New efforts to keep bomb recipes off Web

An animated fuse sparks and burns down to a cartoon black-ball bomb. When they touch, a red-and-yellow POW! explodes on the screen.

The flashy icon animates a Web site that gives detailed instructions on how to make a real bomb. A list of more than 100 links is centered down the screen, showing how to build fertilizer bombs, mailbox bombs, letter bombs, firebombs, and dozens more. One of the links on the Web page asks, "Do ya hate school?" It tells how to call in a bomb threat. Another instructs on the "arts of lockpicking."

There are literally thousands of Web sites like this on the Internet. As people remain stunned by the events in Littleton, Colo., and the bomb threats across the United States that have followed, some groups are again calling for efforts to curtail access to bombmaking sites.

Even companies that host these Web pages are starting to rethink the kind of information they will allow. Congress, too, is debating legislation that would make it a crime to teach over the Internet how to make or use a bomb.

"In 15 minutes of research on the Web, I was able to find at least 10 sites that could give a person with little technical sophistication the information on how to commit mass murder," says Gary Wright, a computer professional who was injured by a mailbomb sent by Ted Kaczynski, who was later convicted as the Unabomber.

The computer-savvy Eric Harris apparently gleaned information from Web sites to construct the bombs that police say he and Dylan Klebold used to terrorize Columbine High School in Littleton.

Since 1993, there have been almost 14,000 bombings or attempted bombings in the US, and more than one-third of them have been attributed to juveniles, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).

Though just a small number of these bombings have been linked to information gathered over the Internet, the overlap has increased significantly in the past few years.

Last week Mr. Wright met with others in New York to support an appeal by the Center for the Community Interest (CCI), exhorting Internet companies to rid cyberspace of bombmaking Web sites. The group included Marsha Kight, a woman who lost her daughter in the Oklahoma bombing, and David Kaczynski, the brother of Ted Kaczynski.

"What we're calling on them to do is to take technologically simple, proactive steps to search their own hosted Web sites for this kind of material," says Dennis Saffran, executive director of CCI. He suggests companies "could run a continuous automated search-engine scan, to look for red-flag keywords that would suggest explicit bombmaking."

One reason Mr. Saffran and his organization are appealing directly to Internet companies, rather than to Congress, is to avoid the First Amendment problems involved in legislating and restricting Internet content.

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