by Chris Minnick
Editor's Note: The following article originally appeared in the paper Motel Magazine in 1998. Like most of our work, it just seems to keep getting better and more timely!
The Information Super High-Way, which was not to long ago widely thought to be the savior of education and business, may prove to be the undoing of the human race.
Recently, computer-savvy teenage hoodlums known as hackers have begun to systematically ruin the lives of innocent computer users through a means of communication once thought to be risk-free — e-mail.
Armed only with their accounts on Internet service providers such as America Online (or "AOL", as these hackers have so cleverly nick-named it), hackers are now anonymously sending bombs at the speed of light to computers around the world — including to the President himself. An email "bomb" currently does nothing more than cause most computers to temporarily slow down or "crash" (a problem which is easily remedied by restarting the computer). Experts at Newsweek predict, however, that future email bombs may cause wide spread destruction of property and possibly even loss of life.
Imagine the death toll that would result from a chemical email bomb that could be sent to millions of computer users with only a few keystrokes. Businessmen and school children around the world would be sprayed with poisonous serin gas upon opening up a friendly looking e-mail message.
It is also believed that most hackers on America Online today will be able to create nuclear e-mail bombs by the turn of the century. Modern nuclear weapons carry hundreds of times more power than the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even if only one nuclear e-mail bomb were sent — say from a teenager in Iowa to a journalist in New York — the result would be unprecedented loss of life.
What can be done to prevent such a catastrophe? The first order of business is to shut down the Internet and return to an agrarian society, according to our experts. Realizing that this may take a number of years, many people feel that given the enormous risks involved, we must begin to monitor every telephone call and every home computer in order to locate and weed out these evasive, mysterious and homicidal maniacs know as hackers — before they weed out us.