In recent months various public individuals have expressed an interest in regulating the content available on the Internet and the commercial online service providers. Educom Review decided to find out how the problem was perceived by such persons, many of whom have had no previous involvement with computers or communications. So we asked Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels and (now) the Cyber Angels. This interview took place several weeks before the well-publicized Federal "sting" operation that led to the arrest of a dozen persons charged with using computer online services for child pornography and related criminal activities.
ER: Before we get to the Cyber Angels, let's start by talking about the Guardian Angels. How would you explain the Guardian Angels to someone who never heard of it?
Sliwa: Well, the Guardian Angels is a citizen safety patrol that I created in the late seventies. It is different from most volunteer patrols in that it's not a block watch, it's not a crime watch, it's not an auxiliary police unit, it's not a car patrol. It's predominantly young men and women - mostly from inner city areas, with a good cross-racial composition - who patrol rough streets, rough mass transit lines, rough public housing, rough red light districts, wearing only red berets, Guardian Angels tee shirts, and having no special powers or privileges. Unlike most other citizen patrols, Guardian Angels exercise their right to make citizen's arrests when they witness crimes in progress.
ER: And you started it in the Bronx?
Sliwa: On February 13th, 1979, I launched the very first patrol in the subways of the Bronx at a time when I was night manager of a McDonald's. The first members were all workers there at McDonald's who were the closers. The Guardian Angels, starting with just thirteen in the Bronx in February of 1979, have now grown to an international membership of 5,000, with chapters in 40 different American cities, seven cities overseas, and extending from Moscow as far on the European continent as one can go to Tokyo in Japan as far east as we can go.
ER: That's very impressive. How would you measure its success, other than by its growth?
Sliwa: The Guardian Angels' success has to be measured in how from its beginnings where we were adversarially met in terms of response from police, elected officials, even the general public (nobody thought we could ever survive, nobody thought we would actually remain true to the concept) we've reached the point seventeen years later where we've turned around all these critics. Many of the same elected officials and heads of police unions who are still active have observed the growth and development of the group and have become key supporters. That's always a great compliment when you can turn around an adversary.
ER: Do you keep any kind of statistics on things like arrests and such?
Sliwa: To date, in New York City alone, we've made close to 4,000 citizen's arrests. These are incidents where we have physically blocked someone's escape or physically grabbed that suspect and held them till police arrived. The charges varied from the most serious murder to the most petty: you know, snatching an item in a shop and running out with it.
ER: Let's move now to the Cyber Angels. How did it start?
Sliwa: Cyber Angels actually came about because of the radio broadcast I do overnight at WABC. It's heard in 38 states and parts of Canada. A lot of talk radio focuses on issues that have to do with censorship - whether it's rap music, rock music, movies, TV or now the Internet. This was while the debate over the Exon amendment was on the floor of the Senate. Surprisingly to me, a lot of Internet users or - as they described themselves - "surfers" began calling up. All of them were universal in not wanting the government to regulate them - you know, "Don't tread on me." But about half of them knew there was an intense problem of use and abuse on the Internet, particularly by pedophiles, and also by cyber-criminals, many of whom are communicating stolen credit card numbers, stolen long distance calling card numbers, and information about swapping weapons and bomb-making materials. They felt something needed to be done. So, even though I wasn't computer literate and had no desire to use computers, I figured just as I had organized a subway patrol back in '79 - basically we were creating something to replace something that didn't exist - we could do the same kind of thing with the Cyber Angels. I created it to act as a regulator in a system in which anarchy prevails and crime is growing in unbelievable dimensions.
ER: You are convinced of that? Have you seen that yourself? Or do you have any doubts about it?
Sliwa: We've experimented by going just on America Online. Just in the limited access to the Internet we have, we have been able to go into chat rooms and observe pedophiles trading pictures and getting into, like, a psychotic frenzy, looking for, as they call it, trade - you know, pictures of 8- to 12-year-old boys, 7- to 11-year-old girls, young girls having sex with one another. I mean, they are very open in terms of descriptions, and then you would think they were on the pit of the commodities exchange. So we've been able to move into the realm of the chat rooms and engage these people in conversation. We're at level one now. That is, when we determine that violations have occurred in the system, we research who the online provider is - in this case, America Online - and we report it to them, as their by-laws suggest you should. But we are not at all sure that they do anything with this information. They are courteous, they reply promptly to your e-mail, but they will say that they can't tell you the outcome of their own policing.
So now we are taking it up another notch: describing the problem to existing police departments that actually have a cyber-cop program. And there aren't that many. Most of them are in rural areas. Most of them are involved in sheriff's departments. It is almost ironic that the real sophisticated police departments in the urban centers really don't have a cyber-cop program. The final level (what we hope to reach once we have the Web site and once we've completed our communication with police departments) is our Web site will be almost like a post office bulletin board. We'll post "Wanted" posters and also list rewards that are being offered by the National Police Defense Foundation for information leading to the capture and prosecution of cyber-criminals.
ER: You've been doing this since June?
Sliwa: Approximately, at this point, two full months on American Online and over 100 cyber-agent candidates.
ER: What has been the reaction to what you're doing? Any negative reaction?
Sliwa: Oh, the negative reaction came fast and furiously. Most Internet users ought to be living in New Hampshire. "Live free or die!" They don't want any interference. They don't want any regulation. They basically feel they can police the cyberspace themselves. I've told them there's no such thing as the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Doesn't work. Got to have a central place to disseminate the information and then follow up on it to see something gets done. They clearly disagree. And disagreeing and sending e-mail and communicating disagreement in a chat room is one thing. But bombing and flaming and making threats is something else. I don't know if any threats have manifested themselves, but the hackers are sure upset. I think it has leveled off. I mean, the bombing was non-stop there for a while. We felt like Sadam Hussein in the Gulf campaign, jumping from bunker to bunker. We've wanted to deal with it; but still there are many cyber-users out there who clearly do not just agree to disagree. I mean, they are threatening to wreak havoc with our personal records and, I'm sure, with Guardian Angels records.
ER: And you haven't convinced them?
Sliwa: There's no convincing them because they are consumed with this anger. They look at us as if we were an auxiliary of government - some kind of regulatory agency, some Big Brother. Many of these people, I think, share a view like many of the recent militia movements - paranoid thinking that if you give the Guardian Angels an inch, they'll take a mile. Next thing you know there'll be Guardian Angels sitting outside your house and Black Hawk helicopters circling around with infrared lenses trying to determine what you are doing in the privacy of your home.
ER: So they think of it as a First Amendment issue?
Sliwa: Yes. Well, I think a hard core of the Internet users think of it not only as impeding their free speech but as a form of Fascism.
ER: So how would you try - I know you say it's impossible to convince them - but how would you try to convince them that you are not Big Brother, you are not an arm of government?
Sliwa: Well if our experiment fails as an organized form of self-regulation then the pressures on government will be such that government will ultimately regulate it. So you've got a choice. Either you can take cod liver oil with people who are on the Internet - surfers like yourself; in this case we just also happen to wear the hat of the Cyber Angels - or know that the bureaucracy is eventually going to consume it and try to regulate it and probably tax it, as government is known to do.
ER: What kinds of things are your volunteers looking for?
Sliwa: Well, the easiest thing to look for at first for the initial Cyber Angel candidate is pedophilia - the trading of pictures, some of which may be compromising people's privacy. There are so many of these chat rooms, so many pedophiles and others out there willing to communicate with just anybody. You don't have to be cloak-and-dagger in order to hook up with them. And naturally the last area we are starting to encourage more of the surfers to get interested in is cruising the Internet for the pyramid scams that are taking place, for the transmission of stolen credit card numbers and calling card numbers.
ER: At the time that the Exon amendment was being debated, a very controversial study came out that caused a lot of heated debate and was featured in Time magazine. The study had claimed that there was just a tremendous amount of pornography on the Internet and also on private bulletin boards and it blurred the distinction between the two. The study was very controversial; it was also attacked very harshly by people who said that was absurdly exaggerated. Are you convinced that there is just an awful lot on the Internet? Have you seen enough of the Internet and other services like America Online that you are convinced that there is plenty of pornography?
Sliwa: Well, I've actually had a situation evolve at WABC where I had to confront one of the sponsors of my program, an online provider who was running ads saying "Sex uncensored, unfiltered, giving you a leeway into cyberspace, go where you've never gone before." When I was confronted with that fact, I looked into it and was told: "Let me send you the Yahoo Internet yellow pages and you will see for yourself formal listings under the topic Sex, Erotica and, sort of like, its subtitles." I was sent this thing, and it looked like I'd just gotten the Yellow Pages from Ma Bell. Then as I began to have some of the Angels research it and have them report on it and then get online and show me it on the screen, it was mind-boggling. Not only the chat rooms and the bulletin boards and the pedophiles and the trading of their pictures, but people suggesting that they were looking for smut pictures and asking if anybody had any of that available, another saying they did. All of a sudden it's like, whoa, you know, this is really cutting edge stuff, that under any circumstances would be considered illegal, whether you sent it through the mail or sold it from a newsstand. Therein was my introduction to actually seeing it and seeing that they were advertising it to the new user. I do believe that most Internet people now - people who are looking for Internet providers to get online - are looking at that title of Sex and entree into that sexual world as one of the reasons, if not the main reason, that they look for a provider.
Was the Time piece accurate? I would lean in the direction of saying most of the online users that I've run across in life seem to have been attracted by that ability to see stuff, get it at their fingertips, download it. Online providers are making money hand over fist because of the sexual exploitation that takes place through access to the Internet. There's one based out of New Jersey with young entrepreneurs like thirty years old, Harvard grads, making money by the barrelful. The owner doesn't even know what to do with all the money. He's, like, the most open of the online providers in being honest about where these new customers are coming from and what is the reason they are coming online.
ER: But you do emphasize illegal activities, right?
Sliwa: Yes.
ER: You are not interested in activities which are not illegal?
Sliwa: Correct. But if it is an activity that children have access to, even if that may not fall into the category of being a crime, it is something we feel Internet users ought to be informed of - particularly parents who are unable to check the access children have. It's easy to say, well, you put a block on it, you have to let them patrol it at home. Well, we found out - just through our own Guardian Angels who are on the Internet surfing as much as they can - that a lot of these kids report to us when they come back from computer class that most of those schools are now online. In class and during study periods they have unlimited use in exploring the Internet at taxpayer's expense. I think if taxpayers knew that they would be outraged.
ER: Has this involvement gotten you interested in it?
Sliwa: No. I've never really been curious about the computer. I still collect my information in crates, the old fashioned lean files, although I recognize that I'm like a Neanderthal in a cave. So my getting up to snuff on it, learning more about it, is a result of being embarrassed by callers and Internet users who were talking circles around me. I didn't know what they were talking about, couldn't believe at first some of the things they were describing. I thought they were, you know, dropping psychotrophic drugs, until somebody showed me. Hey, this is how you download this that we just punched up and then all of a sudden - unbelievable!
ER: What about the good things on the Internet? Have you found a lot of good stuff?
Sliwa: Oh, tremendous. Lots of material, some of which I use when I broadcast, particularly: news-breaking concepts, ideas, letters that people send to me requesting things that we do as Guardian Angels, programs that we might incorporate into our presentation to communities, and show ideas.
ER: So you would say that, although some percent of material available through the Net is grotesque, the vast majority of stuff is good or better than good?
Sliwa: Oh, yes. The vastness of cyberspace and all of its complexities clearly has an overriding positive theme. Unfortunately the new Internet surfers sort of remind me of the second wave of CBers that came on board. I remember the original CBers - very properly motivated, genuine people who used the CB to help others, report traffic conditions, warn other truckers about Smokey. They used it as a vehicle to communicate, and also to ward off the sleepiness that descends upon drivers when they hit their breaking point - then all of a sudden the second wave of CBers came on, and they were polluting the system with garbage: cursing, hollering, yelling, interfering. I think that is the state the Internet is in now. You have literally cyber-scum out there, and they are like pond scum. They are like algae that grows out of control. I think that's why the system needs a form of regulation, because they are the newest Internet users. Their attraction is the decadence that they are exposed to, and they have a piranha-like effect on the system.
ER: By regulation, you really mean self-regulation because you are helping it to regulate itself. Is that right?
Sliwa: Well, obviously that is our contribution. Ultimately, I feel, government will have to regulate it. It's being used for commercial means. If anyone is so naive as to think that you'll be trading credit card numbers, you'll be making sales, you'll be making deals vis-a-vis the Internet without regulation, they're out of their minds. With criminals out there ready to pounce on the system, government will have to regulate it. They will have no choice. The purists out there just fail to realize how the negative element, the criminal element, will manipulate the Internet to their use.
ER: Do you feel that your experience with Cyber Angels is right on track with your experience with the Guardian Angels?
Sliwa: Well, to date it poses completely different problems of organizing. When someone becomes a candidate for Guardian Angels, you get to feel them, touch them, talk to them and analyze them, because they are in your company. You get to see them - good, bad and indifferent. Cyber Angels you never get to meet unless they happen to be in our immediate proximity, our immediate area of operations. Never meet these people. I don't even know who they are. I don't even know that they themselves haven't cloned themselves into this chameleon-like cyber-person. So it's a lot more difficult and it strains your brain a lot more. It has been much more difficult than I assumed in terms of the adversaries in the system, the flaming and the bombing that sometimes require you to spend hours cleaning out your mailbox, letter by letter, bomb by bomb. You almost become like an NYPD bomb disposal unit, and that can get you very tired very fast.
ER: How would a potential Cyber Angel get in touch with you?
Sliwa: Well, Cyber Angels that are interested could do so in two ways. Obviously through Internet, getting in touch with us through America Online at ganetwatch.AOL.com and e-mail directly to the Cyber Angels director Gabriel Hatcher. He also does a lot of follow-up searching to any leads that the Cyber Angels communicate to us about potential cyber-criminal or cyber-smut activity. He will immediately get back to them [via] e-mail. Or, if they felt they needed to call and talk directly to somebody, they could do so by calling 212-501-7373 - that's our international administrative headquarters - and speak to our executive director Gayle Rackley, who also has one of the Cyber Angels community computers at the ready there.