06/05/2002

By DOUG BEDELL / The Dallas Morning News

The Internet is proving itself a fertile recycling ground for all sorts of wrong and often dangerous gossip. Passed along as fact by unwitting e-mail users to entire address books of contacts, these urban myths and "e-rumors" have taken on a life of their own.

And they're beginning to cost real money.

The Department of Energy's Computer Incident Advisory Capability staff has estimated that the replication of a single virulent hoax can cause more than $40 million in sapped productivity, lost time and clogged e-mail pipelines.

To those who follow and catalog the activity, there seems no end to it all. "The irony is that here we are, connected to the greatest, most accessible repository of information – good information, if you take the time to separate the wheat from the chaff," says David Emery, an urban myth debunker for About.com. "And yet so few of us use it to do our own fact-checking."

For example, no matter how hard the Internal Revenue Service tries to kill it, the myth of the "slavery reparations tax credit," which first appeared in 1994, lives on. More than 100,000 tax returns have been received demanding the nonexistent slave deduction, even after two years of government warnings and a slew of related federal prosecutions.

In 2001 alone, citizens filed $2.7 billion in improper claims for the "reparation credit," according to the IRS.

Beginning this year, the agency is sending out letters threatening a $500 fine for filing a frivolous tax return to those who refuse to back off and refile.

The U.S. Treasury Department reported the government actually paid out more than $30 million in erroneous refunds during 2000 and 2001 based on this urban legend.

Less-notorious rumors

There is the fake Florida police warning about AIDS-infected needles being found on gas pump handles. And "Frozen Disney" – the persistent rumor that Walt Disney's body was frozen and stored beneath his theme park's "Pirates of the Caribbean" attraction – is still alive from 1995.

In the post-Sept. 11 milieu, things have gotten worse, according to those who investigate and catalog Net hoaxes. The anxiety level of the country has risen to new heights, prompting faster forwarding of unchecked information, they say.

For evidence, many myth debunkers point to a single, cryptic e-mail that surfaced last fall and was traced back to a woman named Laura Katsis, an employee of Volt Information Systems in Orange, Calif.

It purported to relay warnings supposedly conveyed by an Arab husband to his estranged American spouse. Don't fly on Sept. 11, the man had said. And, whatever you do, he urged, don't go near a shopping mall on Halloween. Then, he disappeared, never to be heard from again, so the story went.

The e-mail signature of Ms. Katsis was included in many of the forwarded e-mails that raced around the Internet beginning Oct. 5. She was contacted by the FBI, which later said that the story was not credible.

Barbara Mikkelson, manager of the Snopes.com urban myths Web site, interviewed Ms. Katsis, who maintained she still believed the story, which she said she heard from a "friend of a friend."

The original source of the story, however, could not be located by either government or civilian investigators.

"That one hit and died, and was never heard from again, but it was extremely powerful," says Richard Buhler, the man behind TruthOrFiction.com, one of a dozen or so Internet sites set up to help Net denizens separate e-facts from e-baloney.

Mr. Buhler didn't fully understand the impact of the Halloween Mall hoax until he received an invitation to keynote the 2002 Security Conference of the International Council of Shopping Centers in Baltimore in April.

There, officials gave him figures showing mall traffic had dropped 40 percent in many parts of the country. Mr. Buhler said most managers were convinced such a precipitous drop had to be directly attributable to the Arab husband e-mail hoax.

"The Internet has sprouted some new kinds of things that never existed before," says Mr. Buhler. "The majority of what is circulating on the Internet is newer and potentially more explosive than what has gone on before.

"They are so instantaneous, you can't even call them urban legends. Urban legends are time-tested. Most of these are not."

Getting the word out about persistent rumors and recurrent hoaxes has become a full-time job for federal agencies, including the CIAC.

Every day, anti-virus corporations update massive Web sites at McAfee.com and Symantec.com to help debunk computer myths. Together with the encyclopedic work of amateur and professional Internet rumor-investigators, the Net is chock-full of up-to-the-minute warnings about all manner of misinformation.

Now a part of life

Some experts believe it is attributable, in part, to the rapid adoption of e-mail as an integral part of life's most important activities.

The use of e-mail for sharing worries or seeking advice has become routine, according to a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

By March 2001, the study estimates, 51 million Americans had e-mailed family members for advice, up from 30 million in 2000 – a 70 percent increase in a year.

E-mailing family members to express worries has become an increasing part of the tableau, the study showed. About 40 million Americans had used e-mail to express their fears and doubts to loved ones by March 2001, up from 25 million the previous year.

"It's easy to see how people take advantage of a growing network," says John B. Horrigan, a Pew senior research specialist. "Each friend who gets Internet access and each grandmother who sends her first e-mail builds the community of Internet users. The larger the community gets, the more likely it is that people will turn to e-mail to share intimate and crucial communications."

Because e-mail is so easily spread one-to-many, computer users often opt to disseminate unchecked information as a "better-safe-than-sorry" option in their communication with family and acquaintances, says Ms. Mikkelson.

"Some of this stuff is impossible to fact-check, so folks go for the easy answer," says Ms. Mikkelson. "Warning a friend to stay safe by steering clear of a shopping mall on Halloween is a lot more definite than worrying that none of us is safe anywhere from terrorist attacks."

Recurrent rumors and urban myths are usually imbued with just enough authoritative tone to hook the unsuspecting or naive, she says.

"The power of the written word is tremendous," says Ms. Mikkelson. "We are accustomed to seeing the written word as authoritative. People have never gotten over the fact that the Internet isn't a supercomputer that knows all. It's more like a library. It's got fiction; it's got nonfiction."

In fact, says Ms. Mikkelson, blaming the Internet for spreading hoaxes is like condemning the telephone for spreading gossip. The same human dynamic is at work.

Many times these authentic-sounding info-bits die out, then are born again with incredible vigor. The IRS, for example, says filings claiming slavery reparations credits began appearing in 1994, resurfaced again in 1996, then – perhaps rejuvenated by widespread use of e-mail – surged once again in 2000 and accelerated throughout 2001.

Most black reparations hoax believers – including several IRS employees – have sought deductions of $43,209. That was the figure used in a 1993 Essence magazine article that calculated the present-day value of the 40 acres and a mule that some freed slaves were given during the Civil War.

Mr. Buhler estimates that about half of all e-rumors he's heard about since January are repeaters.

Recently, they have included a new version of the Hanoi Jane myth that blames actress Jane Fonda for the torture and murder of American POWs during a 1972 visit to North Vietnam. The account of her actions was based on information provided by a nonexistent POW, and is a version of a rumor debunked years ago.

Internet "newbies"

"Americans got out of writing letters to each other," says Mr. Buhler. "A lot of people think if it's written, it's true. When something comes to them that is new – and when they're really new to the Internet and haven't gotten burned yet – they just immediately take it as gospel."

Adds Mr. Emery: "The rate at which brand-new users continue to sign on for their very first online experience is still quite high. That means we have a constantly refreshed pool of gullible newbies who bite on every rumor that comes their way, new or old, and pass it along to their friends. This will be an Internet fact of life for the foreseeable future."

And the mainstream press is not immune from its own embarrassing tangles with recirculated rumor.

In May, Ann Landers bit on a letter describing how nude slumber parties had become "all the rage these days" among 15-year-old girls. The letter from a "Baffled Mom in Burlingame" is virtually identical to one that appeared in the Ebony Advisor column of Ebony magazine in September 1995.

"One reason rumor-mongering is rampant is that we don't always trust authorities to tell us the truth," says Mr. Emery. "Sometimes we don't even trust the media to tell us the truth, and so you see rumors functioning as a sort of 'shadow news' whereby people share – or think they're sharing – the 'untold' truth about certain issues."

In some ways, the Internet has the advantage of being instantly self-correcting, experts say.

During the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, for example, those participating in the rapid-fire rolling discussion of the tragedy on Slashdot.org were quick to point out mistakes and falsehoods being presented as fact, says Slashdot founder Robin "Roblimo" Miller.

"Because of instant reader feedback, what we have is instant correction," Mr. Miller says. "We have thousands of fact-checkers."

Likewise, says Mr. Buhler, it is relatively easy and quick to correct misinformation via e-mail.

"I do think there are more people getting instant feedback when something's untrue, and it's jarring them," he says. "If you send out something that is popularly untrue, you're going to get some immediate response from people who politely or impolitely will tell you. Either way, you feel like an idiot."