UNITED STATES COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE
(HELSINKI
COMMISSION) HOLDS BRIEFING:
"HATE IN THE INFORMATION AGE"
MAY 15, 2008
COMMISSIONERS:
REP. ALCEE L. HASTINGS, D-FLA.,
CHAIRMAN
REP. LOUISE M. SLAUGHTER, D-N.Y.
REP. MIKE MCINTYRE,
D-N.C.
REP. HILDA L. SOLIS, D-CALIF.
REP. G.K. BUTTERFIELD,
D-N.C.
REP. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, R-N.J.
REP. ROBERT B.
ADERHOLT, R-ALA.
REP. MIKE PENCE, R-IND.
REP. JOSEPH R. PITTS,
R-PENN.
SEN. BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, D-MD., CO-CHAIRMAN
SEN.
CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, D-CONN.
SEN. RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, D-WIS.
SEN. HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, D-N.Y.
SEN. JOHN F. KERRY, D-MASS.
SEN. SAM BROWNBACK, R-KAN.
SEN. GORDON H. SMITH, R-ORE.
SEN.
SAXBY CHAMBLISS, R-GA.
SEN. RICHARD BURR, R-N.C.
HON. DAVID J.
KRAMER, DEPARTMENT OF STATE
HON. DAVID BOHIGIAN, DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
HON. MARY BETH LONG, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
WITNESSES/PANELISTS:
MISCHA THOMPSON,
STAFF ADVISER,
HELSINIKI COMMISSION
RABBI ABRAHAM
COOPER,
SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER
MAURA CONWAY,
DUBLIN CITY
UNIVERSITY, IRELAND
MARK POTOK,
SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER
TAD
STAHNKE,
HUMAN RIGHTS FIRST
CHRIS WOLF,
INTERNET HATE COALITION/ADL
[The briefing was held at 3:06 p.m. in Room 432 Russell Senate
Office Building, Washington, D.C., Mischa Thompson, Staff Adviser, Helsiniki
Commission, moderating.]
[*]
THOMPSON: Hello, I'm Dr. Mischa Thompson
with the Helsinki Commission. I would like to welcome you to today's briefing
entitled "Hate in the Information Age."
We're actually expecting Co-Chairman
Senator Cardin. There are actually votes going on and some other things, so he
will be here momentarily, but we wanted to go ahead and get started.
I think
as many of you may well know, the Helsinki Commission, including Chairman
Hastings, Co-Chairman Senator Cardin, and other commissioners came together to
push for the OSCE to begin to address tolerance issues following a spike in
anti-Semitic incidents taking place in Europe.
This resulted in a series of
initiatives to combat not only anti-Semitism, but racism, xenophobia, and
intolerance and discrimination against Muslims, Christians, and other religions.
Now, five years later, the OSCE has an established Tolerance Unit that
publishes an annual hate crimes report and has developed numerous tolerance
education initiatives. Included in these efforts has been a focus on the
Internet in promoting hate.
Today, we will focus on how best to address
this problem in the face of increased hate crimes throughout the OSCE region.
To start our briefing, I would like to welcome Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the
Simon Wiesenthal Center, who has been instrumental in keeping this issue on the
commission's radar.
Following Rabbi Cooper, we will hear from Christopher
Wolf, chair of the Internet task force of the Anti-Defamation League and also
chair of the International Network Against Cyberhate; Mark Potok of the Southern
Poverty Law Center; and Tad Stahnke of Human Rights First.
Their bios have
been made available outside. Additionally, Dr. Maura Conway of the Dublin City
University of Ireland is here with us in spirit, and her work regarding this
issue can also be found outside.
Rabbi Cooper?
COOPER: Thank you, Dr.
Thompson.
Mr. Chairman and other members of the commission, the Simon
Wiesenthal Center applauds your leadership and those of your distinguished
colleagues in the Helsinki Commission in consistently providing bipartisan
leadership in promoting human rights and democratic values and in combating the
forces of hatred and terror.
We are here today because, in 2008, the
Internet is the prime means of communication and marketing in the world. With
over 1,300,000,000 users, it is the mega-mall in the marketplace of ideas.
The Internet's unprecedented global reach and scope, combined with the
difficulty in monitoring and tracing communications, make it a prime tool for
extremists.
The findings of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Digital Terrorism
and Hate Project and our report being released today show that, as the Internet
has grown, the escalation of extremist sites has kept pace in number and in
technological sophistication.
In April 1995, the first extremist site went
online. Today, our center alone is tracking some 8,000 problematic sites,
terrorist Web sites, and other Internet postings, a 30 percent increase over the
last year. All areas of the Internet are being used by extremists of every ilk
to repackage old hatred, demean the enemy, raise funds, and, since 9/11,
increasingly to recruit and train jihadist terrorists.
Internet-based hate
has inspired some of the most violent hate crimes in America. In addition in
this election year, the Internet continues to be used to demean and threaten
African-Americans, Jews, immigrants, gays and virtually every religious
denomination.
In Europe, the Internet is also leveraged as a powerful tool
to package xenophobia and racism to the mainstream.
Extremists are
leveraging 2.0 technologies to dynamically target young people through digital
games, "Second Life" scenarios, blogs, and even YouTube and Facebook-style
videos depicting racist violence and terrorism.
As part of a 10-point
action plan, the Wiesenthal Center is launching today iReport@Wiesenthal.com
(ph) to encourage Internet users to forward to us links of terrorists and hate
postings.
Finally, there is no single answer to the multifaceted
challenges before us. Hate Web sites, blogs, and newsgroups constitute much
more than hate speech. These postings and images are often a click away from
terrorist manuals.
On the one hand, trying to legislate against online hate
and terror through more international protocols may not yield the results we
would all seek and welcome, but doing nothing is not a viable option, either.
We need to empower a consortium led by the online community itself, NGOs, and
bodies such as this one to effectively monitor, expose and marginalize online
hate. A good place to start is by launching multilingual sites to confront and
thwart the digital subculture of hate, racism and terror.
I'd now like to
ask my colleague, Ricky, who is our senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal
Center and who has the unenviable task of dealing with the 8,000 sites that we
look at and coordinate our international effort, to just take us through a
handful of some of the Web sites and postings referred to.
We are also using
the hearing today to release the Digital Terrorism and Hate 2.0 report. This
contains about 500 Web sites and other Internet postings. And, obviously,
there's a focus on the 2.0 technology.
So we've tried to take a slice of
that report and also, with knowing the focus of the committee, as well, Senator
Cardin's leadership is trying to toughen and promote more powerful hate crime
legislation, we decided just to give you a snapshot of what it is we're dealing
with.
Rick, if you'd go to the first slide, please.
This is from a
presentation by a group or an address called Podlonk (ph).
And you want to
try to run it? I'm not sure we'll be able to hear it too well, but let's go
ahead and activate it.
(VIDEO CLIP SHOWN)
COOPER: The rest of that
piece, which we're not going to run, but thank you for that. Had I known we
would have had it, we probably would have let it run.
It's sort of packages
the old hatred, I mean, the worst kinds of racist imagery and stereotyping, but
using the avatar and using almost a kind of a "Nightline" format. So after
showing this alleged criminal, they will then bring in caricatures of well-known
racists to justify the hatred of them.
Senator, good to see you.
And
Podlonk (ph) is just one of, I guess, the kind of YouTube and Facebook rip-offs
or knock-offs that are trying to, again, be youth-oriented and to repackage the
kind of hatred into a pseudo-intellectual basis.
And for those of you who
will, you know, take time to look at this report, it will give you that one
particular example, which is disturbing enough.
In my formal remarks, I
mentioned, of course, that games are also being used as a way to mainstream of
variety of hate. This "Border Patrol" is available free of charge on a number
of mainstream portals and Web sites in the U.S.
And it's a fairly
straightforward game. It shows the -- to win the game, you shoot down people
coming across the Rio Grande into the United States. This is a rip-off of
"Doom," one of the most famous games online, and it's called "Zog's Nightmare,"
"Zionist Occupation Government," AKA Washington, D.C.
And the game, which is
quite advanced, one of the people depicted in it, you can see across the
African-American's head a headband that has the letters "NIG" on it.
Let's
go further. I want to just also quickly show you some of the other games that
are there. This one's called "Mind Bonds." (ph) It appeared very quickly after
the July 7th horrors in London and is not a hate site, per se, but it is a,
quote, unquote, "game" that is impossible to win.
So you end up playing this
game, trying to defuse the bombs. And in the end, all the people in the London
Tube are consumed.
Similar set-up for 9/11; 9/11 is reduced to game. If you
go into it, not even the best teenager has any chance of stopping the attacks,
but you're put into a scenario where this kind of suffering and terrorism is
just reduced to a game.
Let's go out, ethnic cleansing. "Second Life" -- I
know how many grandparents we have in the room. I had to have my researchers
explain to me what "Second Life" is, but this is one of the coming things in the
world of the Internet, used, I think, increasingly by universities to offer
online distance learning.
I think terrorists are beginning to look at it
as a way of distance training. But "Second Life" allows you to adopt an online
kind of personality, and that includes, of course, already some early examples
of neo-Nazi use.
We just downloaded a few examples on Facebook and YouTube.
We took examples of some of the most virulent anti-religion attacks. You name
the religion, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, it's there.
We have written to
the folks who run Facebook with only about 40 such examples. We have yet to get
the courtesy of a response on it.
Wikipedia in the last week or so has been
under increased scrutiny for alleged anti-Semitism, on the one hand, perhaps
pampering on Middle East issues on the other hand.
But this is a
Swedish-based rip-off of Wikipedia, called Metapedia, in which, for example, in
the presentation on World War II or Hitler or the Holocaust, there will be whole
sections of Wikipedia co-opted and then either other sections rewritten or
dropped in order to promote Holocaust denial or revisionism. In addition to
that, it's a flat-out racist hate location against blacks, Jews, and other
minorities.
The blogs, well, we just could have taken a few thousand
examples, but, Rick, if you'll just show -- that one is from Cincinnati. The
next one says Toledo, Ohio, "Mudville." It has an attack on Senator McCain.
"Hungarian Warrior," (ph) one of the countries we're most concerned about, with
the overt Nazi activity taking place in an important democracy in Europe. This
is a very sophisticated site that looks mainstream, but its message is to
promote hatred.
And "Dot Matrix," I'm not even going to repeat the language
on this particular blog. Suffice it to say that the two leading candidates to
be the next president of the United States are already in for a significant
racist and hate-targeting including, in this case, Senator Obama.
One other
point, as I come to the close of my presentation, is the fact that, especially
the media keeps saying, "Well, what are the numbers? You know, 6,000 or 8,000?"
We're reaching a point, I think, where the actual numerical count will have
limited instruction for us in the following sense.
The 2.0 technologies,
many of them are by definition viral. So here we have an example of a
20-year-old tape of Holocaust denial, originally broadcast by the Iranians. We
traced this one tape to about 70 different Web sites, portals. Rick is saying,
no, it's many more than that.
And so I think we're going to see more and
more of these examples, where the same information is going to find its way,
especially if it has a video component, in a variety of areas and multiple
areas, and, you know, make it all the more difficult.
This is the same
presentation across the board. The one we're just showing you there, a famous
wrestler in the U.K., I don't think he's a Holocaust-denier. I don't think he
even knows about it (inaudible) he's linked from Web site by one of his fans,
who happens to also be a Holocaust-denier, so he's taking the same viral
information and posting it worldwide.
This is a pretty sophisticated
rip-off. During the horrible fires that we had last summer in California, this
was posted. If you take a look, it looks like the CNN classic posting. It is
not. It says "Headline News." And there you have otherwise really
sophisticated-looking presentation in which migrant workers are blamed for the
fires in the West.
So when that stuff happens in real time, and it's picked
up, it can have a tremendous impact, even if it's, in fact, short-lived.
And
I know that one of the areas that this commission has looked at on occasion that
we'll be coming back to is the fact that the Iranians are making a huge effort
in South America. And that is being increasingly reflected in online activity,
both by their official news agency, Irna, and by various blogs that are either
pro-Hezbollah or directly pro-Iranian.
We even have in the report one
posting from FARC, the Colombian group, in which they pretty much co-opt
wholesale the language that is presented by the Iranians. You see a seepage of
that, as well.
And we also pulled up here that a link to that particular
site is to the so-called Christian Party here, whose name came across probably
to Mark, as well, in the last year, when they decided that a plebiscite in the
U.S. would be called for to urge blacks to go back to Africa.
And I think
you've been very generous with my 10 minutes, which we made into a Jewish 10
minutes. And I think I'll stop at this point.
Thank you.
CARDIN: Well,
on behalf of the commission, first, let me welcome our presenters here today.
Congressman Hastings and I met a little bit earlier today, and I know he's going
to try to get over here. We very much appreciate your willingness to come and
brief the commission on these issues.
Let me just make one observation, and
then we'll move on with the presentations and, I hope, the discussion.
The
issue concerning the rise of anti-Semitism, the rice of racism, xenophobia, and
other forms of hate activities has been a very high priority of this commission.
And I am proud of the role that the commission has played in making this a
priority and getting it acted upon by the OSCE.
And you're all aware of what
activities and conferences we've had, the special representatives that have been
appointed, and the game plan that many countries have instituted to try to
develop best practices to take a prompt action against hate crime-type
activities or hate organizations.
There are a lot of challenges. As I was
listening to Rabbi Cooper's presentation on what's on the Internet, I was
thinking yesterday I met with representatives of what's happening in China
today. And, of course, China filters all the information they get on the
Internet, not for the purposes of filtering out hate literature, but for making
sure that dissent is not readily available to the Chinese population.
But
it's a very difficult area to get a grip on. We had a conference on the
Internet, which I felt was very helpful. And the United States, of course, has
one of the most open laws anywhere in the world on the ability of organizations
to be able to set up Web sites without fear of government interference and then,
of course, can use that as a platform to get their material around the globe.
Rabbi Cooper, you're absolutely correct. We had our meeting recently with some
people who are familiar with the use of the Internet as to how you can get an
echo on a message. So you can take a message that has legitimacy. And if you
know how to do it, they can get that message repeated thousands of times, if not
more than that, on sites that appear to be legitimate sources.
And that's
something of tremendous concern to all of us. It is used for very legitimate
purposes, but in this case it's being used to try to give legitimacy to
hate-type of communications that should not have any place in any legitimate
circle whatsoever.
So we're very much interested in finding out the current
status. And then we're going to have to struggle with how we try to keep ahead
of what the purveyors of hate are putting out there.
So I very much
appreciate you being here, and I look forward to the other presentations.
WOLF: Thank you, Senator Cardin, and members of the commission. Thank you for
including me in this important briefing.
By day, I am an Internet lawyer at
the law firm of Roscoe Rose (ph), but extracurricularly I've been privileged for
two decades to be a lay leader at the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, and I'm
pleased to be joined here by members of the professional staff of the ADL.
Since 2005, I've served as chair of the International Network against Cyberhate,
which is a coalition of NGOs from Europe and North America, including the ADL.
For over 95 years, the ADL has been at the forefront of fighting hate and
extremism, while at the same time protecting civil liberties, including First
Amendment free speech rights. And in the Internet era, fighting online hate is
a natural and essential part of the ADL mission, and that's because, simply, the
Internet has become a powerful and virulent platform for hate, hate that has a
direct link to terrorism, violence, and to the deterioration of civil society.
From cyber bullying to the other end of the spectrum, online calls for
terrorism, online hate victimizes minorities and children, and it does, in fact,
inspire and facilitate real-world violence.
Now, significant attention to
the problem of Internet hate is paid in Europe by governments and by NGOs. And
attention is paid here in the United States, regrettably only by a few,
including those represented here today and by this commission.
Even with the
demonstrated link between hate speech and violence, the issue of hate has not,
however, been a priority for the Internet community as a whole. Issues of child
predation, obscenity, fraud, spam, domain name, cyber attacks, all admittedly
serious matters, have eclipsed the online hate issue on the public policy agenda
for quite some time.
But the time has come for governments, NGOs and the
Internet community to redouble their efforts to fight the presence and effects
of online hate speech. New peer-to-peer and video technologies, like those we
saw, that are embedded in Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, among others, make
online hate an even more urgent problem today than it has been in the Internet
world.
And there is the epidemic of cyber bullying, kids targeting kids with
cruelty, cruelty that can lead to more destructive behavior.
Now, one
response to online hate is to pass new laws. But as an Internet lawyer, it may
surprise you to hear that I think that laws addressed at Internet hate are
perhaps the least effective way to deal with the problem. Empirically, the law
has not stemmed the tide of new Web sites and social networking sites that
contain hate speech.
Now, to be sure, there are clear cases where the law
has played and will play an important role, where an identifiable group is
targeted for harm, for example. And there are also cases where legal action
serves to express a society's outrage against speech that goes beyond the pale
of acceptability.
In countries like Germany and Austria, the enforcement of
laws against Holocaust-deniers serves as an appropriate message to all citizens
that it is literally unspeakable to deny the Holocaust.
And it's a fact that
the blessings of our First Amendment also make the United States a safe haven
for almost all kinds of hate speech. Therefore, shutting down a Web site in
Europe or Canada through legal channels is far from a guarantee that the
contents have been censored for all time.
The borderless nature of the
Internet means that, like chasing cockroaches, squashing one does not solve the
problem when there are many more waiting behind the walls or across the border.
The best antidote to hate speech is counter speech, exposing hate speech for
its deceitful and false content, setting the record straight, and promoting the
values of tolerance and diversity. To paraphrase U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Brandeis, sunlight is still the best disinfectant.
And in addition to
counter speech, education is hugely important, because kids are the most
impressionable, susceptible victims of hate speech. The anti-cyber bullying
curriculum of the ADL is one example of a curriculum designed to counter online
hate speech.
What is urgently needed is the cooperation and direct
involvement of the Internet community, ISPs and others, to join in the campaign
against hate speech. And they have been visibly absent.
Now, that may mean
enforcement of terms of service to drop offensive content. And it should also
include public service advertising and instructional campaigns.
In the era
of search engines as the primary portal for Internet users, cooperation from the
Googles of the world is an increasingly important goal. Most of all, it is time
for Americans and the Internet community that is centered here in America to
recognize that online hate is a scourge, requiring much more attention than is
being given today.
Thank you for your attention.
POTOK: Thank you,
Senator Cardin, Dr. Thompson, so much for having us. I'm Mark Potok with the
Southern Poverty Law Center. I'm the director there of the Intelligence
Project.
Our bailiwick is smaller than the Wiesenthal Center's, in the sense
that we look only domestically, what's happening in this country.
I want to
say just a couple of sets of things. One, I wanted to expand a little bit on
what Chris said in talking about the difference between the American system of
laws and European countries, most of them, and Canada.
You know, it's worth
understanding that the Supreme Court of the United States has found that
Internet speech is comparable to speech in the press, in the printed mass media.
In other words, no prior restraint is allowed.
That leaves a very narrow
band, to make a long story short, a very narrow band of exceptions, where people
can be gone after in a criminal way. You know, one of those is a true threat.
In other words, somebody sent an e-mail threat saying, "I am going to kill you,"
in such a way that it is believable and, in fact, there have been several cases
like that made. So that is an exception that works.
There is the matter of
criminal incitement, which to my knowledge I don't believe there's ever been a
case brought over the Internet. Criminal incitement is incitement to imminent
lawless action. And typically it happens in an excited situation, where I say
to Rabbi Cooper, "Go kill that person there, right now, in this excited
situation."
There was an important case filed in 1997 which established
that, in some situations, you could limit what was put up on these Web sites.
This was a Web site -- I'll make a complicated case very simple -- this was a
Web site that put up materials having to do with abortion physicians, abortion
providers, including a great deal of personal data and photos of the doctors
(inaudible) photos of the doctors, in some cases, material likely (ph), the cars
they drove, pictures of their spouses, where their kids go to school, even
routes on occasion they drove to work.
In that case, the court found that
the jury should be allowed -- and this was upheld on appeal -- the jury should
be allowed to know the context of this page. The page itself never called for,
you know, "We should kill these people," or anything along those lines.
However, it certainly implied that. It carried the names of abortion providers.
And when one was killed -- a number have been killed, seven doctors and
assistants -- they would draw a line through this person's name.
Additionally, the site was linked to a letter which was written by a man who, in
fact, had murdered a doctor, talking about the joy he felt. So with all that
context, the courts ultimately shut down this site -- or, actually, didn't
totally shut down the site, but it forbade people to provide it with information
about these physicians.
I want to drop back and very briefly say that, from
the point of the view of the radical right in the United States, the hope of the
Internet was that, you know, this was the tool that would finally allow these
groups to bypass the sort of media masters, the editors of the New York Times
and every other newspaper and broadcast operation in the country.
You know,
they felt very strongly that, "We're able finally to go to directly to the
people, the white people in this case," that surely, you know, the masses will
rise and there will be an Aryan revolution and all the rest.
That has, I
think, over the years proven to be most definitely not true. And let me say,
again, that I'm not talking about foreign, you know, Hamas-type sites or other
terrorist sites. I'm really talking about our domestic scene.
I think,
actually, there's been very -- they've had relatively little success, in my
opinion at least, in recruiting directly through the Internet. I don't mean to
downplay the importance of the Internet.
I think it's been extremely
important for the radical right, in terms of organizing events, in terms of
people who formerly felt very isolated from one another and kind of powerless in
the society, feeling that they are part of a movement, a movement that is
happening. Every day, things are happening.
You know, the average
Klansman wakes up in the morning and turns on his computer and sees hundreds of
stories sent to him, all kinds of things, outrages, you know, sort of "White
Woman Raped in Dubuque," that kind of thing. So it gives an energy to the
movement that I think is very important.
Of course, there are many, many
pages out there that contain information on how to build bombs, on how to
construct fire bombs, and so on. And, of course, the Internet provides
anonymity, which is particularly appealing for many of these people. It's not
like going to a strip club where people kind of see you walk into this place and
you may feel some shame about it.
I want to say, because I think people are
covering different aspects of this, that I think a couple of things. I think
really most of the real important action on the Internet, at least in terms of
domestic American groups, is in the interactive fora.
I think what time has
shown is that a lot of the hate groups' Web pages are actually very static.
They don't change a great deal. And so, really, what they act as is a kind of
pamphlet. And it's the same as any other kind of Internet page.
You can
only go up and read, you know, a page or two worth of propaganda about the evil
Jews or evil black people or whatever it may be. And then you get bored.
So
what we found is that the action is in e-mail groups and list-servs, in bulletin
boards, like Stormfront, which was the first hate site on the Net that Rabbi
Cooper mentioned. It was started about a month before the Oklahoma City bombing
in 1995.
I want to speak very quickly, and then I will relent, about what I
think is an important new trend out there, in addition to the social networking
sites and so on that the rabbi mentioned.
And that is, there are a number of
people out there, neo-Nazi leaders and their ilk, who have become very adept at
coming -- at least so they think -- at coming right up to the edge of the First
Amendment, to the protections of the First Amendment, so that we are seeing more
and more every single day now language on the Internet that comes extremely
close to a true threat, to a real death threat.
To get at what I'm talking
about are the kinds of postings that say, "Lynch the Jena Six." And then,
beneath this posting, with a lot of ugly language, which I won't repeat here,
are, in fact, the home addresses of the six young black men in Jena, Louisiana,
who provoked that huge demonstration last September 20th.
This very week --
that came from a man named Bill White, a neo-Nazi leader, leader of the American
National Socialist Workers Party, based in Roanoke, Virginia.
There's
another fellow who's very adept at this kind of thing named Hal Turner. He's a
kind of independent Internet radio show host out of North Bergen, New Jersey.
This very week, as I started to say, he's got something up on his site. He's
talking about all three presidential contenders and his contention is, quote, "a
well-placed bullet can change the world."
This is hardly the strongest thing
that Hal has done. Hal Turner posted at one point the home addresses of all
justices of the New Jersey Supreme Court. This was taken so seriously by the
authorities in New Jersey that they, in fact, provided police protection for
close to a year at the homes of these justices.
Turner also boasts quite a
lot about the fact that he once posted the home address of a judge, a U.S.
district judge in Chicago named Joan Lefkow, who had presided over a case
involving a white supremacist group. He published her home address. About two
years later, as I recall, her husband and her mother were, in fact, murdered in
her home.
As it turned out, it's quite certain that the killer had nothing
to do with the Web site. He was not a neo-Nazi at all. He was a kind of
disgruntled person who'd been in her court years before.
But Turner has
taken advantage of the fact that there was this incredibly horrible murder to
say on his Web site again and again, "See how effective I am? See?"
And so
Turner does all kinds of things like that. He recently -- I know he's being
looked at by the authorities for recently posting a very explicit threat against
a school superintendent in Lexington, Massachusetts, who introduced a kind of
diversity curriculum to his schools.
You know, it goes on from there. I
mean, my own home address and those of many of my colleagues have been posted,
along with suggestions about what might be done to us. You know, this fellow,
Bill White, posted something recently saying -- it was headlined, "Kill Richard
Warman, man behind human rights tribunals abuses should be executed."
Richard Warman is actually a personal friend of mine, I'm sure of many of my
colleagues here, a former Crown attorney in Toronto and Canada, who has been
responsible for filing a lot of the complaints before the Canadian human rights
tribunal.
You know, this posting was accompanied by Richard's home address,
needless to say. Warman has tried very hard to get the U.S. authorities to act
on this threat. You know, from the Canadian point of view, you can imagine that
it's a complete outrage that the Americans will do nothing, but, in fact, that's
the case.
I will simply recite one last instance with where I think -- you
know, I mean, we've looked at all of these cases. I worked at a place that is
teeming with lawyers who are interested in bringing cases around these kinds of
events. Almost none of them, at least in the opinion of our own lawyers, are
really prosecutable under American law.
However, there was a case in which
Hal Turner about a year ago posted something -- posted the following. There was
an anti-racist activist, a man who had been in a hate group and who has spoken
for many years since then against hate groups.
He had been invited to
Newark, New Jersey, to speak. That's near Hal Turner's home. And Hal Turner
posted something -- and also said this on his radio show -- he said, "I have
gathered together a group of friends of mine" -- this is a paraphrase -- "who
are going to intercept this person" -- Floyd Cochran is his name -- "and I am
here to tell you that if Floyd, in fact, shows up at this event, that I'm quite
certain he will end up in University Hospital."
You know, at least, again,
in the opinion of our lawyers, that was a case that could have been made, but I
will point out that neither the FBI nor the Newark Police Department felt that
this was a case that could be won.
So speaking domestically, I think that is
really a quite terrifying development. As I said earlier, I'm not sure that
these Web sites are quite as effective as some of us might have feared at
recruiting people, at recruiting young people, but there's no doubt that they
are a part of the apparatus that helps this movement to grow, and it certainly
has been growing.
Thank you.
STAHNKE: Thank you.
And thanks for the
commission, Senator Cardin, holding this briefing and inviting Human Rights
First. And, also, thank you for your leadership on the tolerance and
nondiscrimination issues in the OSCE that's been mentioned.
So I'm Ted
Stahnke. I'm the director of the Fighting Discrimination Program at Human
Rights First. We have been, since 2002, seeking to reverse the tide of racist,
anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and homophobic violence across the
OSCE region.
And, unfortunately, our monitoring has shown that violent hate
crime is a serious and growing human rights problem throughout the region. And
I guess my role here today is to talk about some of the violence that's been
going on, as, I guess, a leading edge of and manifestation of the hatred that
we're seeing proliferating on the Internet.
In 2007, we put out a
comprehensive survey of the 56 OSCE countries that documented a rise in hate
crime in many parts of Europe and North America. And now we're in the process
of preparing our survey for 2008, and the review of preliminary data suggests
that the violence continues to rise in several areas. And it's continuing in
historically high levels in other areas.
I would point out just a couple of
examples: a large increase in racist violence and murders in Russia, as well as
in Ukraine; increasingly violent anti-Semitic attacks in France; as well as
historically high levels of hate crimes in Canada and the U.K.
And these are
just some of the countries that have come out with data for 2007. So,
obviously, this is a problem that continues.
It's a problem that's shared,
really, by all countries around the OSCE region. And while that is deplorable,
on the one hand, it also presents an opportunity for governments to work
together to combat it.
And so one of the big questions for us is, what are
governments doing about this problem? And, again, unfortunately, our research
shows not enough.
We did a report card of the 56 countries in December of
2007 regarding how well these governments were responded to violence in two
important areas. One was monitoring and reporting; the other area was hate
crimes legislation and its implementation.
And we found that, despite there
being some progress in North America and some Western European countries, the
response to violent hate crimes in the vast majority of OSCE countries was weak.
There's a lot more that governments can do. It's detailed in our written
testimony. I won't go into it now.
We are also are promoting 10 things that
governments can do to combat hate crimes. But, again, just very briefly, I
could point to Russia, where there hasn't been a particularly vigorous response
yet to a large spike in racist murders.
Ukraine, where the government is
more -- has expressed itself to be more interested in responding and has done
some things, but still there's much more to be done there.
But, also,
Western countries, Greece, Italy and Spain, for example, still do not produce
even basic reliable data on hate crimes in their countries, despite the fact
that there are press and media and NGO reports that these type of crimes are
going on.
Just a note about the Internet, obviously, from our point of view,
any response to violent hate crimes has to include some sort of strategy to
address the potential of the Internet to incite violence.
And we would
note that there was an OSCE meeting back in 2004 in Paris on this subject. The
U.S. government put forward a 10-point plan for addressing the Internet as an
avenue of incitement to violence. And we think that those recommendations
should be returned to and the outcome of that conference should be returned to
and really pressed upon governments, what they have done, or haven't done to
implement them.
I believe the view is, is that there's not much that's been
done in countries across the region to implement those things.
A brief
personal example of the Internet. We work closely with a group in Russia called
the Sovicenter (ph). The Sovicenter (ph) is their main person who monitors hate
crimes, has been sponsored by this commission, done briefings before this
commission.
His name and some of his colleagues appeared on a death list a
couple of weeks ago that was being circulated by a Russian neo-Nazi group and
hosted on several sites around. And many of us contacted the people who are
hosting these sites and pressed them to take these things down.
And, you
know, while many of them did so, it's also the case that this list, which
identifies people's names and includes an exhortation to kill them, is still
floating on -- not so much hosted on Web sites themselves, but on various blogs
and chatrooms, et cetera. It's still out there; it's still circulating around.
So this is obviously a very disturbing development.
Well, I'd like to just
move to recommendations, because, from our point of view, we think that there's
a lot that can be done to impress upon governments to do something, do more to
implement their commitments that they've undertaken under the OSCE. And there's
more that the U.S. government can do, building on the positive steps that have
already been taken.
And so I'd like to mention three areas. The first is
the OSCE. My colleague and I were recently in Vienna talking to key delegations
of the OSCE. And our view is that the high level energy that was behind the
tolerance mechanisms and these mechanisms that were put together with consistent
support by the U.S. government and by this commission, that the energy there is
clearly dissipating, and something needs to be done to energize it again.
There is a perception that we heard several times that the United States
government at the highest levels is not interested in the OSCE, and this is an
unfortunate perception to be out there.
And while the Finnish chairmanship
has done several things that are helpful on hate crimes, on a technical level I
think that the next chairman in office, the Greeks and the Kazaks, probably
won't be exercising the vigorous leadership that we would all hope on these
issues.
There are several specific recommendations that we've put forward in
our testimony. I'll highlight one here, and that is that the United States has
pressed for a high-level conference on tolerance issues in 2009.
And we
found, when we were talking to delegations, that even sympathetic delegations
had not yet heard a convincing rationale for such a conference. They didn't
want to have a repeat of what had happened in Bucharest before, which was viewed
as a disappointment.
So we believe strongly that focusing on violent hate
crimes is an excellent way to draw high-level attention and energy back into the
OSCE on this issue. It brings together people who are concerned about different
forms of discrimination and intolerance. It's a way to focus and press forward
on some of the technical work that's been done.
So we would hope that the
U.S. government would press this and begin to work now, because, certainly, if
there's going to be such a thing in 2009, there needs to be a country who's
willing to host it and work and put forward on an agenda.
Two other things
that I'll mention briefly. The first thing, the OSCE. The second is Ukraine.
My colleague has just returned from the Ukraine after a visit there. And as I
mentioned, there's a very serious spike in hate crimes going on.
The
response of the government has been uneven. Different parts of the government
have taken different points of view, but we think there's a real opportunity
here.
The government at high levels has expressed a willingness to work with
the international community on this problem. And I think, in this case, the
United States has leverage, but also much to offer by way of assistance to
Ukrainian police, prosecutors, and judges.
This is believed in Ukraine
something that a government response could do something about and try to rein in
this growing neo-Nazi problem. So we're going to be developing further specific
recommendations over the coming weeks. I would be happy to share them with you
at that time, but our main point has been that the issue of hate crimes should
be a prominent point in the bilateral agenda with Ukraine.
My final point is
about support for NGOs. And NGOs are critical to the process of combating hate
crimes. They monitor cases; they monitor the Internet; they can put pressure on
government.
We're in constant contact with NGOs, especially from the eastern
part of the region, and they need help. They have little capacity. They need
help; they need support; they need funding.
Catherine Myer (ph) was here
testifying not so long ago and affirmed that this was the case.
So here,
again, I think that there's a lot that the U.S. can do to support NGOs that are
trying to combat hate crimes. Russia is one example. USAID is considering
focusing on hate crimes as part of the next phase in its work in Russia and
democracy promotion there. And we think this is an excellent idea that should
be encouraged.
Also, the ODIHR has recently rolled out a civil society
training program for the OSCE. And there is a lot of enthusiasm about this
program. The U.S. mission supports it, and we believe that ODIHR should be
asked and given the resources to press this training program out into countries
where there's a real demand to do that.
So with that, I'll stop there and
take any questions.
CARDIN: Well, thank you. Let me first make a few
comments.
There's reason to be concerned as to how much weight is being
given to the OSCE by the various countries of the OSCE, including the United
States. When we look at the administration's budget, there's reason to have
some concern, particularly as it relates to ODIHR's functions.
Having said
that, we had the opportunity in the Foreign Relations Committee to have a
hearing with the secretary of state. And with the questioning from both Senator
Voinovich and myself, the secretary couldn't have been stronger in her
commitment to the importance of the OSCE and what it's doing in all three
baskets, and with particular reference to the human rights issues and dealing
with some of the issues that you've talked about today.
So I just really
want to put that on the record.
And the last point is that we're now
getting the administration's appointment, and I think the commission should have
pretty much its full complement, including representatives from the executive
branch.
So we're optimistic about the support in the United States for the
OSCE and for what it's been able to accomplish, though we are obviously
concerned about the support in other countries.
On the commitments as it
relates to the anti-Semitism, the racism, the anti-Muslim activities,
xenophobia, there were commitments made by the OSCE states in documents that
came out of the various meetings. The enforcement of that has been mixed.
And whereas I think we all support conferences coming together to try to make
additional progress, we believe that one of the most important roles that future
conferences can have is to follow up to see whether recommendations were carried
out and commitments were complied with.
I think that's particularly
important as it relates to the meeting in Paris. I remember the lead-up to
Paris, where we were concerned as to whether the United States could play a
constructive role, understanding the restrictions that we have. I don't want to
call them restrictions, but the policies that we have on protecting the right of
speech and how important the right of speech is to our tradition and to our
laws.
We came out of Paris, I thought, with fairly positive result. There
was more harmonization than there was difference. And I couldn't agree with you
more: I think we haven't followed up on that.
So I would hope that part of
this will be to look at ways to follow up some practices that we think can be
helpful in this area.
Mr. Wolf, you mentioned, I guess, two of the most
important recommendations that have come out of our conferences in fighting hate
speech. One is to make sure the right information gets out there, to make sure
the record is correct.
And I might add to that from credible sources, so we
want leadership. We want the government officials; we want the church leaders;
we want the business leaders all to be prepared to counter this type of speech,
so that the record is clear as to what, in fact, is correct.
And, second, of
course, is dealing with our young people, which was an issue that we talked
about a great deal at these meetings, as to how we can best get educational
programs and outreach to young people so they are aware of history and aware of
what's happened and are protected against the vulnerability of this information
having an impact on their lives.
My one question would be, I understand the
Constitution of the United States. Maybe I don't know if I understand it, but
sometimes the courts change it around a little bit.
But are you
recommending in regards to hate literature on the Internet that there be either
changes in U.S. law or other recommendations implemented by Congress or the
administration as it relates to the readily available information on the
Internet in the United States?
WOLF: I'm actually not recommending any
legal changes, but I think, as I mentioned in my remarks, that the Internet
industry can play a role through its voluntary actions.
There are on almost
every Web site, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and any other Web site you want to
mention, terms of use. And many of them have high-minded admonitions against
hate speech, bullying, any kind of harassment of other users.
And they are
almost never enforced. They can be enforced voluntarily by the Web sites. And
if that happens, it may only be symbolic, but it at least will tell the users of
those Web sites that, in that Internet community, bullying, racism, homophobia,
xenophobia is not acceptable behavior.
And what we've found is that, when we
report those incidents, sometimes they pay attention to them. And if we report
them loudly enough and repeatedly, they will pay attention to them.
My point
is that they should be more proactive and be participants in the monitoring of
that content and the filtering of it voluntarily, not by government edict,
because I think that would run afoul of the First Amendment, but as a
responsible member of the Internet community. That is a role they can and
should play.
There was a recent example of the racist Dutch parliamentarian
Geert Wilders, who had a very virulent anti-Muslim video called "Fitna," which
just the mere mention of it or preview of it actually resulted in YouTube being
banned in Pakistan altogether.
And Network Solutions was the host of the
site that was to premier this video. And Network Solutions was concerned that
it violated its terms of service and voluntarily took down the site because it
feared that that content would be so offensive and so inflammatory and so racist
that it was simply not something they want to be a party to, not because the
government said so and not because of any threats from the Muslim community, but
because it was the right thing to do as a member of the Internet community.
And we think that that kind of proactive, voluntary cooperation is something
they ought to do, because they're making money from content flowing across the
Internet, but because, more importantly, they are the backbone to the Internet
community and should take responsibility.
CARDIN: Well, I know Rabbi Cooper
wants to respond, but let me just point out there are filters that are used by
the Internet servers. They can use filters. There's nothing that prevents
that.
And how they -- and in certain countries, they must use filters in
order to be able to do business in those countries. So if there is material
that is protected under the Constitution of the United States, because it
doesn't fall outside of the -- it falls within the protected speech, there's
still the ability of the entities that make that information available on widely
viewed sites to put filters to prevent that information from being viewed.
How much is that being done in the United States? Is there a real effort made
to try to...
WOLF: Almost not at all. I think the filtering that's going
on, to the extent it's happening, is in response to complaints by NGOs, like the
ADL and the Wiesenthal Center and the members of ENOCH (ph).
There is no
voluntary filtering of hate speech that I know of. And, of course, the last
thing we want is any governmental entity setting up standards, because, as you
mentioned, in China, you know, they have standards that we certainly don't agree
with and elsewhere around the world. It will result in the filtering of what we
would consider counter speech.
But in the marketplace of ideas, filtering is
just as important as publishing, I think, when it comes to Internet hate. And
there can be pressure in the marketplace as to what should or should not be
hosted or posted on a site, and that can be done within the Internet community
without the involvement of government.
Now, interestingly in the United
States, the Congress gave immunity to Web site operators and Internet service
providers in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, basically absolving
them of any responsibility, except for copyright infringement and certain
criminal activity, but basically saying, "You're not responsible for the content
of third parties."
Well, a concomitant obligation ought to be -- it wasn't
written into the law, it may have been a good idea -- you should take some
voluntary responsibility for protecting minorities and children from the effect
of hateful content by third parties. And you can do that on your own without
any governmental involvement and working cooperatively with NGOs.
CARDIN:
Rabbi Cooper?
COOPER: Thank you, Senator. A few points.
Whenever we
combine the two words "hate" and "speech," it's kind of a third-rail effect. I
think we simply -- no one in America wants to see government intervention in
stopping, quote, unquote, "free speech."
But I think we have to take a
second or third look at the way in which hate is promoted online. We're usually
just a click away from very specific instructions as how to act out on a hateful
idea.
Just to follow up on one of the previous statements, it's absolutely
true that, in the first decade of this kind of activity, we can see that no
extremist group in the United States or in Canada or in Europe, for that matter,
has been successful in using the Internet to create a mass movement or to
sustain one.
But those same groups, having understood that, have now very
often shifted to the lone wolf concept of saying, "We don't want a mass
movement. Don't come and join us over the weekend, because chances are law
enforcement are coming to our meetings anyway. Stay away. And if you have the
courage to take that next step, click to another site that's going to help you
to take the kinds of terrorist actions that really comprise hate crimes."
So
I think that, while from a philosophical point of view the whole notion of the
American instinct is the answer to hate speech is more speech, that's correct,
but we could all construct 100 Web sites. We cannot necessarily bring the
public or young people directly to them.
There's no direct correlation
between a Web site that vilifies all African-Americans and 10 Web sites that
would explain why that kind of activity is wrong.
I think that Congress does
have a role, in terms of the bully pulpit, of bringing in the online community,
the companies that are making a tremendous profit, and generally doing a great
job to empower all of us in the communications and marketing area to, at the
minimum, be responsive to their own template of terms of usage.
If we can
bring them to that and put a few people on payroll just to be responsive to
parents or teens or organizations like ours, when we put it in play, not to be
responsive to the law, but their own rules, that would go a long way not to
eliminating hate, which we can't do in the real world anyway, but to
marginalizing it.
And the other areas which is probably going to be for a
different hearing is for all of us to remember that, just like there are no
boundaries between states geographic locations on the Internet, there's not much
of a boundary between the postings of hate groups and those that constitute the
support system for terrorists.
And once we talk about terrorist activity,
they're using the Internet in a much more sophisticated perspective beyond, I
think, the discussion for this particular gathering.
But it is
interesting. Last month in Beijing, I actually had an opportunity to sit down
with one of the main censors working for the Chinese government. I don't think
he was more than 30, 35 years old. And I certainly wasn't going to turn around
Chinese policy at one meeting.
But I made two comments to him. First, that
he was -- they're basically wasting their time. They should trust and free the
genius, collective genius of the Chinese people, not waste their time trying to
stamp out ideas from the Internet.
But then I asked him the following
question: What was the Chinese government or the Internet experts doing about
the following? You have portable GPS available and now the new enriched
technologies of cell phones. Put one in your right hand, one in your left hand,
and you have command and control from any place in the world to any place in the
world for terrorist activity.
And he looked at me and finally said, "Well,
do you have any ideas?" And (inaudible) ideas, why doesn't the government of
China sit down with the U.S. and with the international entities to discuss
that?
And so I would think that a more multifaceted involvement of Congress
on these issues, and especially for the Helsinki Commission, is absolutely
vital, or we're just going to come back every year and report on, you know, the
latest strike.
CARDIN: Thank you for that.
Mr. Potok, I wasn't clear
whether you agree that the laws are adequate. There are laws that prohibit
certain information from being distributed on the Internet. You can't put child
pornography on the Internet. That's illegal. And we have law enforcement that
regularly polices that.
Certain, well, terrorist activities on the Internet
is also illegal. And we have law enforcement going after that.
It seems to
me that a person who publishes the home addresses, with other information out
that is clearly seeking physical action against those individuals, that, if that
is not illegal, that laws could be constitutional to make that illegal.
Are
you suggesting that our laws are not adequate or these are areas you're not...
(CROSSTALK)
POTOK: No, first of all, I'm not a lawyer (OFF-MIKE) keep my
comments fairly general. I would say, as a general matter, we agree with the
idea that the laws are really adequate.
You know, as I say, I'm not a lawyer
and it seems to me very possible that a lot of these cases that I talked about
are prosecutable ultimately, but that people are quite unwilling to take a
chance on them. That was really, I think, the attitude, for instance, of the
Newark Police Department with regard to the threat to that particular
anti-racist activist.
I mean, essentially what they told the complainants
was, "Look, we might make it stick; we might not. We'd rather not do it if the
chances"...
(CROSSTALK)
CARDIN: Well, my point is this.
POTOK: ...
"chance of losing."
CARDIN: I happen -- I'm a strong defender of the First
Amendment rights. I think someone publishing home addresses of judges, and
putting it on the Internet, and giving the clear impression that these judges
ruled wrong, and you should take action against them, that that is not protected
under our Constitution.
(CROSSTALK)
CARDIN: And if the laws are
inadequate to deal with it, then maybe we should be looking at laws to deal with
those types of activities and within the framework of our Constitution.
POTOK: Yes, perhaps you're right. I can't say for sure. I think that the
Planned Parenthood case gave one a sense that the existing law might be -- you
know, if juries were able to hear the threats in full context, in other words,
you know, they may not say, "Kill Senator Cardin, kill Mark Potok," but that may
be implied very strongly, there it is, with our home addresses.
So I don't
feel completely adequate, not being a lawyer, to really respond to whether it's
prosecutable or not.
One kind of ancillary point I wanted to make is that
one thing that hasn't been said in all of this is that it's true that -- I
certainly agree that Congress and leadership in general can act in a sort of
bully pulpit fashion to try and get these Internet service providers to act.
What's happening though, increasingly, is that these sites are moving to white
supremacist-owned servers. So in that case, there's nobody you can go complain
to, right?
When the Stormfront server, Don Black, the former Klansman who
runs Stormfront, rents out his server space to other people, you know, you've
got no ISP you can go to, so it may be that, in fact, that some law or some
clarification of the law might be needed.
CARDIN: Once again, I think the
point there about letting people know what that Web site's about would be
helpful, so that you can affect it economically by people having more
information about what the Web site is about.
POTOK: I think that's true.
And I think that's very much what we've been about. I mean, you know,
essentially the argument I've tried to make over many -- especially at these
international forums, is that in many ways -- there was a policy followed years
ago in the '50s and '60s, during the kind of reign of the American Nazi Party,
where a lot of agencies, NGOs would approach newspaper publishers and say,
"Please don't cover the American Nazi Party."
And the policy was
informally called the quarantine policy. That I think is completely -- you
know, I think it's obvious. That's completely out of the question. You can't
possibly pursue a policy like that, because there's so many different kinds of
media.
So I think that really inoculation, insofar as it's a practical
thing, is the policy to pursue. And what that means -- you know, sometimes it
means at a very personal context, you know, I've got a 13-year-old boy. So what
that means is taking my son, Nick, to a Holocaust-denial site, Nick, who really
doesn't know anything much about the Holocaust, and talking to him about those
kinds of things.
That may sound a little Pollyannaish, but I think that, as
a general matter, you know, maybe that involves Web sites like the Web sites of
the Wiesenthal Center, the ADL, the Southern Poverty Law -- you know, as kind of
counter information sites.
And I think, obviously, we all try and do a lot
of kind of publicity work to bring attention to certain -- for instance, the
fake Martin Luther King site that purports to be an educational resource for
kids, but really is recitation of white supremacist views of Martin Luther King.
WOLF: Senator, on that point, there is a law that Congress can pass to
provide funding for education of children, just as Mr. Potok's point.
The
commonwealth of Virginia is starting -- I think it's the first in the nation --
Internet education program. They provide driver's education. They provide
personal hygiene information.
Kids are not taught in an organized way how to
deal with the bad neighborhoods on the Internet. That's not the intent of the
Virginia program; it's a more general program. But certainly earmarked funding
to teach children how to filter up here...
CARDIN: Did you say "earmarks"?
WOLF: Earmark. No, we don't like earmarks. I understand, but dedicated
funding, shall we say, to teach children how to filter on their own what they're
seeing by being taught about these sites would be, I think, a very useful law.
And in response to your earlier question, I do think criminal law is adequate
to deal with the kinds of episodes that Mr. Potok talked about.
COOPER: If
I can just add on the statistics over this -- the trends over the last year, the
number of Web sites have actually flattened somewhat, in terms of the growth.
And I still think it would be a great idea, using the cockroach concept from
before, having good citizenship online from the mega-companies is something that
we sorely need. And if there's a way to segregate the bad material on those
other sites, I think it would be positive.
But, secondly, what we're seeing
-- the reason why the numbers still spike is they're going to Facebook, they're
going to YouTube, they're going to the sexy new technologies that are viral in
the way they operate. And so the numbers are just runaway.
We need to get
the attention of those, you know, cutting-edge companies to throw some resources
at being better, more responsive to the community, before we have to have
special hearings on it.
CARDIN: I agree with you, but the whole philosophy
of a YouTube is that it's self-selecting by the user. And if it is trash, the
user won't use it. I mean, that's their whole philosophy.
So it's counter
to their philosophy to prejudge the appetite for it. And it's got to be -- it
basically is current. It happens and it's off the YouTube pretty quickly, at
least normally.
So I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. I'm just
saying I think it's going to be a hard sell to get that type of entity to put in
-- to screen, because that's not what they do.
(CROSSTALK)
COOPER:
Well, let me clarify. I'm not talking about screening. I'm talking about being
responsive when a parent or an organization comes and says, "Look at this
stuff," and not getting any response at all.
And then I guess we could
always bring in a witness from China to fill us in about how profoundly they're
committed to their business model and fill such time as a big client, like China
says, we want you to bend.
So there's plenty of wiggle room out there if you
push the right way.
CARDIN: Good point. Good point.
POTOK: I just
want to say, it's worth saying that YouTube enforces pretty strictly anti-porn
policies. So it's not -- that does not seem dissimilar to me.
CARDIN: With
that, I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Thompson and let her continue this
discussion. I have some conflicts in my office with some guests that I have
from other countries, and then I think we have votes that are going to be
starting on the Senate soon.
This has been extremely helpful to me, I know
to the commission, and we thank, again, our four guests. And I'm going to let
Dr. Thompson, the time that remains, to open it up to discussion by anyone who
would like to join us.
THOMPSON: And, actually, I'm going to take this
opportunity to open questions up to the floor. And we have a chair here with a
microphone set up for anyone that would be interested in presenting any
questions to the panelists.
AUDIENCE: Hi. My name is Steve Clark (ph), and
I'm with the Library of Congress. Of course, we do research for Congress. And
one of our responsibilities is to be very balanced in the reports that we do.
Listening to the panel, I got the impression that problem of Internet hate
speech, of which I know nothing -- I have never gone and looked at any of those
sites, so I'm not an expert in this field -- it is pretty much solely a problem
of what you call the radical right.
And that made me wonder, are there no
leftist, revolutionary hate speech sites, groups advocating violence from a
leftist perspective, or are we only dealing with a right-wing, kind of kook
phenomenon here?
POTOK: If I may respond -- is that OK?
(UNKNOWN):
Sure.
POTOK: Yes, there exists some left-wing sites like that. I mean, the
one that comes immediately to mind is the Animal Liberation Front, which
actually provides an arson guide. You know, how do you burn up your animal
oppressors, farm, or burn up SUV dealerships, and that kind of thing?
You
know, beyond that, I think what you might consider something from the left would
be really more in your world, I think, than mine.
COOPER: Sure, you have it
across the board. You also have -- we didn't talk about them today -- the fact
that the Internet is the perfect incubator for conspiracy theories.
And
sometimes they're benign, and sometimes they'll lead individuals and/or groups
to go in -- or in the case with, say, the Iranian regime -- to co-opt the
Holocaust denial. A lot of these, you might say, were either invented or kept
on life support system or resurrected by virtue of this kind of technology that
really fits them very much.
The other area which we didn't talk about today
at all, which we always put together in our reports, but we deal with as two
distinct areas, is the whole food chain and feeding chain of terrorism.
And
there you have entire -- the whole jihadist worldview, which is not only
identifying, you know, U.S. is Great Satan and Al Qaida having an anti-Semitic
site, a hate site, nothing new on there but sort of making their statement that
way.
You have certain Islamic sites which attack other Islamic groups,
religious groups, as not being religious enough by their definitions. You have
a whole kind of Solar System out there, including the insurgent groups in Iraq
all see the Internet as front and center to how they do, what they do, their
agenda, their fundraising, their justification, and their propaganda efforts
against U.S. and coalition forces.
And sometimes those two worlds do collide
very interesting, again, in terms of the Internet. You have a Queens, New York,
group, an Islamist group, called Islamic -- Rick, what is it, Islamic Thinkers?
(UNKNOWN): Islamic Thinkers Society.
COOPER: Islamic Thinkers Society.
Now, they're the ones who talked about a coming nuclear attack on New York.
They burned the flag in 2003, I think, on the streets of New York City.
When
we went a couple of days ago onto their Web site, the first that we've seen it,
on the front page of their presentation, they co-opted some of the worst
Holocaust-denial material, conceived of, written and thought through not by any
Arabs or Muslims, but by Europeans and Americans.
You have also this
crosspollination and the potential for a lot worse than just ideas co-mingling,
but you mentioned the Animal Liberation army. I think a lot of us and some law
enforcement are very concerned that the immense amount of material available
online that just can teach you how to deploy as a terrorist, the potential there
for that kind of melding is very apparent and, as I said, may be beyond the
scope of this particular discussion.
But feel free to take one or two of
these and get an introduction into this neighborhood. It's a little bit broader
than what you heard today.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much.
THOMPSON:
And I will say that the OSCE is in the process now of looking at terrorism more
and also this idea of radicalization, and I think the role of the Internet and
some other things, as well.
If there were any more questions from the floor
at this point, if anyone was...
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much.
THOMPSON: ... interested in asking questions, please feel free to come up.
If not, now I'll give people time to get to the chair (ph), as well. One of the
things that I'd also wanted to mention was that Dr. Maura Conway, who's in
Ireland, hopefully joining us via the Net at this point, had also documented a
number of things in her research, which we have available here, in terms of how
or what it is Internet service providers can do.
And some of those things
that she had noted in her work are I think, number one, just changing the order
on which Web sites come up through a search engine. So there have been examples
where there have been hate sites that come up above others.
And so that's
been one of the issues that's been brought up, and the use of geolocation
software to actually identify users and then, if necessary, report them to law
enforcement.
We've also talked about this preventing of the use of search
sites of hate sites. And I think France and Germany are some of the European
countries that are doing that.
And I think, additionally, purchasing the
domain name addresses of certain, I think, negative terms, that hate groups
might want to use as a beacon to their sites were some of the other things that
came up.
And I was just wondering if some of you might be able to speak to
-- I think Chris Wolf had mentioned...
WOLF: Yes, I was just going to say,
with respect to getting search engines to alter the results of their algorithms,
it's not going to happen, certainly not at Google, where they view their
algorithm as sacrosanct.
We were able to work at the ADL to work with
Google, when you types in the search term "Jew," one of the top hits was a
virulently anti-Semitic site called Jew Watch.
Google would not change the
order, certainly wouldn't remove that from the listing, but did agree at no cost
to provide a sponsored link that they normally charge for with a link to the ADL
site and with a banner that said, "One of the first results you will see is from
a hate group," or words to that effect, "so if you'd like to put it into
context, click here."
And we thought that was a great advance, and we'd like
to see more of that, frankly. But I think the notion that search engines are
going to filter out hate sites, while it may be a laudable idea, is practically
not going to happen.
COOPER: I just wanted to share -- I think it was in
2004, the hearings, the big meeting in Paris that the OSCE was involved with.
And part of my presentation, I showed six major French hate sites, pretty
virulent stuff, that had been removed by the French authorities.
And it's
not often that an American Jewish human rights organization is going to say nice
things about the French, but we did, and they were very, very happy and proud
for about 30 seconds, until we showed the next slide, in which all six of the
sites were at that .fr.rr (ph), whatever it was, one additional addition it took
by these organizations to find their way back to the Net.
So I think we
should say, again, applaud the governments or the companies involved for making
the statement and knocking them off for at least a while and pushing them on to
the margins, but I think we all have to be honest enough to admit that you're
never going to be fully successful in keeping any idea off the Internet.
And
with that basic starting point, we still have to figure out what we can do to
marginalize that.
WOLF: I actually want to say a couple of very nice things
about the French. Ambassador Levitte, who's now President Sarkozy's national
security adviser, had a special interest in the subject of hate on the Internet,
was very much behind the French hosting the OSCE conference in 2004, came up
with me and briefed the Senate and the House on the issue.
And the French
embassy here in Washington is hosting a major conference next November at Lemee
Sans Frances (ph) on Internet hate speech. So I don't want to be too tough on
the French. I think that they're actually a leader in the world on this issue.
THOMPSON: And, Mr. Stahnke, you had mentioned earlier that the use of, I
think, cell phone technology, Internet, et cetera, and having increased, I
guess, with the use of some of the groups that are targeting human rights
defenders and actually even persons of certain groups within Russia, Ukraine,
and some of the other OSCE countries.
And I was just wondering if you could
talk a little bit about how you've seen that being manifested and, also, how it
is that these governments have responded and if you've seen anything in
particular where they've actually either looked at the Internet or just in
general how it is these groups are trying to publicize themselves via new
technology.
STAHNKE: Right. Well, one of the things that -- we were
recently in Russia. And one of the things that was happening was a strong rise
in neo-Nazi skinhead attacks on foreigners, on Asians, on Africans, in Moscow
and St. Petersburg and elsewhere.
And one of the disturbing aspects of it is
that, while these attacks were taking place, someone would take a cell phone
video of it. And that would be posted on the Internet as a way to promote what
they had done, laud what they had done, and encourage others to do similar
things.
And this obviously was a very disturbing thing. There was a video
that was posted that purported to be an execution by neo-Nazi groups of Central
Asian people who looked Central Asian in Russia.
So it's certain that these
neo-Nazi groups are using -- you know, trying to use the Internet, they're
trying to use their cell phone technology in order to spread their message.
What we've been focused on is to try to get the government to use its tools
against violence as a way to marginalize the activities of these skinhead
groups.
And it's clear that they really haven't done an awful lot. I mean,
Russia has laws. They have laws against hate violence. They have laws against
extremism and other things.
And, of course, it's a mixed picture how those
things have been implemented. In some cases, they've done some laudable things,
maybe not from a First Amendment point of view, but in the Russian context.
But in other cases, they've turned their extremist laws against political and
religious dissent in that country, and it's sort of manifesting the fears that
you have outside societies, where the rule of law has much more traction. So
that's a problem.
And then the other thing in Russia is that, with the spike
of murders, there has been a little more awareness by the police and the
government to do something about it.
So perhaps the tide is about to turn,
but the response -- there's a lot of fear that the response of the government
will be too strong, that they'll rely on methods of violence themselves to crack
down on some of these neo-Nazi groups, and that that will just be a short-term
politically expedient way of dealing with the problem, rather than a real
long-term effort to end impunity for these sorts of attacks.
And it comes
back to, I think, our point and that is that it's impunity for violence that can
fuel the power of groups and their messages that are operating throughout the
Internet and other forms of technology.
And that when governments in
particular speak out condemning violence, when civil society speaks out to do
that, but when governments actually put in and implement tools to combat it and
end this sort of impunity, that that also helps to marginalize what's going on.
COOPER: I think the first major example of this kind of cell phone activity
was first reported during the riots in the Paris suburbs, in which you had the
young toughs actually spread out among -- within a couple of blocks radius, the
police had their hands full, and it took them a while to realize that they were
actually using the broadcasts from phone to phone to inspire both the tactic,
the target, and to inspire similar activity.
In our digital terrorism
CD-ROM, we do have a whole section dealing with this, including the reformatting
of some of the earlier material that's been online, some of it by the Iraqi
insurgents, but others, as you mentioned here the neo-Nazi example, we actually
put it on the cover of the report, because it's that concerning to us.
And
Rick has shown a couple of -- we have a couple of examples -- I don't know if
you want to run this particular one. It's not a great quality, but maybe just
run through a couple of the other examples that we have on this area of the 2.0.
(VIDEO CLIP SHOWN)
Can you just give us a brief description? This says,
"SMS to U.S." This is an insurgency group. And we all know about text
messaging, but actually the imagery here is actually sending back body bags of
American soldiers.
(UNKNOWN): (OFF-MIKE)
COOPER: Do you have the one
with the sniper accessible? There's been now for a couple of years an Internet
creation -- is it called Jewba (ph) -- of an alleged sniper who comes home after
a hard day of work in Iraq, shooting down American soldiers, keeps a diary.
It has a component -- I think a Brazilian cartoonist is doing a comic book, an
online comic book. And now, for the first time, we've seen that particular
material finding itself reconstituted so it can be sent to a cell phone and
transmitted to a cell phone.
So for those who are also in the -- having the
job of trying to quantify the nature of the threats and the trends, this kind of
activity is going to make it more and more difficult, without any question.
THOMPSON: Well, also one of the things that I think you all have spoken to
here, I think, are the need for various voices to come together. So those that
are concerned about combating hate crimes, hate propaganda on the Web, and those
that are also concerned about free speech, freedom of assembly, and related
issues to come together.
As you were talking, actually, about the cell phone
use, I was thinking about, from my own experiences being in countries that shall
remain nameless at this point, where text messaging wasn't working and had
purposefully been cut off because of concerns about uprising and actual, I would
say, meetings.
And the governments had said that they were concerned,
actually, about uprisings. But when you looked at the groups that they were
worried about organizing, they were actually student groups and some other
groups.
And so there's clearly, I think, a balance and that needs to be
struck here. And I think the necessity for people to be able to come together
from all angles to really talk about these things, I think especially as we're
looking within the U.S. context and broadening that out to some of the OSCE
countries in Europe.
And unless there were any other questions from the
audience...
POTOK: I think it's worth pointing out that not all of the kind
of racist propaganda that ultimately results in criminal violence appears in the
context of Web sites with swastikas on them or that kind of thing.
And what
I'm talking about is the kinds of theories, the conspiracy theories we hear now
about how Mexicans are coming to destroy our country, the North American Union
conspiracy theory, the Axlan theory (ph), they're coming here, they're secretly
planning to conquer our country.
You know, this stuff exists probably more
plentifully on, quote, unquote, "mainstream" Web sites. You know, there are
probably tens of thousands of blogs out there that contain this material.
So
no legislation is ever going to help you with that in any way, right? I mean,
the only answer is counter speech. And I think that there's some leadership --
it hasn't been helpful in the case of the North American Union theory that 20
houses of representatives, 20 different state house of representatives, has
passed resolutions opposing this fictitious entity.
So that's when you turn
to Congress and say, "Maybe it's time for somebody to say something about this."
The Bush White House has put out a little -- and more power to them for doing
it. They put out a little page saying it's B.S., this stuff is not true.
But I think clearly there's things that can be done that are really beyond the
power and scope of what these NGOs can do. And that's the only way you're
really going to take this stuff on in a head-on way.
THOMPSON: Thank you.
I appreciate it. And if there are no more briefings, we'll end the briefing at
this point.
Thank you.
[Whereupon the briefing ended at 4:38 p.m.]
END
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