[iwar] [fc:Browsing.The.Net.During.Wartime]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-04 07:19:21
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2001 07:19:21 -0700 (PDT)
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Browsing The Net During Wartime 
By Leslie Walker, Washington Post, 10/4/2001
<a href="http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170811.html">http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170811.html>

The Internet is opening a wider window into America's war against
terrorism, giving people in the United States and other nations a view
outside their homelands that wasn't readily available during previous
global conflicts. 
Internet media and foreign affairs experts say more and more people are
veering off the online paths of mainstream media to supplement their
understanding of current events with alternate sources of information. 
They're surfing abroad to read local newspapers such as the Dawn in
Pakistan (www.dawn.com) or to peruse Middle Eastern Web portals such as
Islam Online (www.islamonline.net). People in far-flung countries are
chatting via instant messaging software, posting thoughts on electronic
bulletin boards, and searching for relevant Web journals at sites such
as DayPop (www.daypop.com). Some are forwarding e-mail commentaries
through automated distribution lists that anyone can join at Yahoo
Groups (groups.yahoo.com) and Topica (www.topica.com). 
While it's too soon to say what impact this massive electronic dialogue
will have on the world's response to the horror of Sept. 11, I'm
convinced it will be significant. 
How could it not be? With an eye to boosting bottom lines, American
media companies dramatically scaled back international news coverage
throughout the 1990s. Now Americans are struggling to learn about the
politics, history and religious subtext to a murky fight against
terrorism. 
As Americans look abroad for information, people elsewhere are consuming
more online media in the United States. The surge appeared in Web
traffic logs right away after terrorists struck New York and Washington
on Sept. 11. 
Thirty-six percent of CNN.com's traffic during the 11 hours following
the deadly attacks came from outside the United States, vs. 22 percent
for the same day a week earlier, according to ComScore Networks Inc.
That pattern was even more pronounced at government sites. More than
half the traffic at the FBI site came from abroad that day, ComScore
reported. 
For all the talk of it being a global medium, most Internet content
reflects the regional politics of its home country. Few truly
transnational Web sites have emerged to aggregate news from around the
world. Yahoo's world news section (dailynews.yahoo.com/h/wl/nm/?u) is
among the better free aggregators. There is also the U.S. government's
World News Connection, successor to the Foreign Broadcast Information
Service, which translates thousands of articles from foreign
publications every day and publishes free headlines at wnc.fedworld.gov.
To read the articles, however, costs $65 a month. 
Stephen Cohen, a senior foreign policy fellow and Middle East expert at
the Brookings Institution, said the Web is essential to his research
because it gives him direct access to citizens and political experts he
knows in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. 
"What astonishes me is how well they can be informed about what we are
doing," Cohen wrote in an e-mail interview. "Those Indians and
Pakistanis that use the Web have asked me questions about policy
decisions and choices here that I am unaware of." 
I've been reading with growing dismay foreign newspaper accounts of
anti-American riots in Indonesia and Pakistan. Many articles quoted
protest leaders predicting that the American war on terrorism will widen
into a crusade against Muslims. Foreign commentators repeatedly cited
President Bush's Sept. 16 use of the word "crusade" to describe
America's response, without noting that his spokesman later retracted
the loaded religious term. 
In Britain, newspapers are serving up more detail about military
preparations in the Middle East than is appearing in media outlets here.
There are sensationalist scoops for die-hard news junkies, too. 
On Sunday, Britain's Daily Telegraph published a doozy of an interview
with a bodyguard of the Taliban's top leader, who reportedly defected to
Pakistan. "I was one of the Taliban's torturers: I crucified people,"
screamed the headline. The man described how he and others in the
Taliban secret police had patroled Afghanistan looking to arrest people
who were watching videos or engaging in other banned activities, then
tortured and killed them. Arabia.com featured a story yesterday under
the headline "Palestinian Kids Want to Die Throwing Stones." 
Of course, Internet news sources don't always reveal their true origin
or purpose, and it's easy to be misled. Paul Levinson, an Internet media
expert and author of the book "Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the
Information Millennium," says there's no easy way for most people to
determine whether an online source is credible, making it tough for the
Internet to fulfill its promise as a global news medium. 
"On the one hand, the technology and processing of information is
transnational," Levinson said. "One would think that would change
everything and people could hook into the Internet and get satisfactory
information from all over the world. But the uncertainty of information
we find online gets in the way of that." 
Vera Beaudin Saeedpour, founder and director of the Kurdish Library in
New York and an expert on Kurdish affairs, said the challenge for many
Americans is compounded by the fact that many paid scant attention to
international affairs for so long. She doubts the Internet can now offer
an effective crash course on the complexities of belief systems and
politics behind terrorism movements. 
"The problem for Americans . . . is that they were off on the wrong
track beginning with the Gulf War and they never got it right since,"
Saeedpour wrote. "Now everyone wants information but has no background
to appropriately assess sources or the validity of what they read." 
Nancy Snow, a propaganda expert and associate director of UCLA's Center
for Communications and Community, agrees that vested interests and
propaganda goals of many world news Web sites make them hard to digest
properly. She said the Internet's power to educate can also cut two
ways: "It also has the power to inflame, as we saw with how this notion
of an American 'crusade' got transmitted around the world
instantaneously on the Internet." 
What remains to be seen, of course, is to what extent the Internet might
help narrow opposing views. It's conceivable, for example, the medium
could help folks bypass their governments and traditional media outlets
to not only read alternative perspectives, but also directly ask
questions of people who might be declared their "enemy" if the conflict
escalates. 
Researcher Robert E. Thomason contributed to this column. 
Reported by Washingtonpost.com, http://www.washingtonpost.com

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