new tools and information and taking advantage of all the ways that networking makes the boundaries between institutions and people more porous. In part, this is visible in all the do-it-yourself civic hacking that digitally empowered activists, many of them focused on their home town or city, are doing with home-brewed data and apps.