Flame war

Can the internet do anything right? After a year of being blamed for the biggest speculative binge since the 1920s, now the internet is cast as the helpmate of modern terrorism. Maybe I am being overly protective of a communications medium that has grown up and can look after itself, but just look at the following litany.

Al-Qaeda commanders are thought to use web-based email to communicate orders. Bloodcurdling threats sent by instant message to an Israel software company. Online rumours of removal trucks filled with explosives in US cities. French police believe attack instructions embedded within digital images. Government websites gutted after fears that terrorists will use official documents to discover weakness in nuclear power station security systems. There is even a Bin Laden computer virus.

Judging by the coverage, the internet is at once the seedbed of rumour, the command and control system for Islamic extremists, and a rich source of target intelligence for enemies of the US and the West. It takes me back to the early days of the medium, when US newsweeklies ran long and hysterical features about the dangers of online pornography, gambling and, yes, even cyber terrorism. (I suppose they were right about that one.)

The technology community’s response went much like this: yes, the internet, like the telephone system, can be used for evil as well as good. Commentators do not hold the telecommunications industry responsible for the content that passes through its wires. So why does the internet get all the attention?

In part, there is a fascination with how some of the West’s most triumphant achievements – jet aircraft, computers and telecommunications – have been turned against it. And there are plenty of technology reporters, with no stock offerings and few product launches to report, who have occupied themselves by writing articles, not about the war itself, but about the internet front.

And so, I feel the need to justify the internet in a way that a telephone company engineer probably does not: to explain that the exploitation of the network by the West’s opponents are far outweighed by its contribution to international understanding. I wish it were true.

To a degree, it is. Take, for example, Al-Jazeera, the celebrated Qatar-based satellite television network. Its footprint does not touch the US, but its companion website does. Since the September 11^th events, traffic to the website has quadrupled to 3m pageviews a day. 40% of the visitors are from the US. I have written before about some of the Western weblogs – one-person sites - that have often covered the conflict more subtly than the established media.

There is informational value too in Osama bin Laden’s statements, which have been dropped into Al-Jazeera’s Kabul office or, it is thought, sent by email from an internet café in Peshawar. Yasser al-Sirri, director of the Islamic Observation Center in London, the recipient of one bin Laden communique, said: "The Internet is a very effective tool, and we use it to obtain and disseminate information quickly. Even people in Afghanistan can go across the border and send e-mail."

However, as often as not, when the web and email have not actively misled opinion, they have simply inflamed it. The Palestinian Journalists Association urges Arab and Muslim journalists to make better use of the internet, but then spoils its appeal by saying: “The Jews can and do control the American media from The Washington Post to CNN, but they can't control the flow of the Internet.”

To be sure, the internet opens our eyes to the Middle East press, but the sight revealed is rarely pleasant. Bjoern Staerk, a 22-year-old Norwegian weblog author, brings his readers excerpts from the day’s Saudi and Pakistani press. The effect, at least on me: to make me doubt the existence of moderate and reasonable Muslim opinion.

Matt Welch, author of the War Blog, blasts some quotes from a Saudi prince in Arab News. “Unluckily for him, there is an Internet, and his verbal contortions no longer sputter out on the Arabian peninsula…we get to read it right here in beautiful Los Angeles, California.”

In the first online discussion forums, the hippy hopes for mutual understanding were often soured by “flame wars” – online arguments which would career out of control because there was none of the reassurance of face-to-face contact. In this current conflict, we are witnessing a flame war, in which the ease of online communication first promotes bitterness. We can only hope that the understanding comes later.