by David Hipschman
Web Review, 1997
Republished with permission

Cyber graffiti: hackers rewrite the Nation of Islam's home page

Until recently on the Net -- where Republican and Democratic sites link to each other and even anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers trade links with their "anti-hate" detractors -- the only war that existed was the undeclared battle between conflicting ideas.

But visitors to The Nation of Islam's Web page on October 18, the day after the Million Man March, were met with an escalation in the war of words on the Net. During the night, hackers altered the text on the page by placing "HTML graffiti" that read, "The Bigots of Islam Homeboy Page," "Welcome to the Nation of Murderers Homeboy Page," and "Time to Die, Whitie."

Timothy K. Maloy, editor of Internet Newsroom who discovered the defacement, told Web Review the site "had been hacked and defaced... it was a racist attack and unique in my experience as a reporter covering the Net."

Was the attack the first "hate crime" on the Internet? A Nation of Islam official said the US Justice Department is investigating and wouldn't comment further, except to say "we are consulting our attorneys." But at the Justice Department, after a three day silence on the issue, a spokesman finally said: "We are taking no action. (There was) no violation of federal law, either civil rights or criminal, as a result of the hacking."

But the hack of the Nation of Islam page may represent an opening shot in a new way to wage the war of information on the Net - now hackers can just deface Web pages they don't like. We may "start to see opposing opinions begin to wage actual war in Cyberspace," Maloy says.

The hacker made his attack after accessing Object Oriented Information Systems, the Massachusetts company hosting Afrinet Central, where the Nation of Islam has its page. Maloy believes such attacks on Internet service providers are relatively easy for an experienced hacker, and warns that the "hacker's attack bodes ill for the future of free expression on the Internet." 

David Hipschman is Editor of the Casper Star-Tribune, Wyoming's largest newspaper, and the author of Cyberland. This article first appeared in Web Review, of which Hipschman was a founding contributor.