Giants of flesh and steel

After the 11 September terrorist attacks, the instant news-and-views power of cyberspace came into its own. But there may be a price. Amira Howeidy reports
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
--- John Perry Barlow
You would imagine, especially after the conditioning of Hollywood blockbusters, that a 21st Century War involving America would be technological. We've been programmed to envisage state-of-the- art operation rooms and hi-tech smart weapons capable of monitoring everything and everyone (think Independence Day, Art of War, Enemy of the State). No target is impossible, even a virtual one (think The Matrix).
But the wars America fights (and wins) in the movies are nothing like the one we are witnessing today. Instead primitiveness seems the fundamental feature. The tools of the terrorists on 11 September were workaday civil aeroplanes, and the prime suspect is a bearded man who often appears on TV footage riding that state-of-the-art transport device, the horse, in that most high- tech of surroundings: the empty desert. And despite the simplistic "goodies-versus-baddies" analysis of the roots of the terror, so like the plot of a Tinseltown feature, in real life it was the victims, not the villains, who sought refuge in technology. Hijacked passengers on the ill-fated planes of 11 September rushed to mobile phones for solace. Hours after the attack, millions around the globe feverishly exchanged SMS (Short Message Service) messages in their bid to find sense in the absurdity. And nothing beat the convenience, space, tolerance, variety, wealth and democracy of the World Wide Web as a means of swapping news, views and theories about the attacks.
Global traffic on the Internet doubled in their immediate wake. E-mail forwards have choked our mailboxes with theories, facts, jokes, information and, perhaps most important, knowledge, allowing a generation that grew up knowing nothing beyond CNN and BBC to discover more adventurous thinkers and journalists like Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk.
But traditional news sites have, of course, prospered, too. According to Jupiter MMXI, a Web site which monitors Internet use, an average of 11.7 million Americans visited online news sites every day the week after 11 September: almost double the six million who visited news sites the week before. ABCNews.com, which broadcast television coverage live in the week after the attack, experienced a surge in average daily unique visitors of more than 360 per cent, with 272,000 visiting in the week ending 9 September to 1,257,000 in the week ending 16 September.
CNN.com logged 4.6 million unique visitors each day during the week after the attack, making it the sixth most visited site in the United States with a total of 17.2 million unique visitors. The BBC's Web site, bbc.co.uk, received 260 per cent more visitors, with 526,000 average daily unique visitors from the US, up from its usual 146,000.
Likewise, Internet traffic in the Middle East region ballooned. Individual Web sites reported a significant increase in numbers of visitors. The daily Arabic Al-Ahram Web site, one of the most frequently visited Arabic press sites, recorded a huge increase from its usual 50,000 to 130,000 unique visitors a day, says Omar Sami, head of the Al-Ahram technology department. LINKdotNET, believed to be Egypt's largest Internet Service Provider (ISP), also witnessed "a rush" in dial-up connections, Karim Zidan, Link's marketing director, told Al-Ahram Weekly.
Predictably, the mass turn to cyberspace affected the performance of several major sites. American Airlines' AA.com and the US government's FBI.gov simply cracked under the weight of people hunting information on the crisis as it unfolded. RedCross.org, which processed $1,024 in online donations from about 50,000 visitors on 10 Sept, had some 2.5 million users the following day, and processed more than $1 million in donations. "Our server was nearly melting," Phil Zepeda, director of online media for the American Red Cross, was quoted as saying.
Chat rooms and news groups also found new prominence. They were the perfect outlets for those who wanted to vent, as a global community sought to uncover the dynamics of a new age: its makers, partnerships and victims. From hackneyed anti-Islam, anti-Arab hate to more scholastic views on the similarities between the coming war and the Trojan war of Homer's Iliad or the relation between the roots of Darwinism and the roots of terrorism, viewpoints of all stripes found a home on the World Wide Web.
Perhaps ironically, this unprecedented and spontaneous online presence was accompanied by campaigns for stronger Internet surveillance laws, as part of the "war on terror." American legislators have been enthusiastic and prompt in allowing the security apparatus to monitor electronic communications. On 13 September, the US Congress passed the Combating Terrorism Act of 2001, which lowers the legal standards necessary for the FBI to deploy its infamous Carnivore surveillance system. According to a recent article in Village Voice, a weekly newspaper based in New York, Carnivore is attached to an ISP; once in place, it scans e-mail traffic for 'suspicious' subjects, "which, in the current climate, could be something as innocent as a message with the word "Allah" in the header," argues Brendan Koerner in Voice.
Koerner also suggested the Internet's care-free days are over. This may well be true: everything indicates that civil liberties are now in serious jeopardy as American legislators and their allies surrender to the more histrionic fear-peddlers. Yet others argue that it is too late to control the Net. The virtual world, after all, won its popularity and legitimacy because our virtual selves are supposed to be immune from the sovereignty of governments. In his "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," the iconic (and iconoclastic) cyber-libertarian John Perry Barlow addresses the governments of "flesh and steel" thus: "You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions." And so, as the war against terror heats up, another war will take place, too: between the free-thinkers of cyberspace who cherish the Internet and its anarchic ideals, and the authorities of "flesh and steel," who mean to control it -- by any means necessary.
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See:
Fall-out
Fall-out 27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001
US Tragedy: The fall-out 20 - 26 September 2001
US Attacked 13 - 19 September 2001
Related links:
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
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