/ 21 September 2001

Net shines in time of terror

It has been a busy, and sad, time for the Internet since the attacks on the United States

David Shapshak

As befits its status as the world’s communication medium, the Internet has been abuzz these past two weeks with the shock of the World Trade Centre bombings.

For many, especially on that fateful Tuesday, it was the primary means of news, for finding out what had happened and, as an anxious world waits for the United States’s military response, what will happen next.

While some news websites saw traffic catapult in the flurry to find out what had happened even as their capacity to handle it was severely affected by the destruction of telecoms infrastructure in the Twin Towers friends and family were desperately trying to contact loved ones and there was an outpouring of compassion and offers of help. The national outpouring of grief saw online donations to charities soar, for some doubling in six days what was raised in all of last year.

Sadly, the inevitable rash of hoax e-mails also appeared, as did a sickening amount of scam attempts and links to porn sites some promising an escape from the horror: “No terrorists here! Join our porn site, turn off the TV, quit watching the crap happening in the States and join our free site!”

One particularly destructive and fallacious e-mail faked a CNN alert alleging the South African government was involved, which both the state and the news channel denied. Two Stellenbosch brothers were arrested and appeared in court this week, threatened with long prison sentences for what could have been a very damaging exercise.

But there was also the inevitable Nostradamus “prediction” that did the rounds. In this case it appears to be based on fiction. Canadian student Neil Marshall claims he invented the verse himself to demonstrate how easily the oft-quoted seer can be misread, misrepresented and his predictions manipulated because of the vagueness of his writings.

The quatrain reads: “In the City of God there will be a great thunder,/Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb,/The third big war will begin when the big city is burning Nostradamus 1654.” However, as the authoritative urbanlegends.com website points out: “Unfortunately, Nostradamus died in 1566, so it’s rather unlikely he wrote this passage in 1654. The quatrain is not to be found in his published oeuvre. It’s a hoax.”

In all, it was a busy, and sad, week for the Internet.

Much of the world’s Internet infrastructure is centred in New York and South Africa saw one of its key communication lines go down when the World Trade Centre was hit by two hijacked commercial airliners.

One of South African ISP Internet Solutions’s big “pipes” landed a kilometre from the Twin Towers, which themselves housed telecoms infrastructure, including cellular masts on the roof. The knock-on effect was felt around the world. South Africa’s international bandwidth slowed but appears to have been restored this week.

On the brighter side, the Internet’s ability to process online transactions has been a boon to aid agencies raising money after the devastation. Online donations reached new records when some of the biggest sites on the Web including AOL, Yahoo and Amazon put up buttons for donations on their front pages.

The American Red Cross received $5,9-million in the first six days from Amazon alone twice the donations it received last year, which at $2,2-million made it the second-biggest online beneficiary. AOL members donated double that $13-million to the Red Cross, while PayPal, used by auction site eBay, brought in $1,2-million.

These existing online payment structures made it easier for regular customers on e-business sites to donate money. Many of the Internet’s detractors like to point out the spam and scams as proof that it is a depraved medium. However, it is a more rapid means for human response to be displayed and is also a prime source of information about the tragedy.

Certainly there is no more efficient means to communicate to the mass market than the Internet. One story posted on a news website can be viewed by millions of people. But, as was so evident last week, bandwidth and server capacity play a role. Some sites ground to a halt last Tuesday as desperate relatives and friends sought information on the catastrophe.

Perhaps though, the true sign of the Internet’s success has been the first, and still leading, “killer app”: e-mail.

In the midst of Tuesday’s mayhem, the unscathed New York inhabitants, including a good friend of mine who lives six blocks from the ravaged financial district, could e-mail their friends and family around the world to say they are okay. A colleague frantically tried to contact her father who also lived nearby. His reply a few hours later was chilling, especially as he comes from that other troubled land, Ireland. He described the “horror” in a way that echoed Joseph Conrad’s painfully apt summation of seeing evil.

It is these messages that demonstrate the usefulness of the Internet, which lived up to its discarded moniker as the information superhighway.

In the words of one American Internet columnist, David Coursey: “As the Internet era has unfolded, we’ve sometimes wondered how it would affect the national fabric: what role would the Internet play in a time of national sorrow? This isn’t a lesson I ever hoped to learn, but the answer is clear: an important and valuable one. As our nation rallied together, as it does in times of acute pain, the Internet helped.”

But sensitivity is not always a human attribute. eBay was forced to ban the auction of memorabilia associated with the New York icons or the Pentagon, which was also hit by an airliner. This followed the listings of several hundred items for sale and the resulting outrage by other users.

As quick as the usual hoaxes appeared, so did the black humour. E-mails began whizzing around the world, including one depicting King Kong straddling the Twin Towers batting off the two lethal aeroplanes.

There are many times when it has been claimed that the Internet has come of age. Perhaps the most genuine of these was when Internet columnist Matt Drudge beat the world’s finest journalists, based in Washington, to first break the infamous Monica Lewinsky scandal that would humiliate then US president Bill Clinton.

At the height of the dotcom hype with online poster child sites such as bookseller Amazon and eBay in full flight the ability to do global business through e-commerce was trumpeted as the breakthrough. The recent launch of Big Brother in South Africa has seen another milestone passed, as bored office workers stared at their TVs or news sites, not with voyeuristic fascination but in horror.

However, the graphic, shocking nature of the terrorist suicides still made television a more compelling medium. The sight of the World Trade Centre towers on fire, and the repeated footage of the two Boeings deliberately crashing into them, their implosion and the resultant chaos are images that will live in the mind forever.

News sites were forced to strip bandwidth-intensive graphics from their pages and revert to the much easier to download text pages of Internet’s early days to accommodate the increased traffic.

E-commerce took a knock too, as the grounding of all flights over the US slowed courier deliveries of packages bought online. This also affected the successful online travel industry.

Air cargo makes up about 40% of world trade, according to some figures, meaning there was a devastating loss of business for airlines, which have already begun laying off staff.

As always, any books relating to the disaster went straight to the top of the bestseller list. Amazon’s number one seller reportedly was Twin Towers: The Life of New York City’s World Trade Centre, while the biography of the men who tried to blow up the World Trade Centre in 1993 The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism was in the top 10.

It is impossible to say what part the Internet or e-mail played in the planning and execution of the world’s worst terrorist act. In a seemingly unrelated incident a few weeks before the tragedy, US security authorities shut down InfoCom Corporation, a Texas-based company that hosts websites for clients in the Middle East, including al-Jazeera (the satellite TV station), al-Sharq (a daily newspaper in Qatar), and Birzeit (the Palestinian university on the West Bank). About 500 websites many of them with an Arab or Muslim connection crashed a week before Tuesday’s day of terror when an anti-terrorism taskforce raided InfoCom, which is also the registered owner of “.iq” the Internet country code for Iraq.

The FBI, meanwhile, insisted the search had nothing to do with religion or Middle East politics. “This is a criminal investigation, not a political investigation,” a spokesperson said. “We’re hoping to find evidence of criminal activity.”

Privacy could be the big loser as governments that have been pushing for greater powers to monitor online communications use this tragic event to push through “big brother” laws to monitor electronic traffic.