At the mercy of the world's worst techno-terrorist

WARNING! Do not place this disk in your computer.

Congratulations! You hold in your hands a potentially dangerous computer virus, in the Macintosh format.

Written by native craftsmen of Bangalore, India for less money than you probably make in a day, the Silverlake Area Militia FreedomVirus (c) is a simple but devious program which will render any Macintosh computer as useless as your college education will become once the information revolution takes hold and allows more earnest citizens of the third world to do what you do for pennies on the dollar, with little of the whining or envy-induced slothfulness that earmarks so many US workplace attitudes.

We have funded this virus, not in regard to any alarmist free-trade rhetoric, but so that it may become an ASCII olive branch, sent to hedge the best of man's recyclable faith with a grand web of old-fashioned cooperation.

You see, this artwork will only succeed if no one inserts the FreedomVirus (c) into a computer and opens the file inside. A single break in the chain of cooperation could prove disastrous. But we at the Silverlake Area Militia have faith that our citizenry will band together in these troubled times, because the alternative is expensive indeed.

Now, it may surprise people to hear that when I read this, I did not shriek and hurl the disk across my lawn. Viruses, after all, are computer users' worst nightmare. They come to life on our hard disks and gobble up our data.

But instead of terror, my response was to be intrigued. For one thing, I've never had a virus. My data corrupts itself the old-fashioned way, through power surges.

Second, I was intrigued by the language. As a lover of metaphor, I admire any sentence featuring an olive branch that hedges bets with a grand web.

Third, I was taken by the unusual format of the package: a chain-mail virus. Instead of being punished for breaking the chain through inaction, I will be punished if I break the chain through action, i.e., putting the disk in my computer.

In that sense the virus isn't a Unabomber-style act of true terror at all, but rather a demonstration of what could happen if the sender were really riled. It is like pretending to rob a bank with a starter pistol in order to persuade the bank it needs better security.

There is even the grim possibility that the disk is a hoax, that there is no virus on it at all. I have shipped it off to famed Northwestern University cybervirologist John Norstad for testing.

Fake or authentic, what does the sender want? Something tells me he (or she) is not really a disgruntled native of Bangalore at all, but someone using the old native underpaid craftsman ploy to play on my well-known sense of colonial guilt.

The word "militia" is probably another false clue, intended to liken the virus to the fertilizer-filled vans of our own disgruntled natives. Silverlake probably does not refer to the L.A. neighborhood, but supports the envelope's postmark; it's no big trick to mail a bag of letters from any mailbox anywhere.

My picture of the mailbomber was filling in. The anger was real, targeted broadly at the arrogance of the computer industry and computer users who think Third World programmers are incapable of being evil hackers. So this person was undoubtedly a programmer; who else would care about such things?

And who else is so isolated? Imagine the shop talk at the computer terrorist hangout. The other evil hackers are boasting about breaking into NATO, creating Swiss bank accounts, and shutting down phone service in the mountain states. Then our guy announces he has snailmailed Mac viruses to people who don't own Macs. All heads turn.

All it cost him was $200 for disks and, at 55 cents a crack, $550 for postage, plus maybe 10 hours of desktop publishing, disk copying, and envelope stuffing. And all his targeted victims have to do to bring the labeled virus to life is put the disk in their drive.

Top that, diabolical geniuses.

No, this fellow not only doesn't hang around such places, he doesn't know there are no such places. Or that viruses are routinely implanted with much less cost and trouble, and bragged about more globally, on the networks of the world.

Still, it's a watershed event -- the first known marriage of terrorism and direct marketing. It psychologically unnerves you even as it adds to postal congestion.

Even the mailing list, sending Mac viruses to non-Mac users, leaves something to be desired. What other errors were made? Hey, Mr. University Minnesota, of Minneapolis, MN, you have joined our circle of data-annihilated winners!

But any beginning student of direct marketer worth his or her salt would have pointed out the key failings of this foray into the world of direct mail: No call to action, no reply device, no 800 number.

And no testing. Today's smart mailbombers test one letter against another for results, even when the product they're selling is the end of the world.

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