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. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&