"Hi! I sent you this letter because your email address was on a list that fit this category. I am a fan of child pornography. . . . I am now selling my products."

It went on to give a price list, a real name and address to order from, and the invitation to use Mastercard or Visa.

Let me tell you what my first reactions were:

I am definitely on the world's most awful mailing list.

This fellow is the most brazen spam artist yet, selling this stuff like sweet corn from an electronic tailgate.

I don't report too many obnoxious users, but I could make an exception here.

I assumed the return address was forged, but I returned the message to America On-Line anyway, and also cc'd it to my Net guru, Charles Gimon, writer for the excellent techno-tabloid Info-Nation.

America On-Line responded first, with a letter saying I was not the only complainant, and the matter was being referred to the FBI. That told me that the solicitation was big, perhaps sent to a million users or more.

But it was Charles who came through big time. Charles knows where all the bodies on the Internet are (or soon will be) buried. He quickly sorted through the mounting evidence on Usenet indicating that the episode was probably not about kidporn at all. More likely it was an e-mail hoax to punish this (or possibly, some other) Steve Barnard, who had been spamming users by the thousands, ironically for a software add-on that would let AOL users send massive amounts of e-mail free.

By this time, thousands of people were doing detective work on the outrage. The Jackson Heights police station was deluged with calls from around the world. The alt.current-event.net-abuse newsgroup and others monitoring spam attacks lit up with leads, theories, and counter-conspiracies. Some people tracked the antagonostic offenses of Barnard going back several years, in newsgroups about tennis and pet training. Someone else researched how many Steve Barnards are listed in the U.S. (84).

Others fingered America On-Line's laxity toward offending mail as the real culprit. The Washington Post reported that 370,000 fake AOL accounts were created were created between March and June this year. All those diskettes they mail out, with no e-mail limits for first-time users.

The good news was that these posts peeled away the veneer of kiddie porn. Just imagine what Time magazine, which has twisted the truth about Internet pornography way more than Don Shelby ever did with Northwest Airlines, would have on this week's cover: "Kidsmut Stalks the Internet!!").

The bad news was that one person with an axe to grind and a little cleverness with e-mail headers was able to galvanize hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, into action.

Change the word galvanize in the last sentence to distract and you'll see the problem. Networked information has no bureaucracy to slow things down -- everything happens to everyone all at once. While this is wonderful for ferreting out the truth in matters bureaucracies tend to sit on, it bodes ill for national security in the information age.

What if a latter-day Lord Haw-Haw or Tokyo Rose consumes the attention of the entire network, the entire world? Saddam Hussein (just as an example) may not have the lift to get a SCUD missile across an ocean. But people adept in the ways of online sabotage will soon know how to create a ruse that will shift the world's attention off to the right while they do something appalling over on the left: disinformation smokescreen.

Project what happened in the cybersmut case to higher levels. A subversive entity creates a rumor that so alarms decent people that the phones of every police force, regulatory agency, and military organization in the world rings off the hook for four hours.

Rumors guaranteed to get us going:

An object the size of Asia is hurtling toward earth, and it appears to be navigated. Hey, it worked for Orson Welles.

Branch Davidians have planted fertilizer bombs in 500 elementary schools nationwide.

Ukraine is mad about something, and has lit the nuclear fuse.

Planes carrying attack militia of zombified, Uzi-toting Sasquatch have landed in major cities in the industrial world.

Ebola virus intermutated with the common cold is moving eastward from the San Diego Zoo at the speed of snot.

Salman Rushdie plans to attend homecoming weekend at Teheran University, with a special greeting from the Great Satan.

Forget "Loose lips sink ships." We hear those rumors, we're off to the races. It doesn't matter that they are untrue if they spark our prurient American interest in conspiracy, and we all have phones and Net subscriptions. During the twelve or so hours it takes to dismiss the stories as hoaxes, our technological and social bandwidth will be choked with the glut of a networked world.

That's when they make their move. When we are at our weakest, perhaps tomorrow, the thing we most dread will step forward as our savior:

"Hi, I'm Ross Perot."

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