Mice war

by Jane Lyons    4th May 2001

The struggle between civil rights activists and extremist hate groups has intensified. It is a war without borders; an archetypal battle of good and evil and its weapons are mere mice and modems.

Representatives from civil rights communities gathered in Sydney last November at the "Cyberhate: bigotry and prejudice on the Internet" conference to discuss the new and disturbing trends of hate in the virtual world.

At the conference, speaker David Goldman, founder and Executive Director of Hate Watch, an American web-based organization that monitors online extremism, said hate extremists are migrating away from websites to web attacks.

According to him, there are currently 450 to 600 extreme hate sites on the net. These are home to most of the usual suspects - anti-blacks, anti-Asians, anti-gays and anti-Semites - with misogyny also on the rise. Holocaust denial is another disturbing trend and although few, Australia has its own brand of racist sites: "Boongs paradise" is an interactive web game that lets players stalk and sexually assault Aboriginal women.

An emerging trend identified as 'leaderless resistance' or 'lone-wolf activism' where individuals no longer act at the behest of a leader but instead on their own initiative is the new problem facing the civil rights community.

"Leaderless resistance says, don't join groups, don't get tattoos, don't walk around with a big Klan patch on your chest because that marks you. Act as though you were in stealth mode. But take action as a white man or woman should," says Goldman.

And the consequences are severe. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a watchdog organisation, had its server where they hold membership lists and credit card details hacked into. Hatewatch's own server has been crashed and was rendered unavailable.

'Web jacking', whereby a hacker fakes the registration of a domain name and effectively take over a site is also a problem. However, the attacks on individuals are more ominous.

"There was a list floating around Usernet for a while called the 'dead pool'. It had the names of 15 people who would be good targets," says Goldman. He was number seven.

The difficulty with individual attacks is that they are hard to prosecute.

"The problem that is occurring online is that the person posting the information probably won't be the person to act. It is part of the ideology of the extremist world to cull the public information and put it out there as a sort of wish list," says Goldman.

The Nuremberg files, an anti-abortion website currently under investigation in the States, is an example of this type of individual extremism. The site is dedicated to providing dossiers on abortionists - photographs, license plate numbers, working hours, home addresses and even a map to help you get there. There are links to gun sites and each time an abortionist is murdered a black line is drawn through their name. This site has now been taken down, but a number of ?mirror' or replica sites have already appeared.

Jeremy Jones, Director of Community Affairs for the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, says that e-mail has also become a valuable weapon for the hate activist.

After a number of Jewish people were killed in the 1997 bridge collapse at the Maccabi games in Israel, relatives of the victims received e-mails celebrating the demise of Jews.

"The threatening email is now right up there numerically with hate mail," Jones says. However, he says the anonymous nature of the Internet has made the emails even more threatening and aggressive.

Nevertheless, the aggression does not stop with e-mails. Of even greater concern to Jones is a recent message on a number of Internet news groups inciting people to throw rocks at the Israeli consulate in Sydney and to attack Jewish people on Bondi Beach.

Whether it be online hate groups, threatening e-mails, menacing ?wish lists' or individual web attacks, Goldman says ?Leaderless activity' will be the future trend of hate online and will present the next big challenge for civil rights groups and traditional law enforcement agencies.

However, he does remind us that most of the Internet is secure and that "There is not a nazi behind every modem or mouse."