GRASPING to make sense of a surfeit of madness, news articles across the nation have mentioned the role that the Internet may have played in helping organize the Oklahoma City bomb attack, detailing places on the net where militia and hate groups gather.
One publisher, rushing to sell books in a display of avarice and bad taste, sent out a news release about a new book on computer security under the headline, "Are Car Bombers Cruising the Internet?" and proclaiming that "a new breed of on-line terrorist" is stalking the network.
In these times, it is easy to demonize the big, powerful, invisible Internet -- to be outraged that it harbors pornographers and hackers and hate groups, and demand a means to monitor and control their conversations on the network so they might be stopped.
But is the Internet any more friendly to terrorists and social outcasts than the telephone, say, or any other communication system or network? News reports have repeatedly noted that books on making bombs were available on line. I've seen plenty of bomb-making books over the last 15 years in bookstores. In fact, most of the books you can find in survivalist bookstores are legally obtained United States Government field manuals with titles like "Unconventional Warfare Devices and Techniques," "Boobytraps," "Improvised Munitions Handbook" and "Incendiaries."
Some newspaper and television reports have provided details about Internet World Wide Web sites with pinup-style pictures of guns, and about Internet news group discussions that applauded the bombing. Again, there are plenty of places off line for people to find stylized pictures of guns (Hollywood movies are a pretty reliable source, for starters). And people are also applauding the bombing on talk radio, without a thousand-dollar computer and Internet connection.
Still, news groups themselves (part of a huge Internet community of electronic bulletin boards called Usenet) are an interesting study. The very features that make the Internet such a boon -- a free flow of information, with no central control mechanism -- also create a fertile breeding ground for extremists and others with special interests.
Usenet was designed in 1979 to cultivate specialized virtual communities of people who needed to share information on technical arcana. Today, extremist groups can use Usenet to swap their accusations of government malfeasance and treachery. And because the groups are so self-contained, these tales never have the benefit of being submitted to an outsider's reality check or corroborated in the process of being reported by the news media.
Of course this cloistering is precisely the point for many of these folks, who strongly believe that the mainstream news media are part of the dysfunctional system. But anyone who believes anything they read on the net without corroboration is begging to be misled.
The ability to connect people with extreme viewpoints, who would otherwise be on the fringe in their hometowns, is unique to the on-line world. As Francis Fukuyama, a Rand Corporation researcher and author of the "The End of History," noted in an Internet discussion grAoup last week, "It seems to me that contemporary technologies allow segments of civil society to opt out of the national community in ways that weren't really possible in the past."
That is certainly true. But as we've learned from recent disclosures about the militias' recruitment and indoctrination methods, bomb talk and on-line braggadocio do not make a standing army. The real stuff happens among a few hand-picked men in a training camp in the middle of rural pick-your-state. The bigger question is whether the Constitutional right to assemble is any different because it's on a computer network rather than in a rural bivouac.
Yet many lawmakers and Federal officials seem hell-bent on finding some way to snoop on the net.
Since February of this year, civil libertarians have been overwhelmed by the outcry against pornography on the Internet, where, in contrast to prime-time television, you have to look for it to find it. Most startling was the swiftness with which the Communications Decency Act was introduced by Senators Jim Exon, Democrat of Nebraska, and Slade Gorton, Republican of Washington, after a spate of news accounts of net-smut.
The bill would ban "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent" communication on the Internet. Among its many questionable provisions, the bill would apply restrictions to on-line media that do not apply to printed or spoken expression.
The Senate is expected to consider the bill sometime toward the end of May, but it may not come to that. In early April, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, introduced the Child Protection, User Empowerment and Free Expression in Interactive Media Study Bill, which proposes a study to figure out how users, rather than the Government, can control the information they receive over the network.
And now there are more than 20 counterterrorism measures proposed by President Clinton, many of them reversing legislation that was intended to protect Government critics from Federal surveillance.
Terrorism and child pornography are Pavlovian issues in American culture. People who display great common sense in all other matters, and who fervently believe in the constitutional protections for privacy and free speech and freedom of assembly, crumple when someone from law enforcement says: "There are child pornographers and terrorists on the net. Don't you think we should use whatever means possible to stop them?"
But the argument "we're doing this for your own good" is a slippery slope when applied to free speech. Perverts and criminals will always be with us. Once they are stopped (always temporarily, if at all), who is next to be watched? As Benjamin Franklin said, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The decisions we make today will be ones we live with for a very long time. If we want our Constitution to remain intact through today's turbulent times, we can't afford to demonize the Internet, or any other medium of human communication.
The only cure for hate speech, wherever it surfaces -- in a news group, on a radio show, in a magazine -- is to let it be heard, and to speak out against it.
