Recently, the television show "60 Minutes" engaged in a popular pastime
for the U.S. media - making vague derogatory statements concerning
Internet reports of the missile hypothesis for the downing of TWA 800. 
They deserve a response.

If one trusted the "60 Minutes" report, it would sound like the missile
hypothesis was a wild and irresponsible speculation.  Yet the truth of
the matter is that the wild and irresponsible speculation was when the
entire mass media of the U.S., seemingly without exception, immediately
embraced the notion that TWA 800 was brought down by a bomb, and paved
the road for public acceptance of a massive, expensive "security" effort
to prevent future bombings.  This program has led to a tremendous waste
of human time.  (consider:  50 million O'Hare passengers x 5 minutes'
delay = 285 *years* of wasted time, about 4 full life-spans, every year,
at one airport!  I'd rather die by the bomb, myself.)  This program
serves the purpose of tracking people's movements, allowing warrantless
searches of bags with advanced equipment (e.g. X-ray CT scanners) capable
of finding bombs *or any other contraband*, running "profiles",
justifying prolonged questioning without any evidence of wrongdoing, and,
of course, would do absolutely nothing to stop somebody with a shotgun
full of buckshot from killing the pilot while the plane was taking off. 
The "security" itself is even full of holes - during one round trip I saw
that passengers could leave their bags while exiting at an intermediate
destination, or smuggle just about any metal object (grenade?) in the
toes of steel-toed boots.  The logical conclusion, therefore, is that
Flight 800 was used as a justification for a political program wholly
unrelated to the deaths of its passengers, with the connivance of mass
media outlets such as 60 Minutes represents.  The subsequent passage of
"anti-terrorist" legislation closely patterned on COINTELPRO or the
Palmer raids certainly reinforces this conclusion.

Of course, we might ignore the political overtones, and presume that this
is solely a matter of forensic investigation.  But in that case, why does
every mass media outlet in the entire U.S. have an agenda to discredit
this ONE topic for discussion on Internet?  We have had "threads" equally
as large with such distinguished topics as "I Just Raped A Nigger Child",
and nobody cared.  It would not seem that the question of whether
terrorists took out a plane using a bomb or a missile, or whether it was
some kind of accident, would be even interesting, much less important. 
Even if we consider the more speculative notions that the missile had
something to do with the declared military testing zone in the area,
there is no obvious reason why the media, in the absence of politics,
should be so quick to condemn such speculation, as opposed to following
it themselves.  In truth, it wouldn't even be such a large story - it
would hardly be the first time that a military training accident has
killed U.S. civilians, and it wouldn't even be the first time they've
shot down a commercial airliner by accident.

It's also interesting that the 60 Minutes hatchet team did not deign to
mention the defector in the ranks of the media, one man by the name of
Salinger, who quoted French intelligence sources and stood by his story
even after people claimed he'd been sucked in by the big, bad Internet.

Instead, they avoided any serious discussion of the alleged facts
concerning the missile strike, and focused on how a person might
conceivably give false information on Internet.  They obtained one
believer in Flight 800 missile theories who was particularly
un-photogenic, interspersed him with fancy, made-up anchordweebs, put him
in bad lighting, with a bizarre upward camera angle, probably diddled
with the contrast to make him look even worse, then took what I'd guess
must have been an hour of interview in order to find a few flippant
remarks and stammers to show the audience out of context, which utterly
avoided any substantive issues.

Aside from this, they spent their time showing how a person could
headline a Web page with someone else's name, or forge E-mail with
Eudora, and then they addressed the single SUBSTANTIVE issue of the
performance.

Which was, of course, CENSORSHIP.  Would you believe it?  The anchor of a
U.S. news firm seriously acted as if she were shocked that ANYBODY could
put up a Web page without having some government official wave the magic
wand and decide whether it was wholesome enough!  They had somebody else
for "balance", but of course, the question is not whether the issue has
two sides - but what the issue *IS*.  In this case, they transformed the
issue of whether Flight 800 was downed by a missile, into a question of
whether anyone should be allowed to say ANYTHING (*POLITICAL*, mind you)
on Internet, without some censor looking them over.

I would like to think that this is merely, as some people have said, a
matter of these professional reporters realizing that now that Junior has
a library card he doesn't need Mommy and Daddy to read him a bedtime
story anymore.  But these people will have no trouble finding work, no
matter how far Internet progresses in popularity.  "Where there's war,
there's whores" - and wherever there are billionaire owners facing labor
disputes, or politicians looking to explain just what they were doing in
the car with the underage female, there will be plenty of employment for
made-up beautiful people who can with great sincerity read a script that
completely obfuscates the truth while pretending to settle an issue.

I fear, however, that the truth is more sinister.  There is a clear
agenda of state power, of secret police and arbitrary arrests, which is
furthered by the kinds of tracking and identification information which
the Flight 800 hysteria served.  When reporters such as these suggest
that Internet could simply, one day, be banned and turned over to them to
handle, I wonder if they really do know *something* I don't.  I also
wonder - if they find it so hard to believe that a person could put up a
Web page and "publish" whatever they want to a few thousand hits from
Internet geeks, then surely they feel that they can NOT publish what they
want, say what they want, about issues such as TWA 800.

And yet, there is power here, and resistance here, and even they admit
it.  The 60 Minutes reporters mentioned that supposedly a fake rumor
about Mrs. Fields' hosting OJ Simpson for free resulted in a
"single-digit drop" in sales.  If this is true, then imagine the power we
can in fact mobilize when we are correct!  They report that the
corporations have started watching us, which is sinister indeed, but what
is not sinister is that we have enough power to be *worth* watching. 
Indeed, they reported that some poor sap working for a firm they
consulted with has to read every post with "60 Minutes" in it somewhere,
and I should relieve him to say that after some amusement I dropped the
idea of putting that particular phrase in a signature quote.  ;)

There are so many censorship issues that 60 Minutes could address, which
do not require pretended ignorance and out-of-context quotations. 
There's a kid in Georgia (Jason Paul Moreland) facing a 20-year sentence
for handing out leaflets - they say that because he had a cartoon
including a Molotov cocktail in a pamphlet about anarchism that he's
eligible for a law against "advocating the overthrow of the government". 
There's a juror in Colorado (Laura Kriho) now serving a jail sentence for
failing to mention her politics when not asked, before serving on a jury
and attempting to vote not guilty.  There's a student from a university
in Florida who has been sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison, and barely
escaped the chain gang through the personal intervention of the governor,
for "stealing" *his own lab notebook* containing documentation of a
patentable discovery he made, because the university claimed it had an
implied agreement with him to turn over all rights to them, simply
because he was a student.  I would have at least thought that they would
care about the ABC/Food Lion case and its implications for their line of
work, or the more prosaic but equally outrageous decision in California
that employers can be liable if their letters of recommendation fail to
include any negative observation they "should have known".  

What I wonder most of all, however, is simply this:  why can't ONE of
these people decide to change sides, and become the Murrow of the 90's,
and put a stop to this creeping agenda of lies and privacy invasions
before it goes any further?  Are they truly that afraid, already?  Do
they truly have no cause in their hearts other than money?  I cannot
understand.

P.S.  There are two major aspects of this story that 60 Minutes clearly
missed, with their penetrating investigative reporting.  The first is
that Mrs. Fields has been targeted with a false rumor before - about two
years ago, a sort of chain letter passed around which described a long
story in which a person, having requested a recipe for their cookies,
gets charged $250 on their credit card for the "intellectual property". 
Utterly false, of course, but suggesting that some individual with a wit
is out to get them.  The second is that on talk.politics.drugs I recently
summarized a long string of false allegations made against Paul Stanford,
one of the chief petitioners for the Oregon marijuana legalization
initiative.  I've since learned he's had other such instances of
deliberate defamation off the Net as well.  The tactics much resemble
COINTELPRO, so it is no surprise 60 Minutes wouldn't touch the story, but
you'd think they could, if they cared about an election being an open and
honest process, rather than a complete sham.  But of course, for that
they do not care, even for their own reporting.