Land of the free, home of the unhinged

Freedom! cried the internet users, as they wrecked the US government's plans for a "back door" into encrypted messages. Freedom! cried the spokesmen [sic] of white-supremacist groups as they tried to respond to the bombing in Oklahoma city, carnage apparently caused by their own. And they cried it on the net: so the US government push to regulate the net is renewed. "Neo-Nazis have published anti-Nazi hit lists [on the net] and offered young followers on-line lessons in how to build and use a bomb," writes Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, in the Los Angeles Times in response to the Oklahoma bombing.

It is Abraham Cooper's job to expose and oppose anti-Jewish and other hateful material wherever it appears, and all strength to him. In his place, I might use the net.wickedness angle to get a piece into the LA times. But the internet spin to any wickedness story is alarming, not least because it distracts attention from the three-dimensional reality.

Five years ago, casually trawling for net.wierdness, I came across a discussion forum, supposedly devoted to the social niceties of transvestitism, but in fact debating the relative merits of different assault rifles. Support for the Second Amendment to the US Constitution -- interpreted as a right for all to be as heavily armed as they please -- was assumed, in what I naively expected to be one of the less macho corners of cyberspace. It's not so much shocking that this belief appeared on my computer screen, as that it exists.

I'd known the militias were somewhere on the net, but never stumbled across them until I was pointed to a handy Web page from the National Press Club in DC. It led to the same disturbingly childish crayon graphics and unhinged paranoid whining -- how white American men are an oppressed minority, for Chrissakes -- as I have found in my browsing through weirdness-on-paper and heard on US radio shows. It is the same material, recycled. Perhaps there are real dastardly deeds out there on the wires -- but I'd have to be a trusted member of a group to see them.

I can report from my day-tour of militias on the net that the inevitable conspiracy theory about the Oklahoma bombing has sprung up. Would you believe that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms bombed itself to discredit the self-proclaimed "patriots"?

And I found the statement "though we reject the use of political violence in this country, we entirely support the [US] citizen militias in their opposition to the Federal Government" attributed to Britain's tiny "Libertarian Alliance", which I had previously thought to be only moderately unhinged. I am grateful that the net made this allegation available.

In the US you can find more extreme and inflammatory material by tuning to radio shows like that of G Gordon Liddy, the convicted Watergate felon. He, and the gun-toting trannies, and the conspiracy theorists and the rest, are a mad, bad and dangerous feature of American life. To concentrate on their presence in cyberspace is to establish a comfortable distance from their presence in normal space.

Perhaps the real significance of their presence on the net is this: it allows the many Americans who never venture outside air- conditioned comfort to read what they could have heard if they had visited the sweaty trailer parks and the bars of the mean streets.

But what is to be done about hateful speech on the net?

"By demanding personal responsibility and accountability," Abraham Cooper concludes, "it may yet be possible to prevent bigots from gaining a free ride in cyberspace." He thus proposes that all messages should be clearly sourced. I would, as a journalist, promote this idea, to encourage responsibility and restrict plagiarism in cyber-publishing. But I'm still looking for a solution which provides legitimate anonymity -- for those seeking support after being sexually abused or harassed, or for brave people who want to spread news of human rights violations in China or East Timor, or for the person who's about to send the true accounts of the Conservative Party to my mailbox (please).

Anywhere where there is freedom of expression, it will be abused: that could stand as its definition. It is, in general, a price worth paying.

I have a difficulty, though, with the US "strong First Amendment" position, which takes the prohibition on Congress making any law to abridge the freedom of the press as a God-given right for anyone to say whatever comes into their head as obstreperously as possible. It regards all statements of equal value and admits no criteria of truth other than free-market competition of ideas. The only response to noxious expression, other than the greater danger of censorship, though, is to join in that free market of ideas and rebut, rebut and where possible refute.