untraceable speech. Social norms have not yet evolved to create a code
of conduct for acceptable online behavior—and may never do so. The
psychology of the Internet creates a feeling that the targets are some-
how distant or unreal and therefore less sympathetic—this problem
has been known since the psychologist Stanley Milgram demonstrated
the effect of social distance on human behavior, but, has been accen-
tuated and made nearly universally applicable by modern technology.
Law enforcement also lags behind the Internet. In the United
States, online law enforcement has generally been focused on major
fraud and child pornography. Many victims of “routine” online at-
tacks cannot obtain help from the legal system, either because the at-
tackers have disappeared into the digital night or because local courts
and lawyers simply don’t know how to deal with complex online at-
tacks that might have come from the far side of the world.
Developments in the law itself have also lagged far behind the
evolution of Internet technology. Today, the law of the Internet is
controlled by two major federal statutes: the Communications De-
cency Act (CDA) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA). These laws were enacted in 1996 and 1998, respectively,
and they have not been updated, even though the Internet today
would be unrecognizable to politicians of 1996. A legal loophole in
the Communications Decency Act makes it impossible to force a
website to remove anonymous attacks, no matter how false and dam-
aging they may be. The result of the CDA and the DMCA is per-
verse and bewildering: Viacom can send one letter to YouTube and
force it to remove 50,000 videos for copyright violations, but if an
anonymous attacker were to upload a lie-filled video about your kid
sister to the same site, she would have no power to force the site to
take the undoubtedly illegal video down.
As a result, false rumors are spreading with lightning speed. In-
timate photographs, videos, and personal details are being leaked
worldwide. Gossip and innuendo are replacing honesty and truth.
And, thanks to the power of the Internet, attackers and gossipmon-
gers enjoy instant global audiences and powerful anonymity. They
Wild West 2.06
work from the shadowy corners of the Web to sabotage reputations,
careers, and families. Loopholes in the law protect them from being
found or prosecuted.
Of course, anonymous gossip and lies are as old as civilization.
But, thanks to the Internet, smears that would once have been lim-
ited to a bathroom stall or a hand-passed note can now be seen by
employers, friends, families, dates, clients, and anyone else with ac-
cess to the Web. Before the Internet, a smear campaign based on a
personal grudge would last only as long as it took for scrawled notes
to find their way to the trash can or as long as it took to paint over
graffiti. But today, notes posted on the Web are broadcast to a world-
wide audience, preserved into the distant future, and spread to
thousands by Google.
For too many people, the Web has become a permanent scarlet let-
ter. Who is going to hire a victim of an online smear when there is a
similar candidate up for the job who is not accused, however noncha-
lantly and anonymously, of being a liar, thief, or cheating husband? Too
often, the attack is hard to undo, even if the smears are untrue: how
does one rebut an allegation of sexual impropriety? Can one forget the
emotional damage caused by being crassly reminded of the loss of a
loved one? How is it possible for an everyday person to prove that a
photograph is a forgery, let alone inform everyone who has seen it?
The harm caused by electronic attacks extends into the “real”
world of flesh-and-blood interactions. Nothing separates the “vir-
tual” and the “real” worlds; an online smear impacts face-to-face in-
teractions just as much as a hushed comment or a passed note. A
false claim about your business—accusations of bias or of a lack of
patriotism, claims that your product is dangerous, or even claims that
employees made offensive comments to customers—can send cus-
tomers running in droves away from your business and even tie up
your phone lines or flood your e-mail with howling protests.
These online attacks are happening more and more frequently.
Bullies, jerks, jilted lovers, and sociopaths have realized that they can
wreak far more havoc with far less accountability by using the Inter-
Welcome to the New Digital Frontier 7
net to launch their barbs. The attackers seek explosive revenge for
petty differences and jealousies, censorship of their critics through
humiliation, destruction of political and business opponents, and
sometimes schadenfreude or just nerdy self-celebration from the
ability to inflict pain on unsuspecting people hundreds of miles away.
The Machine Is Amoral
The problems caused by the Internet are amplified by its structure.
The computers that run the Internet—including the big network
switches that control the flow of data and the computers that store
the content of websites—do not know or care what information is
being transmitted. To a computer, it is all just digital bits. A com-
puter doesn’t know if information is true or false, kind or hurtful,
public or private. There is no way for a computer to realize that real
people are being hurt by a website. A computer is amoral—it just
does not have any sense of what is “good” or “bad.” (The Internet is
not immoral—of bad morals—but rather merely amoral, meaning
that it has no regard for morals either way.) If a computer is pro-
grammed to repeat information that it finds, then it will do so no
matter whether the information it finds is true (“the moon is made of
rock”), false (“the moon is made of cheese”), or completely nonsensi-
cal (“the moon cheeses the rock”).
The most obvious example is Google’s search results. No matter
what terms you search for, the results you see will be selected by a
computer without human intervention. The details of the algorithm
used by Google to rank search results are a closely guarded secret,
but the general outlines have been made public. In short, Google’s al-
gorithm ranks “popular” sites higher and less “popular” sites lower.
The algorithm does not make any judgment about the correctness of
a page; it just finds the most popular pages. Google is notorious for
refusing to alter the results provided by the algorithm, no matter how
compelling the circumstances. Sometimes this policy leads to painful
results. For some time, a search for “Jew” on Google returned a hate-
ful anti-Semitic site as the first result, rather than information
Wild West 2.08
about the Jewish faith or people. Google apologized and blamed the
algorithm’s result on the popularity of the hate site, but refused to in-
tervene directly.
1
Just because the hate site was popular, Google’s al-
gorithm assumed it must be important. Other results of the
algorithm’s single-minded focus on popularity are more comical: A
search for “miserable failure” used to return a link to the White
House, and a search for “French military victories” still returns a link
to a page suggesting that the user should have been searching for
“French military defeats.”
The danger of the automated Web is not limited to search en-
gines: The “social Web” or “Web 2.0” is a group of increasingly inter-
connected websites that are based around active user participation.
This “Web 2.0” model relies on users to create large amounts of con-
tent, which is then displayed to other users. The new “Web 2.0” model
stands in sharp contrast to the older generation of websites (call it
“Web 1.0” or even the “old Web”), which relied on a top-down content
model: a paid author would write content and then hope that users
would read it. The basic functions of sites like CNN.com or
FoxNews.com are classic examples of “Web 1.0” sites: content (like
news stories and photographs) is developed by a professional staff,
and average users play an entirely passive role when reading the site.
On the other hand, Facebook.com and its adult cousin,
LinkedIn.com, are paradigmatic examples of “Web 2.0” websites in
that they are both sites where most of the content comes from active
user interactions: the sites both allow people to connect online with
friends and co-workers in order to share photos and life updates.
There is very little content that is created by employees of Facebook
or LinkedIn; instead, the sites simply create an open space where
users can determine for themselves how to interact. Discussion sites
like Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit are also classic examples of “Web 2.0”
sites. These sites allow users to submit news stories for others to view
and discuss; there is no editor who picks news stories or puts an official
spin on the news—instead, it is up to users to submit news and com-
mentary for other users to view. Hundreds of thousands of people visit
Welcome to the New Digital Frontier 9
these sites to get an eclectic view of current events and to discuss the so-
cial issues of the day, and most of the value comes from other users.
These Web 2.0 sites allow (and encourage) positive user inter-
action. But they also create grave risks to personal reputation. Back
in the days of Web 1.0, the reputation of most private individuals
was pretty safe: most highly visible content was created by profes-
sional journalists (or at least by serious amateur ones), and a big
news website like CNN.com had no reason to spread rumors about
individual people (the big sites had other news topics to cover) and
a big financial reason not to smear individuals (the threat of a libel
lawsuit). But, in the days of Web 2.0, everyone is a publisher, and
everyone can distribute content. Your enemies have been armed with
new weapons: blogs, easy “WYSIWIYG” website editing (“What
You See Is What You Get” editors that allow everyday people to cre-
ate fancy-looking sites), extensive discussion forums, and a massive
social echo chamber to repeat it all. And, most important, all of these
enemies have been armed with the power of Google to index every-
thing they say. Disgruntled customers no longer have to rely on pro-
fessional journalists to carefully research their claims against your
company; now, customers can directly blog about their experience or
write negative reviews on consumer sites—and then these sites will
appear in a Google search for the name of your business. Bitter ex-
lovers or rejected suitors can create online attacks that have the same
impact as buying a massive billboard above a freeway, but at a frac-
tion of the price—and with the possibility of doing it anonymously.
Kids who would once end their mischief with prank phone calls can
now leave a permanent scarlet letter on your reputation by publiciz-
ing a rumor or lie just for kicks and giggles. The power of Web 2.0 to
create positive connections among its users also creates the danger of
misuse to attack and smear reputations.
The open nature of Web 2.0 sites can also create a system of in-
terconnected websites, algorithms, and search systems that no one
person or company is responsible for. Call it a “machine” of sorts,
with parts spread around the world. Often the system works for
Wild West 2.010
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