Bombers’ Victims, Brother Call for Internet Self-Policing

The brother of Unabomber Theodore J. Kaczynski joined a victim of one of his bombs and the mother of a victim of the Oklahoma City bombing to plead Wednesday for Internet companies to purge or block Web sites that carry bomb recipes.

David Kaczynski, Gary Wright and Marsha Kight appeared at a news conference to ask America Online Inc., Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and Walt Disney Co., part owner of Go Network, to police the vast array of Web sites on a voluntary basis.

“No one has a constitutional right to use an Internet company’s property to facilitate murder,” said Dennis Saffran, executive director of the Center for the Community Interest, which joined the call to delete the Web information. “Rather, the companies have the constitutional right--and the moral obligation--to stop this use of their property.”

Access to violent sites, particularly by children, has come under sharp focus since the deadly April 20 attack in a Littleton, Colo., high school, where one of the teenage killers detailed the building of pipe bombs on the Web a year earlier.

The victims and the CCI are pressing host companies to scan for and delete bomb-making instructions and want search engines to scan for such sites and block access.

Industry spokesmen said companies do what they can, but they questioned whether it is possible to scan the content of every Web site, particularly if a bomb recipe, for example, contains just chemical ingredients and no violent or hateful language.

“We don’t tolerate any bomb-making information to be posted on AOL Web pages, chat rooms or any other areas of service,” said AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein. “When we find it, we remove it.”

The Go Network uses automated filters to find and block sites filled with hateful or violent language, said Amanda Higgins, a spokeswoman for Infoseek, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company that produces the network.

“It’s not 100% foolproof at this point,” she said.

Saffran said the request would not violate the constitutional right to free speech because they are seeking the voluntary cooperation of private companies rather than government regulation.

But, he added, limited government regulation might be needed if companies don’t participate on a voluntary basis.

“We’re giving every troubled kid out there the tools to become a Tim McVeigh [sentenced to death for the Oklahoma City Bombing] or a Ted Kaczynski,” he said.

David Kaczynski recently created a tax-exempt fund with the $1-million reward he got for turning in his brother, after tax restrictions prevented him from distributing it directly to Unabomber victims. The fund will give money to victims of crimes committed by paranoid schizophrenics.

Wright, who still finds shards of shrapnel in his skin, said that in a span of 15 minutes he was able to find 10 sites telling him how to make pipe and rocket bombs, bombs disguised as tennis balls, and homemade napalm.

“A child running in the park is going to have no hesitation in picking up something that is made to look like it can give him pleasure, like a tennis ball,” Wright said Wednesday via video hookup from Salt Lake City.