A citation for The Terrorist’s Handbook popped up on my screen a minute after I started a search of the World Wide Web under the word “explosives.” I apparently would be able to make “book bombs,” “lightbulb bombs,” “phone bombs.”
Trying to retrieve the Handbook some weeks later, I read the following: “Are you sure this resource exists?” Cute. The heat is on. Handbook-style items caught the attention of the U.S. Senate after sickos blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City and killed 160 people. The response in effect was: “Ban the bomb manuals—from the Net and otherwise!” and as of this writing, it looked as if such sentiments might end up as law. Still, a little problem arose in the case of The Terrorist’s Handbook on the Net. The material was coming to me from Lysator, a respected academic computer society at Linköping University in Linköping, Sweden. Last I knew, the U.S. Senate did not enjoy jurisdiction over its counterparts in Stockholm.
The Swedish computer that stored The Terrorist’s Handbook, however, contains megabyte after megabyte of valuable material on computing and other subjects, and the electronic librarians didn’t want to anger the university. So out of prudence, they voluntarily removed the bomb manual after hysterical stories appeared in the press. The Handbook wasn’t worth the fuss.
Perhaps in other cases Washington will use diplomacy with other countries to unplug Handbook-style items. But no one should count on this approach working in the end. Inevitably the same material will be secretly making the rounds of obscure electronic bulletin board systems, as opposed to the Net itself. As if that isn’t enough, Washington has unwittingly given out instructions for bomb-makers by way of the tax-financed Blaster’s Handbook from the Forestry Service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Even The Encyclopedia Britannica has printed material on explosive making.
Most disturbing of all, Constitutional issues arise here. We don’t need the government to restrain free speech. As writer Brock N. Meeks wrote in his CyberWire Dispatch newsletter, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s proposal was “a break in the dike.” It was “the trickle that could become a river of regulatory hammers meant to turn the rough-and-tumble, open and free-flowing online discourse into something with all the appeal and intellectual acumen of tofu.”
Newsgroups are a bit like local bulletin board systems except that some newsgroups reach hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Mailing lists are more intimate than newsgroups since you usually need to sign up for them electronically before you receive the messages.
“The funny thing,” Harmon says of freshly created mailing lists, “is that you never know what will result. What I found was that most depressed people couldn’t produce that much art and mysticism, but they were interested in supporting each other, and I looked at that and let it go on its own.”
A seventy-eight-year-old widow in the American South discovered Harmon’s list. She was the first in her family, after several generations of mental illness, to seek psychiatric help. People from Singapore have popped up, too, reporting how they were stigmatized as lazy by people unable to understand the energy-sapping qualities of the disease. Walkers tell of spouses complaining about the loss of sex drive from depression or medications. Simply put, Harmon’s list has not just helped people cope with a disease, but it has also helped those who can’t understand it. And as shown by the Singaporean example, geography has been inconsequential for the most part. “When you’re depressed,” Harmon says, “it doesn’t matter where you’re from, you’re still depressed.”
What’s more, Walkers can log on as often or seldom as they want. Frequently the depressed feel all “peopled up,” so they may flee into their rooms and close the blinds when visitors approach. But with Walkers messages, all they need do is press the delete key. The Internet isn’t just a medium of special benefit to the deaf; it’s also one for the seriously depressed, many of whom, if made Netless, might try to do without any company offline.
As with thousands of other Net lists, people come and go, some of them overwhelmed by the sheer volume of messages; Stoll is right to characterize the Internet as like trying to drink water from a fire hydrant. But a core of stalwarts remain enthusiastically on Walkers, and along with Harmon and Goldberg, they’re rather small-townish in cyberspace in the best of ways. I ask about the East Coast Walker with suicidal tendencies. Harmon says that by the time the supportive messages reached the man, the programmer had already called 911 and gone to the hospital to have his stomach pumped.