Chapter ten 
Dissidents on the Net
At 8:19 P.M., Terry Griffith waves both arms like a man struggling to be seen across a crowded train station. He is begging the bartender to kill the sound on the Getaway Cafe’s color television, but when the young man finally sees Terry and heeds his request, a handful of beer drinkers let out a chorus of loud groans. The fifth game of the Stanley Cup finals has just begun, and the Rangers are expected to clinch.
Terry ignores the hockey fans. He picks up his Martin D-35 acoustic guitar, adjusts the strap on his shoulder, and with his whiskey-thick Irish voice starts in at once with the night’s first plaintive ballad:
Oh, then tell me Sean O’Farrell, tell me why you hurry so.
Hush, me buchaill, hush and listen
And his cheeks were all a-glow.
I bear orders from the Captain, get ye ready quick and soon
For the pikes must be together by the risin’ of the Moon.
The Getaway Café, in suburban Pittsburgh, is all polished brass and wood, a contemporary pub with electronic darts, video trivia, pastel mints at the cash register. The menu is truly multicultural—Italian, Tex-Mex, seafood, and steaks. I am at a corner booth, munching one of those salads that includes not only lettuce and tomato, but grilled chicken, shredded cheese, and french fries, all dumped on top. It is a salad, sure, but about as healthy as deep-fried pork.
Thursday is Irish Night at the Getaway, so the bar is offering a $2.50 special on Guinness drafts. I munch my french-fry salad and watch the Irish music fans drift in, all of them laughing, joking, trading wide smiles. The guys at the bar, though, just stare mournfully at the muted television.
Maybe forty people are in the room by the time Terry finishes his first song. “You’re a small crowd,” he teases, “but mighty. A mighty small crowd.” A few patrons laugh at an old joke, the door flies open, and more of Terry’s fans pour in.
Terry is forty-six. He sports a tweed cap, jeans, and a cotton workshirt. His hair is long, back in a ponytail, and peppered with gray; he is small, with wire-rimmed glasses and an open, amicable face.
“The Rising of the Moon” is an Irish traditional, what’s known as a rebel song. The “pikes” referred to in the lyric are long poles, hooked at one end, useful around a farm or logging operation, but also commonly used by poor Irish folk for fighting off foreign intruders. In the case of the song, the intruder is no doubt British.
Terry performs a good number of songs about the British presence on Irish soil, because he believes British rule of Northern Ireland is altogether unjust. A few nights each and every week, he uses his guitar to spread the word.
On just about every other day, he uses his modem.
Griffith is part of yet another Internet culture—that of the international on-line freedom fighters. Access to instantaneous communication such as E-mail, electronic mailing lists, and the trading of files by modem is being used to spread “the message” by thousands of oppressed, misunderstood, angry, wronged, struggling, or simply eager-to-be-heard nationalities across the planet. In nations where war or censorship make free speech a near impossibility, the impact might someday be tremendous.
During the attempted coup against Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, a group of Moscow hackers kept the world (or those who knew where to look, at least) completely up to date. At the height of the Bosnian civil war, a man named Warn Kat in Zagreb, Croatia, used the Net much like the French underground once used the telegraph, letting the outside world know the inside scoop. Chinese leaders, though they’ve recently agreed to do business with Microsoft Corporation, are reported to be afraid of the Net for the same reason they have outlawed satellite dishes: an informed populace can be a dangerous one. And Vietnam is getting a CompuServe connection.
It is not just the United States government that worries about the Net. By early 1995 nearly 160 countries were reachable by E-mail, and some Internet supporters see this as the final breakdown of state boundaries, a first step in the fulfillment of the New Age “one planet, one people” revolution. If we all understand one another, the argument goes, if we can communicate regularly and during crises, there will be no war. It will become increasingly hard for ruthless rulers to characterize the “enemy” as a horned infidel if the citizenry and the “enemy” have spent months trading gardening tips. “But he helped me save my roses!” will be the rallying cry of the twenty-first century.
Like every other claim made about the Internet, of course, the claim of international serenity might be a tad optimistic, but I concede that the possibilities are very interesting.
“As more and more people have access to the Internet,” Siobhan Down, program director for the international writers’ group PEN, predicted in The New York Times, “it will be practically impossible to ban something.” Already, activists are throwing banned books up on the Net—the works of Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng, Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Iranian writer Esmail Fassih. The books are stored on a computer in Hackensack, New Jersey, of all places, and can be accessed via an address on the Internet.
It is more feasible for an oppressive government to listen into a phone call or intercept a fax, experts say, than it is for them to intercept or trace E-mail. The reason has to do with how Internet data is broken up and sent. Like Warn Kat before them, a lone dissident with a modem in Beijing or Tehran, Belfast or Grozny, could conceivably tap into zillions of gigabytes of outside information, then turn around and broadcast the inside story of his oppression across the globe.
This access is not always so easy, however. There are very few Radio Shacks in the Third World.
For instance, Jeff Cochrane, a researcher in Ghana, Africa, preparing to work under a Fulbright scholarship in Sierra Leone, responded to my request for information on his Internet hookup with the following note:
Fri, 3 Jun 1994 19:01:01-0400
Received your note yesterday via a Fidonet dial-up download from my hotel room in Accra, which involved taking off the cover of my room phone, attaching alligator clips to the incoming wires of the phone at one end and to my modem jack at the other, then dialing reception to have them call USA Direct, then telling ATT to dial a Fidonet server in Washington DC and bill it to my credit card, then quickly dropping the mouthpiece of my phone out so that room noise would not interfere with the data transmission, watching as my outgoing mail was uploaded and then my incoming mail was downloaded, then disconnecting everything and reassembling my phone. At least in Ghana there’s reliable power to keep my computer battery charged, and when you pick up the phone receiver there’s almost always a dial tone. In Sierra Leone, this will not be the case.
It is not as easy as dialing up America Online and pointing your mouse at a little box that says “Overthrow the Regime.” But obviously, connecting to the Net can be done—all over the world.
There are an enormous number of international groups on the Internet, but most of them are not revolutionary in the least. On Usenet for instance, there are groups for almost every ethnic cluster, from soc.culture.african to soc.culture.yugoslavia, with socculture.berber, soc.culture.nigeria, and soc.culture.tamil somewhere in the middle. All in all, when I last counted, there were sixty-eight of these groups, with more being added every day.
If you are trying to find an argument, this is the place to look for one. In fact, just mention Turkey or Armenia in just about any group, and the argument will find you.
Still, much of what concerns those who post on the international newsgroups mirrors what concerns us all. Soc.culture.indian, for instance, is not only one of the most popular socculture groups, but published usage statistics show it is one of the most highly used newsgroups on all of Usenet. When you call soc.culture.indian up on your screen, the menu will be fat with messages, and the list of topics will look something like this:
Anybody Going from Detroit to Madras?
Arranged Marriages
Cheap Ticket from JFK to India
Goan Arts and Crafts
Goat meat
Hindu Apologists!
Hindu Holidays
Hindu Shame? Gimme a break!
Looking for an Indian female
Looking for a Hindu-Punjabi Girl
Suspect Names Pakistan in Bombings
Time to get a Visa
Which is, perhaps, the point. Except for a few dietary differences, and different names we use for God, the peoples of the world are not all that different. We like a bargain; we are looking for love.
Terry Griffith’s concerns, however, are Irish. When he isn’t performing his rendition of “They Wounded Old Ireland,” he is using his computer to scan newsgroups such as soc.culture.celtic, picking up information on the continuing British presence in Northern Ireland, and downloading copies of The Irish Emigrant, a weekly recap of news from the Emerald Isle. The Emigrant is edited by Liam Ferrie of Galway, and his story itself is a model of how the Internet can unexpectedly transform people’s lives. Ferrie worked in Galway for Digital Equipment Corporation in 1987 when he started his electronic newsletter as a service to twenty or so fellow employees—colleagues who had transferred overseas and might miss the local news. The newsletter was distributed by what is known as a listserver (an automated mailing list that sends electronic mail instead of Lands’ End catalogs.)
“The distribution list started to grow immediately,” Ferrie explained to me by E-mail, “as I heard of additional Irish nationals working for Digital, and they heard about me.” His mailing list grew rapidly to include five hundred Digital employees, from Hong Kong to Czechoslovakia, and some of his colleagues began distributing the newsletter to people outside of Digital, until the distribution list approached four thousand. Then Digital closed its Galway plant.
“I was faced with the choice of leaving Galway to find work or to turn the Emigrant into a commercial enterprise,” Ferrie wrote. “Galway is a place which most people find difficult to leave, and I was no exception.” He started to charge a small fee for E-mail subscriptions to his newsletter. The response has been strong, and the electronic newspaper is now Ferrie’s full-time occupation. He even has a subscriber at the Amundsen-Scott base at the South Pole.
Terry Griffith subscribes, then takes his copy of the Emigrant, prints it out on a laser printer, makes a handful of photocopies, and leaves them on the cigarette machine at Murphy’s Pour House, an Irish pub south of Pittsburgh. Murphy’s is frequented by both Irish-Americans and a handful of Irish students studying or working in the states, and over time, Griffith has learned to print the Emigrant in a large, bold font, so that it can be read in a dark, smoky room.
“I’ve seen some of the students at Murphy’s read the Emigrant and get an astonished look on their faces,” Griffith tells me between sets. “A couple months ago this guy was reading and he says, ‘Oh-my-God.’ I say, ‘What’s the matter?’ He was reading the obituaries, and he says, ‘I knew that fella.’ Of course, a lot of them will turn right to the back, to the sports scores.”
This is not exactly James Bond stuff—the results of Saturday’s match between the Balbriggan Ballknockers and the Skibbereen Skidoos is not so dramatic as what happened in the former Soviet Union, or in Bosnia-Herzegovina—but in his own small way, by helping to distribute Ferrie’s paper in the United States, Griffith sees himself as engaged in a subversive act.
Much of the English language news coming out of the British Isles is written by reporters based in London, he explains, and “the conventional news is cleared through [a division of British intelligence known as] MB before it goes out over the wire.” Griffith smiles, raises an eyebrow. “And they have been known to distort.”
While the Emigrant regularly chronicles Northern Irish violence and politics, it comes out of the Republic of Ireland and bypasses normal news distribution channels by coming across the Net. In this way, Griffith says, Ferrie’s paper also bypasses British oversight. “During World War II, the Allies would never have relied on news coming out of a German News Agency,” he explains. “Why wouldn’t someone question news about Ireland that has come from or through Great Britain’s censors?”
All of this was before the 1994 ceasefire between the British government and the Irish Republican army, by the way. In the pre-peace days, for instance, Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, was not even allowed to appear on British television without an actor dubbing in his voice. (In other words, British viewers could hear his words, they just couldn’t hear him say them. Odd rule.) Now, Adams is all over British television and is even allowed to travel into London.
There is no direct connection, of course, maybe no connection at all, but to the extent that public opinion and pressure from the American government played a part in coercing the British and Sinn Fein leaders to settle their conflict, it is entirely possible that Griffith and Liam Ferrie played their small part in bringing a moment of peace to Northern Ireland.
What can foreign governments do about this newly found freedom of information?
Well, again, censoring the Net is a problem, because no one person or one group “publishes” or “broadcasts” the Net. There is no center, no headquarters, no home office. The Net is thousands of smaller networks all linked together, traversing national and continental boundaries. So who do you censor?
Nor can it be easily shut down. To disconnect all access to the Internet, to keep his citizenry from writing messages to the international Net community or reading messages from them, a tyrant would theoretically have to confiscate every computer within his borders, or shut down the entire phone system. Otherwise, anyone with a computer and phone line could log on, and the government would be hard-pressed to know about it. Confiscating computers or shutting down a national phone network would probably work, but it is not the cleverest way to win public support, especially in a world economy.
Still, censorship has been attempted.
Take Italy for instance, where machine-gun-toting police raided the offices of 119 local bulletin board systems in May 1994, confiscating computer hardware, disks, and answering machines. Police were trying to crack down on a ring of software pirates (who copy software illegally, to avoid paying for it, and sell it to others without paying licensing fees) said to be run by two men in Pesaro. The two men were suspected of distributing the software through bulletin boards, so the Italian police shut all 119 of them down. Classic overkill, many charged. The police couldn’t find the well-hidden pirates, so they went after the easily located bulletin board operators, though the operators were arguably blameless for the abuses of two users.
Or consider the response of another highly repressive dictatorship: Canada!
In early 1994, a Canadian judge ordered a publication ban on facts relating to the gruesome murders of two teenage girls. The Teale-Homolka case was deemed so sensational, the manner of death so lurid, that any pretrial publicity, including reports of the apparent confession of one of those charged, was totally outlawed by the judge. Canadian newspapers could not carry a word. Copies of neighboring American newspapers—The Buffalo News and the Detroit News, for instance—did carry the story but were confiscated at the border.
Two students, however—Justin Wells at the University of Waterloo and Ken Chasse at the University of Toronto—noticed that the publication ban had become a hot topic on a newsgroup called ont.general (“ont,” as in Ontario). Wells and Chasse created their own newsgroup, alt.fan.karla-homolka, as a “sick joke,” using the name of one of the alleged murderers. Canadians and others quickly took to the group, however, to trade banned information and post newspaper articles from the American press. When Canadian universities, fearing they would get in trouble, deleted the alt.fan.karla-homolka group from their students’ accounts, two new groups were formed, and the numbers of postings only grew. One whimsical Canadian suggested that all banned Teale-Homolka news should be posted to rec.sport.hockey, since no Canadian government official would ever dream of shutting that one down.
The Ontario attorney general’s office eventually got into the act, investigating one frequent poster known as Lt. Starbuck and warning others that their computers could be seized if violations continued. Some users claim that private E-mail messages were electronically scanned for any reference to the Teale-Homolka case. Lots and lots of Canadians are still angry about this whole affair—the judge and the police, because in the end the ban was made useless, and the Internet zealots, because no one messes with their Net.
Back at the Getaway, Terry confesses that, though he is clearly of good Irish stock, he is not so sure who came over on what boat, or when. “I knew my relatives were Irish,” he tells me, “but they wouldn’t talk about it. That’s always a sign that there is something shaky going on.
“My grandfather died when I was five,” he continues. “He wasn’t born in Ireland—his father was born in Ireland, but he just maintained his Irishness and sang a lot of songs. I always open with ‘The Rising of the Moon,’ because it’s a song I can remember him singing.”
Griffith started playing Irish music in the sixties, “when Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio and everyone was doing it,” but he found there was no money. “Then about ten years ago it became a good thing to put in bars. It draws a certain audience that knows how to drink, which is a good thing for a bar to do.” Indeed.
At the Getaway, the Guinness draft flows like the River Shannon after a storm, the occasional shot of Jameson whiskey is hoisted high to salute Sinn Fein, and the crowd, which has swelled to nearly eighty people over the course of the long evening, grows louder and more appreciative of the rebel tunes. Even Terry’s good friend Shag, though, can’t help but rest one eye on the television. The New York Rangers hold a lead, and it looks as if the series will wrap itself up.
“If you had told me a few years ago that I, through my computer, would be providing information to the local Irish community that they couldn’t get any other way, I would have told you that you were nuts,” Terry admits, “but that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
And exactly what thousands of others are doing as well. Modems beep and whine across the planet. Data streams cross the globe in fractions of seconds. Canadians get censored news with their hockey. And somewhere in Sierra Leone, Jeff Cochrane is trying to find a working phone booth so he can unscrew the phone’s mouthpiece, latch on his alligator clips, and send E-mail home. The world may or may not become a better place thanks to the Internet, but it seems to have become a much smaller place. And to the man in Dublin who sent me the recipes for curried chicken, a belated thanks.