Blame Society, Not the Net, for the Evils Lurking Online By John Schwartz Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, November 18 1996; Page F19 The Washington Post "Is the Net a dangerous place?" asked Diane Rehm, with trademark earnestness. She raised the question last week on her nationally syndicated radio program, but she isn't the only one asking. Commentators have been taking a harsh look at the Internet lately and always seem to come away with "deep concerns" about "troubling implications for society." Welcome to the latest chapter of the great Net scare, today's Big Threat. Along with the usual stories about online hatemongers, hackers and lechers come these recent stories: A front-page piece in the New York Times last week warned that college students are getting sucked into endless hours of online activity, forgoing studies and becoming isolated. An Associated Press story trumpeted the news that police had arrested a man for going online to find someone to rape his wife. And of course there's the bizarre story of Sharon Lopatka, the Carroll County, Md., torture fetishist who, via the Internet, sought a man to kill her and then went all the way to Lenoir, N.C., to meet him. "I don't know about this Internet," mused the North Carolina prosecutor pursuing the case. "I think I'm not letting my kids anywhere near it for a while." The Net has become the all-purpose scary place, good for a quick headline or government initiative. When Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf dropped by The Post for a lunch earlier this month, he ridiculed the logic that when bad things happen via the Net, it's somehow the Net's fault -- and then sober questions are inevitably asked about how to control this new menace. "You know you can get in your car and kill people?" he said with mock astonishment. "Maybe we should ban cars." I use the Net to find information and to meet people, and I find it a great place to be, spending hours a day online. I have educated myself about it, and avoid those neighborhoods where I know I won't feel comfortable. Common-sensically, I don't put my children online without being there to supervise, just as I wouldn't just drop them off at the mall for a day of roaming. So the idea that these various news stories all underscore some dark truth about the dangers of the Internet mystifies me, and leads me to raise a bunch of "as ifs." As if college students had never wasted time before. As if people haven't long used classified ads or singles bars to find each other, sometimes for nefarious purposes. People lately are willing to make the most amazing stretches of fact and reason to blame the Net. When Pierre Salinger held a Paris press conference to announce what turned out to be a bogus TWA Flight 800 conspiracy that had been floating around online discussions for months, stories in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune painted the Internet as a conduit of unreliable information. As if Salinger couldn't do what thousands of others who read that message had done: dismissed it as a paranoid fantasy, one more Net urban legend like the Neiman Marcus $250 cookie recipe. Similarly, when allegations of CIA involvement in the crack trade were distributed via the Internet, many commentators excoriated the Net as a place where unsubstantiated rumors fly -- when in fact these "rumors" had originated in a San Jose Mercury News series that had the benefit of all those layers of editing that the Internet supposedly lacks. And in a weird new twist on the trend for blaming the Net for all our problems, telephone companies such as Pacific Bell have said that plain-vanilla Internet users -- not even the perverts -- are putting such a strain on their networks that local phone service is imperiled. Interestingly, the telephone companies' own Network Reliability Council has reported no recent telephone outages have resulted from Internet usage. Pacific Bell's complaint led Cerf to suggest that the companies actually might be looking to boost rates from Internet users. "That's a genteel way of saying, `You speak with forked tongue!' " he joked. Like many Net boosters, though, Cerf wants it both ways: He wants what's good about the Internet to be seen as revolutionary, and what's bad to be seen as not much different from what you find in the real world. But we all know that, in fact, the very things that make the Net a special force for good -- such as the ability to find people of common interest around the world -- give it extra punch when people want to use it to do bad things. Our tools extend our abilities, and the abilities of bad people as well. As one noted analyst of the modern age has observed, "The `bad' parts of technology cannot be separated from the `good' parts." Well, okay, the "noted analyst of the modern age" is the Unabomber. I agree with the critique, but not with his solution. The people decrying the Net are using technology as a scapegoat for the fact that we haven't, as a society, addressed these problems. Yes, it's a shame that there are pedophiles on the Internet. But the real horror is there are pedophiles in the real world and that pedophilia exists at all. Let's face facts. To the extent that there's a problem out there, it's our society that's sick -- or at least, it has spawned a number of sick and broken people. The Internet, as the most personal medium ever developed, reflects that. I guess cartoonist Walt Kelly said it best: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Could we move on to the next Big Threat now? Please? John Schwartz's Email address is schwartj@twp.com PLACES TO GO You can read the now-famous TWA Flight 800 memo at http://members.aol.com/tomhun8054/twa800.html; the Unabomber manifesto can be found at http://pele.ckm.ucsf.edu/marc/misc/anarchy/fc/. Interneters discuss the press and the Net on the newsgroup alt.internet.media-coverage. Copyright 1996 The Washington Post Company