New efforts to keep bomb recipes off Web

Last week the Senate approved an amendment to the massive juvenile-crime bill that would punish anyone who teaches bombmaking techniques with the "knowledge or intent that the information will be used to commit a federal crime."

The amendment, sponsored by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R) of Utah and Dianne Feinstein (D) of California, does not make it illegal to simply provide the information, however. Many of these bombmaking sites on the Internet post warnings, and make the disclaimer that the sites are for informational purposes only.

Though Saffran says he finds these First Amendment issues "dubious," in a letter to Internet executives he argues that no one has a constitutional right to use private property to facilitate terrorism.

"You have the right," he writes, "and ... the moral obligation to stop them from doing so."

MANY companies claim to be already making efforts to do this. The site with the animated sparking bomb was located on the Angelfire.com network, a network of personal home pages owned by Lycos Inc. "That kind of material is strictly prohibited on our Web pages," says Brian Payea, spokesman for Lycos.

Seven million people are members of either Angelfire or another Lycos-owned Web community called Tripod.com. Employees monitor the sites, and an automated system does search for certain tell-tale key words, Mr. Payea says.

Still, it is not so technologically simple, he adds. "If you put in key words like 'bomb' and 'kill,' you would come across some historical sites that give information about Hiroshima.... So we can't just automatically remove sites; we have to look at them first."

Payea explains that efforts are under way "to better identify these kinds of sites, and remove them." He would not reveal the name of the party that launched the bombmaking site found on the Angelfire network.

At this time last year, information that explained how to mix chemicals, even if it were to make a bomb, would not have been prohibited, Payea says.

Like the proposed federal legislation, the company's policy was to remove only messages that included threats or calls to commit illegal acts. "But with the current national crisis, we've begun to shut down sites that include information on bombmaking."

Both Saffran and Payea agree that Internet domains should do more to monitor their sites.

"But there is a strong sense of community in our networks," Payea says, "and to some to degree they are already self-policing. Like any other community, people would want to be a part of something that is maintained in a wholesome, orderly way."

A day after being informed of the site with the sparking cartoon bomb, Angelfire.com blocked access to it.

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