And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Posted at 11:19 p.m. PDT; Saturday, May 22, 1999
Foes spin Web to attack whalers
http://www.seattletimes.com/news/local/html98/whal_19990522.html
by Eric Sorensen
Seattle Times staff reporter
Having lost their battle in the waters of Neah Bay,
anti-whaling activists have taken their fight to the
World Wide Web.
Among their weapons: a Web site that mocks the
official site of the Makah Indians, who today host a
potlatch celebrating their first gray-whale hunt in more
than 70 years.
The anti-whaling Web site went so far as to buy and
register the Internet domain name makah.org, as
opposed to the official site's makah.com domain. A
domain name be bought for as little as $75.
The mimic site uses the copyrighted Makah name and
firebird symbol, said tribal chairman Ben Johnson Jr.
"I'm pretty sure that there's a lawsuit there," he said. "I
hope so."
Borrowing an opponent's name has become a common
tactic to detour Web surfers to a spoof site. And
judging from the traffic recorded on makah.org, it's
working.
As of yesterday, the site had registered more than
25,000 hits - almost as many as the 30,000 hits that
the official Makah site logged earlier this week.
The mock Web site is registered to Della Bear, at a
post-office box in Vancouver, B.C. The post-office
box belongs to Darren Thurston, said David
Barbarash, a friend and fellow animal-rights activist.
Barbarash declined to say if Thurston was operating
the site.
Both men were arrested by the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police last year on 27 counts of mailing an
item with intent to do bodily harm after they allegedly
sent razor-blade-lined letters to hunters and people in
the fur industry. Charges against Barbarash have been
dropped but are still pending against Thurston,
according to the provincial court.
Thurston, the former leader of an Edmonton group
called Citizens for Animal Liberation, was given a
two-year sentence in 1994 for breaking into a
University of Alberta laboratory, freeing 29 research
cats and vandalizing the room, according to the
Montreal Gazette.
Thurston did not respond yesterday to interview
requests made through his lawyer or Barbarash. In an
e-mail exchange earlier this week, "Della Bear"
declined to be interviewed.
The makah.org domain name was recorded last
November, but the site surfaced in earnest earlier this
week, when Makah officials said it was the work of
someone who had hacked into their own site. Officials
later said the tribe's site wasn't hacked but copied into
a Web-page editing program, altered and then reposted
on a separate computer server.
The spoof site's home page is a nearly exact copy of
the official Makah page. But click to get to "Makah
whaling," and the page is topped by a blood-dripping
bar, identical to one used by the anti-abortion
Nuremberg Files Web site. A link to the "Makah
marina" features a picture of whalers, possibly in the
North Atlantic, pulling dead whales through blood-red
water.
"Why Does the Tribe Want to Do This?" the text asks
in a question-and-answer section. "WE WANT
MONEY! 350 million tax dollars to be exact - paid to
us or else."
Johnson, the tribal chairman, said the twisted facts in
the site are disturbing. "Everything in there is a lie."
"It's similar to the kind of tactics that we've seen," said
Al Ziontz, retired tribal attorney for the Makahs.
"There are no constraints. The gloves are off. They
take liberty with everything."
Ziontz said any decision to sue will be left to John
Arum, the tribe's active attorney, who could not be
reached yesterday. In the past, Ziontz has advised
against suing anti-whaling activists.
"If you leave your opponents to do the crazy stuff,
eventually they blow their credibility," he said.
Meanwhile, the Makahs have been hit with so much
e-mail that they are beginning to remove some e-mail
addresses from their Web site. Some 500 messages are
coming in each day, with about 2,500 messages
arriving over the course of the week.
The Internet also has become a brisk breeding ground
for anti-whaling rumors, often written in the guise of
news stories.
One story getting heavy recirculation through
AnimalNews.com claims the Makah lied about their
cultural motivation for a hunt and instead sought to sell
whale meat to Japan and Norway. In truth, the Makah
signed agreements with the United States never to sell
whale meat.
Another story circulating claims two whales have been
spotted with harpoon wounds, one off the coast of
Washington and one off Canada. No officials have
confirmed any such wounded animals.
Copyright © 1999 Seattle Times Company
Reprinted under the fair use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
doctrine of international copyright law.
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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