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 The Homey Home Page; Newspaper Taken In by Gang Site Hoax
Linton Weeks Gunz! Boyz in the Hoodz! Oyz veyz! What a tangled Web we weave. Just ask Tessie Borden, a crime reporter for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Recently she wrote a front-page story about street gangs flocking to the Internet. She zeroed in on an especially disturbing page from a Detroit crew called Glock 3. Brash, crass and full of sexually explicit language and tuff-muthah wordz (many of which end in z), it claimed to be "tha site of one of tha most famous street gangz in tha world today." The tone of G3 is in-your-face and down-your-gizzard. For a while, the home page urged gang members to attack churches. One section, called Racist Cowardz, posts angry e-letters. Another lists the Membaz, with "streetsweeper" names like N-Doggg, MC Mike, Slice V and Krack Rok K. Another page, called Phat Linkz, guides visitors to other gang-related sites. Borden bought it lock, stock and Glock. "I talked to people in law enforcement who took it very seriously," says Borden. "To me, that was significant." Calling on a covey of gang experts, she pointed out in her story that the Internet provides gangs with the opportunity for global influence. "Police who track cyber-gang efforts," she wrote, "say the potential exists for these formerly territorial groups to build a nationwide network of franchise gangs that then could turn to crime on a grand scale." It was a riveting read, really. High tech, higher anxiety. The only glitch in the Glock story was that the whole thing was a hoax. In his online CyberWire Dispatch, Washington-based reporter Brock Meeks exposed the perp: Nick Woomer, "a 16-year-old, preppy white kid" from Michigan. "It was a joke from the start," Woomer wrote in an e-mail message to Meeks. "Me and two other friends (all of us suburban white kids) started doing this whole thing because someone would do some graffiti around the school and all of a sudden a well-to-do suburban school is gang-infested." We reached Woomer by phone at his home in Grand Rapids. The high school junior says he got a computer last Christmas, hooked up with an Internet service provider (ISP) and put up a page called Glock 3. Woomer copped the hip-hop jargon and a lot of details about gangs from rap music and movies. He urged brotherz and sisterz to tag buildings with the Glock 3 logo. Perhaps because he was encouraging vandalism or because of complaints by more puritanical users, Woomer offended his ISP, and they pulled his plug. With the help of a New Zealand page designer named Sinister, Woomer was able to post Glock 3 through another ISP. Woomer watched with quiet glee as his page was transformed. He not only anticipated cultural angst over the Web site, he relished every minute of it. He tells us, "I was never worried. There was a legal disclaimer on the site." He maintains that he wasn't doing anything illegal and that he's protected by the First Amendment. "Just seeing all those articles was hilarious," he says. "I knew I probably was causing people to be upset, but I didn't care." Despite -- or perhaps because of -- the controversy, Glock 3 lives. It provides a link to a similar site, Gangsta Net Crew. And another site, Gangs in Los Angeles County, sports a link to Glock 3 -- calling it an Internet Thug. Jim Ledy, a criminal intelligence analyst for the Arizona Department of Public Safety who specializes in monitoring gang activity on the Net, is not derailed by the Glock 3 cybercon. He says part of the challenge of his job is "trying to identify who's real and who wants to be." "The ones that are using the Internet most successfully," he says, "are motorcycle gangs and organized crime." These groups use cyberspace to disseminate information to members quickly and anonymously, he says. In retrospect, he says, G3 "was almost too professional. The person who was putting this together knew a lot about computers. We tended to think this was some little geeky kid in his basement rather than the member of a street gang." If nothing else, Woomer's ruse reminds us that any Net is full of holes. Bruce Sterling, author of "The Hacker Crackdown," compares Woomer's work to that of the kid who goes to the local video store and tapes hard-core pornography in the middle of "Heidi." Meanwhile, Woomer has begun to plot his next prank. After all, he's got a lot of time on his hands these days. His parents, he says, are peeved: "I'm grounded. I'm not allowed to get on the Internet again for a long time." -- Linton Weeks weekslwashpost.com GETTING THERE: Glock 3 is at http://www. voyager.co.nz/ sinister/; Gangsta Net Crew at http://www.cybercondo.com/pub/bstolk; and Gangs in Los Angeles County at http://www. -bcf.usc.edu/ aalonso/Gangs/index.html.
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