Frank Haden opines on Redwatch and malicious internet users in general in the Sunday Star Times:

Surfing a monstrous wave
15 October 2006
By FRANK HADEN

We’ve let a monster into our midst with our uncritical acceptance of the email system. Last weekend’s Sunday Star-Times featured an article on the use of email campaigns to threaten anti-fascists showed there is no time to mess about.

We have to move aggressively to develop new defences against the sort of electronic thuggery freely available to groups such as Redwatch Downunder, a Perth-based site aimed at discrediting liberal writers in Australia and New Zealand. This happy outfit says it will display all the details and photos of anarchists, reds, homos, multiculturalists and so on. Doesn’t leave much.

It’s not that a single site such as Redwatch Downunder is going to cause much of a hassle. What should worry us is that irresponsible people can misinform us on a grand scale.

We are unskilled surfers in a tumult of giant waves of information and communication. Most of us don’t really know what we are talking about. We repeat parrot-fashion what we have been told about the internet as a global computer network providing communication and information virtually free to all who ask - but we haven’t a clue about the implications.

It’s the same with the World Wide Web. We type in those ubiquitous addresses beginning www, but not one in a hundred of us knows the implications of having an unimaginably vast system leaping to cross-reference myriads of intangible documents at the click of a button. We pretend we know what’s happening, but most of us don’t.

We just take the benefits of all this indexed information for granted, without thinking too much about the consequences.

The email system that lets in Redwatch Downunder has developed like lightning, steam-rolling all our normal social precautions without giving us time to draw breath before the next wave hits us.

This is dangerous. We can’t just sit back and leave it to the elite of computer-oriented wizards who think in gigabytes and are - for the moment at least - on our side.

We have to move before it is too late, paying them whatever they ask to erect defences against the many thousands of malevolent nerds and hackers. If we delay too long - forming committees and setting up technology foundations - before we know it, we will be in the grip of a real-life cybernightmare.

Last Sunday’s sobering account of firebombings and death threats, traced to Redwatch when it published the residential addresses of journalists who expose racist and neofascist groups, showed just what we can expect in the environment of an email system that provides few safeguards or guarantees.

It is open season on young and old when the ignorant or malevolent decide they want to exploit the system to further their cock-eyed aims. If you use a search engine such as Google to find out something about a popular disease, you had better be prepared for an avalanche of authoritative-sounding but dangerously misleading diagnoses, prognoses and treatment advice.

Most of the information pouring out of your computer will be worthless at best, but often potentially life-threatening. Mixed in with this crap will be some genuine, up-to-date information and advice from reputable sources, and you have to be untiring with the flush-button in purging the system of its mostly unhealthy blockages.

Your electronic mail box will be in a similarly constipated state, day after day, with unwanted messages from drivellers who have become adept at getting you to read their non-information. There was a time when stacks of this stuff appeared on the screen tagged spam, and you could get some useful exercise each morning rhythmically clicking on the messages and hitting the delete button - but someone has done something awful to the spammers and most have disappeared.

In their place has come a new generation of cunning junk mailers who use authentic-sounding signatures and subject lines to sneak their unwanted messages touting everything from Viagra to ultra-cheap computer software to pie-in-the-sky oil stock issues. A fellow named Garnet Milne tagging his offering RT Alert was the only bible-banger I turned up in three days of sampling. Peg Daniel had a messaged headlined “Reprieve national monument” that was in fact promoting some delicious-sounding oil company shares. And I was rather taken with a message from Marcia Harrison: “You left something the other night”, touting a penis enlargement course.

Another disadvantage of the email monster is the fact that when you send or receive material it gets parked away in a slot in the computer of your internet service provider awaiting a signal to send it on.

While it is in that slot, the information is available to the service provider to copy without telling you. Not that it would, of course, but the opportunity is there. It’s as if New Zealand Post had the right to open and read our sealed mail. I would be a lot happier to see my email protected by the same laws that restrict wiretapping.