Chapter twelve 
The Dark Side of the Net
I had hoped to meet and interview some youngsters, ask them how they used the Net. I had even begun swapping messages and trading introductory questions with a few advanced technoteens, but the interviews didn’t work out. The kids just disappeared suddenly, because their parents didn’t want them to talk with me.
Yes, I explained to the parents that I was writing a book. Yes, I named the publisher, offered to send references and phone numbers, but the parents (apparently) didn’t believe me, because the previously friendly and enthusiastic youngsters just stopped writing back.
And do you know why?
Pedophilia.
There is a dark side to the Net, you see, and my journey cannot end without touching on that subject as well. There is some truth, and much hysteria, surrounding the many claims of digital darkness, and especially the notion that pedophiles roam the Net in search of young prey.
On-line child abusers are the bogeymen of the electronic age, profiled on tabloid television, chronicled in Time, Newsweek, and USA Today. A columnist for the Seattle Times was so upset by the supposed level of electronic child abuse that he even suggested it was “time to pull the plug on the Internet.”
Well, is it true? Have pedophiles used computer networks to find young boys?
In a word, yes.
Is the danger exaggerated?
Greatly.
But it happens. In Chelmsford, Massachusetts, John Rex, Jr., was arrested and charged with using his own computer forum, the County Morgue, to recruit teenage boys. He is alleged to have asked one of these boys to help him kidnap an even younger boy, and the teenager instead tipped off the cops. Smart kid. A similar case came up in Cupertino, California, when a man using the Net name “HeadShaver” allegedly carried on a series of electronic mail conversations with a young boy, then convinced the boy to meet him in person, and subsequently kidnapped the youth and subjected him to systematic abuse.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has released a list of warning signs to help parents detect their child’s possible involvement with Internet weirdos and pornography. According to the department, parents should worry if: 1) the screen goes blank whenever Mom walks into the room, 2) the kid uses vast numbers of diskettes to retrieve material, or 3) the kid tends to hide these diskettes under the bed.
Though the actual cases of on-line child stalking are few, parents, and police, have begun to take notice. Computer networks provide anonymity and easy access to lonely kids, and computer stalking by private E-mail is very difficult to prevent. “The electronic frontier is a beat without end,” one California detective complains. “There are lots of criminals, but few cops.” And to make matters worse, most police stations have fairly unsophisticated computer equipment, and most cops do not have the programming sophistication needed to catch their crooks.
But crime is crime, these sorts of crimes are surely among the most vile, and almost everyone on the Net would abhor such activity. Where things get a bit more sticky is when issues of free speech conflict with electronic community standards.
Remember, one trait that distinguishes Net people, the BBS and Usenet people particularly, is a pure belief in freedom of speech. Net people celebrate free speech. They are passionate about free speech. The Net is free speech, some will tell you. On the Net, you can say whatever you want, whenever you want, and distribute it to the world with the push of a button. The rich and the powerful have no special sway in Net circles. The major newspapers and television networks may be owned and controlled by (pick one: bleeding-heart liberals; conservative rich businessmen), but the Net is still essentially owned by no one, no one decides what is news and what is not, and no one censors the letters to the editor. Freedom of the press is said to belong to the person who owns one, and now millions of us, in effect, do.
When unpopular political opinions are expressed in Usenet groups, Net people usually applaud and point and say, “See, it’s working.” When someone started the first alt.sex group, the Net people said, “Sure, why not?” When alt.sex.fetish.feet was formed, people said, “Yes, of course, this is freedom!” Though some people worried that the raunchy alt.sex.bondage group might give conservative government censors an excuse to clamp down on the Net, no one really tried too hard to stop it. “Who are we to say what others should do in their private lives?” was the general attitude. “I may not like bondage, but I’ll die for your right to talk about it!” Libertarians are a particularly active group on the Net.
And then along came NAMBLA.
NAMBLA is the North American Man Boy Love Association, a group that openly advocates the elimination of all age-of-con-sent laws, NAMBLA fiercely supports the right to consensual sex between children and adults, especially men and boys, NAMBLA makes the hair on the back of most people’s necks stand up. And NAMBLA wanted its own Usenet group, NAMBLA wanted to talk about man-boy love.
Man oh boy, did the fur ever fly!
There is a group called alt.config where ideas for new groups are proposed and discussed, and if I had a nickel for every time the words “weird, sicko, disgusting, and repugnant” were aimed at the individuals attempting to start the alt.sex.pedophilia group, I would have many nickels indeed. Many, many nickels.
It was fascinating to watch the process, NAMBLA made even the most staunch defenders of freedom squirm with an acute case of the free-speech willies. It was a riveting test of the Netters’ resolve. As the NAMBLA people and other pedophilia proponents accurately pointed out, they were not proposing to have man-boy relations, which remain illegal, on the Usenet group; they were just going to talk about man-boy relations and discuss the rightness of the laws, and just talking about the rightness of a particular law is certainly not illegal.
This was a compelling argument, and the free-speech Netters found themselves triply horrified—they were horrified to see themselves cast as hypocrites, shutting down someone’s right to talk about something; they were, in many cases, horrified by NAMBLA and by the whole concept of man-boy sex; and they were horrified by the publicity that might be generated, in particular by the potential response of Senator Jesse Helms if they approved the group alt.sex.pedophilia.
How are groups approved or disapproved? This, like so much else on the Net, is a bit complicated. Groups are proposed, votes are solicited, the big guys who operate the big machines decide to add a new group or not. But there are ways around this, especially in the alt.grouping, and often the group formation process resembles chaos more than order.
Ultimately, anyone with a good computer who knows the correct programming codes can start an alt.group with or without the Net community’s approval, and this is what eventually happened. The group was started with no clear consensus on its right to exist. The compromise was to call it alt.sex.intergen, as in intergenerational, as in one generation reaching out to another. And pigs can fly.
The Congressional hearings on all of this have not yet begun.
“It is amazing how many creatures live wild and free though secret in the woods.” Oops, I just quoted Thoreau again. The man has got under my skin. I can’t seem to shake that picture of him in my bedroom, holding the dead otter.
But yes, as I went deeper and deeper into the electronic forest in search of answers to my basic questions—Who is using this Net? What are they using it for?—I, too, was amazed by the creatures I found lurking in the dark corners.
There is a Usenet group called alt.shenanigans, for instance, where bad boys (and some girls) trade ideas and advice and gloat over their latest practical jokes.
For instance, under the heading “A GREAT Way to Get Even With a Bad Teacher Person,” a really funny guy explained how he and his buddies went out to their teacher’s driveway at three A.M. in the middle of a January snowstorm and cemented concrete cinderblocks to his driveway. The snow was three feet deep by morning, so the teacher never saw the cement blocks until the rear bumper had been ripped from his car. Hardy, har, har! If any of this is true, and it may not be, the bad teacher person missed about a week of work and sustained five hundred dollars worth of damage to his automobile. The person posting this shenanigan made it clear that the teacher “lived with his mother… [and] deserved everything he got for this one reason.”
Oh, to be young again!
Another suggested shenanigan was to get access to the electronic mail account of some “loser,” either by learning the loser’s password or by waiting until the loser walked away from his logged-in college computer lab terminal to go to the bathroom. Then, ha ha, you could “compose an E-mail letter threatening to kill the President.” Excuse me while I hold my side! To be fair, the author of this shenanigan advised that the message not be sent to whitehouse.gov, but back to the loser with some misleading information attached, so that the loser only thought that the message had been sent to whitehouse.gov. Then, it was suggested, you could forge an electronic message that looked as if it came from the Secret Service, and threaten the loser with arrest. Then stand back. Watch the loser wet his pants.
There are roving bands of anarchist hooligans as well, wandering from Usenet group to Usenet group, the most famous ensemble being alt.syntax.tactical, a group known for stirring up artificial flame wars. A flame war is when I flame you, you flame me back, I flame you again, others jump in to flame both of us for wasting too much time and too many words on flaming, we flame them for having the audacity to complain, and so on and so forth.
Here is what alt.syntax.tactical, or “a.s.t” for short, will do to incite mayhem:
First, they find a friendly, congenial newsgroup full of affable people who post politely and respectably. Then one or two a.s.t types join the group as secret agents, ask polite questions, get themselves known. Then, in what the a.s.t. guidelines call Wave One, other a.s.t. members post a flame to the group, or more likely, flame bait, something so controversial that people cannot help but get upset. The original secret agents respond with flames and counterflames, others are quickly drawn in, and pretty soon the majority of postings on the previously quiet and affable group revolve around flames, attacks, people calling for the attacks to stop, name calling, and accusations. The a.s.t. guidelines define success as the point when “the Majority or ALL threads in invaded newsgroup were started by us.”
This was done in rec.pets.cats, for instance. Someone posted an absurd but seemingly sincere message to the cat lovers’ group discussing the practice of stimulating his cat’s vagina “with a Q-tip” to induce ovulation, so that the cat would not inconveniently and vociferously go into heat when he had a girlfriend over for dinner. He also complained that his second cat had particularly foul-smelling bowel movements. Some of the more earnest cat lovers offered calm advice, but suddenly hordes of previously unheard cat lovers appeared on rec.pet.cats and began suggesting horrible alternatives, like putting the kitties in the microwave, nailing them to the wall, shooting them in the head.
The real cat lovers were understandably unnerved, and began posting messages to counteract this inexplicable tidal wave of anticat activity. The a.s.t. types, of course, then began attacking the true cat lovers, accusing them of all sorts of crimes and indiscretions, and for a short while nearly all the sensible people left rec.pet.cats.
I have witnessed other newsgroup invasions of this sort, and frankly, they are sort of fun to watch, assuming one of your favorite groups is not the victim. But it is rude, sophomoric, and does little to promote the idea that the Internet will raise mankind to some kinder, gentler level of consciousness.
Then there are the hatemongerers. One fellow spent the first half of 1994 literally flooding the Internet with long messages that began “SHOCKING NEWS: There Was No Holocaust” or “HOLOCAUST HOAX: Six Million Jews Never Died.” He posted his vitriolic garbage hundreds of times, to hundreds of groups: the world history groups, of course, the Jewish culture groups, but also to the auto repair groups, and the cooking groups, and everywhere else. People tried to stop him, but how? No one knew who he was.
Nor was he the only one. Matters got bad enough that Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Weisenthal Center, a group that investigates and exposes neo-Nazis, complained, “It may be time for the FCC to place a cop on the Superhighway.”
The April 1995 terrorist bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building triggered further calls for Net anarchy to be more closely monitored. Did the bombers use the Internet to communicate their plans? This suggestion was made within days of the bombing, but no one offered evidence. Is information on bomb making available on the Net? Yes, but the information has been around for years in books and pamphlets. Is there incendiary talk and hate propaganda on the Net, in Usenet groups like misc.activism.militia and alt.politics.white.power? Yes again, but in the wake of renewed calls for Internet regulation following the Oklahoma bombing, Net defenders were quick to point out that our national security might be better served by clamping down on libraries, shortwave radios, G. Gordon Liddy, and mailorder publishing houses. For that matter, what about the national telephone system, which is also used by potential anarchists? Or what about rental trucks?
There are homophobes, racists, and misogynists on the Net, and the anonymity of it all seems to give them a dizzying feeling of freedom. Posting hateful attack messages on Usenet groups is a bit like spraying graffiti on a public wall, but in the case of Usenet postings, there is little chance of being caught, and it probably isn’t even illegal. A coward’s dream.
Is there more of this hate talk on the Net than in “real life”? No, probably a little less, but it’s easier to find by accident and in ways it can seem more repulsive. While the sensible among us would never invite a rabid anti-semite into our home to spout his malicious rubbish or spraypaint our dining room wall, with Internet connectivity, the wires that link every computer to every other computer, the anti-Semite’s message might just appear some evening on our “personal” computer, in our family room maybe, in our most private spaces. This can be disconcerting; it can make us feel violated.
Bad boys, bad boys. There are so many of them, it is hard to keep track. Impostors are all over the Net. Men posing as women. Women as men. Kids as adults. Adults as kids. I joked once on a book discussion group that I, in fact, was Stephen King, and pretty soon this kid in New Jersey started flooding my mailbox with fan mail. He was “so excited” to know my electronic address and wanted my opinions on all my books. But I was only kidding!
Newsweek, on the other hand, reports that an unidentified record label was caught hiring paid shills to talk up new bands on the progressive music groups, trying to create an artificial groundswell of popular support and thus sell more records. There will always be snake oil salesmen, it is only the product that changes.
For the moment at least, until a secure system of encryption is worked out, many experts advise that you should never give your credit card number out to anyone on the Internet. They may not be who they claim to be, or perhaps they are, but someone else may have found some sneaky way to intercept their mail and steal your card number. Many people are now working on a secure system for Internet mail-order, but my advice is to wait until they finish, test it, and prove that it is secure.
By the way, this illustrates one other potentially dangerous aspect of Internet life—your electronic mailbox is not so wonderfully secure, either. To enter my ATM machine and steal twenty dollars, you would need my password and my card, but to read my electronic mail or send false mail under my name, all you would need is my password. Back in the 1994 Winter Olympics, when Tonya Harding was the center of the world’s imagination, three American reporters were caught reading the figure skater’s E-mail, though they denied finding anything of interest. Her password was on her plastic Olympic Village ID card, she wore that card on a chain around her neck, and someone took a photo, blew it up, and read the numbers. There are electronic means of learning someone’s password as well, though I don’t claim to understand them. There have been computer hackers as long as there have been computers, and you should never underestimate the resourcefulness of a hacker.
With all of this bad-boy activity going on, you may ask, Where are the Net Cops?
Well, remember, there is the problem of jurisdiction. No single entity owns the Net. It is made up of an ever-growing number of separate networks voluntarily joining forces in a vast cooperative effort. No one can really set enforceable rules. That is why Usenet, for instance, seems like anarchy. It is anarchy, of a sort. The Internet has been hailed as “the largest functioning anarchy in the history of the world.” Lots of people continue to post suggestions for good Net citizenship, but no one can make you follow them.
Only if what is being done is a crime can conventional crime-stoppers step in, but this gets very complicated, too. Regular hometown cops are responsible for stopping computer child abuse and other forms of stalking. If you engage in securities fraud on the Net, that is a matter for the federal regulatory authorities. If you threaten the president, expect a visit from men in dark suits with sunglasses. If you attempt to sell drugs, maybe the DEA will catch wind. But no one agency, or enforcement group, patrols the Internet. No one is really in charge.
It is not even clear if the United States government has jurisdiction. Sure, much of the Internet was built by American government funding and by American universities, and the vast majority of users right now are American, but the Net crosses a number of international boundaries. Think of it as air space, international air space, and no one national government can regulate international air space. Maybe the UN can form a commission to look into this. Maybe we will all be dead before the commission agrees on the shape of the table.
Eventually, though, most realists agree that the U.S. government will have to find some way of regulating what happens, at least within its borders. Based on current statistics, it seems likely the Net will continue to grow like a weed, and in addition to E-mail, Usenet, IRC, all of that, the Net will become a main source for on-line library catalogs, airline reservation systems, electronic shopping linkages, and the much-touted five hundred channels of cable television. Something this big, the argument goes, is just too important for the federal regulators to ignore.
And if those predictions come true, the Net may very well become victim of its own success. So many people will want to use this tremendous new information resource that the current Internet infrastructure will not be able to handle all the traffic, and someone will have to step in to build a newer, bigger, better one.
Who will it be?
Greedy, self-serving big business monopolists? Or free-speech libertarians with no intent to control or profit?
Don’t make me laugh.
I asked my highly placed House sources about this, and they said without hesitation that we Americans should expect full corporate involvement somewhere not too far down the pike. Communications companies like AT&T and Sprint already own part of the Net’s “backbone.”
“Building the Information Superhighway that Vice President Gore is talking about is going to require money,” my sources pointed out, grinning, “and the only way to get money is to get these people to build it.”
So here is the scenario—a conglomerate that includes a merger of Time-Warner, QVC, Beatrice Foods, Microsoft, and Disney builds this new network—shining, gleaming, interactive, with fiber optic cables running into every living room—and for a reasonable fee they provide all the programs, all the channels, all the commercials, and allow us to shop from the convenience of our BarcaLoungers; and they, of course, have access to demographic profiles of our shopping preferences as well as our medical records, perhaps, and our educational records—certainly our preference in computer discussion groups. They know how much electronic mail we send, and to whom we send it. The software exists even now for them to search every bit of our electronic mail for key words and phrases (such as “I am a sex pervert” or “I plan to buy a new car next month”) They know just about everything there is to know about us, more than we know about ourselves.
And what will they do with all of this information?
If you are just a little bit skeptical, maybe even paranoid, the answer is obvious.
Target marketing!
They will use this inside knowledge of our buying habits to drive us so deeply into debt that our grandchildren will be born already owing this Time-Warner-QVC-Beatrice-Microsoft-Disney aggregation every cent they will ever earn.
Oh, brother!
Oh, Big Big Brother!!
George Orwell may have been right after all. He was just off by a few short years.