110th CONGRESS

2d Session 

Printed for the use of the 

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 

HATE IN THE INFORMATION AGE 

MAY 15, 2008 

Briefing of the 

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 

Washington: 2015 


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Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 

234 Ford House Office Building 

Washington, DC 20515 

202–225–1901 

csce@mail.house.gov 

http://www.csce.gov 

Legislative Branch Commissioners 

SENATE HOUSE 

BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, MARYLAND, 

Co-Chairman 

RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, WISCONSIN

CHRISTOPHER DODD, CONNECTICUT

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, NEW YORK

JOHN F. KERRY, MASSACHUSETTS

SAM BROWNBACK, KANSAS

GORDON H. SMITH, OREGON

SAXBY CHAMBLISS, GEORGIA

RICHARD BURR, NORTH CAROLINA

ALCEE HASTINGS, FLORIDA, 

Chairman 

LOUISE MCINTOSH SLAUGHTER, 

NEW YORK

MIKE MCINTYRE, NORTH CAROLINA

HILDA L. SOLIS, CALIFORNIA

G.K. BUTTERFIELD, NORTH CAROLINA

CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, NEW JERSEY

ROBERT ADERHOLT, ALABAMA

JOSEPH PITTS, PENNSYLVANIA

MIKE PENCE, INDIANA

EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS 

DAVID J. KRAMER, Department of State 

MARY BETH LONG, Department of Defense 

DAVID STEEL BOHIGIAN, Department of Commerce 

(II)


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ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION FOR SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE 

The Helsinki process, formally titled the Conference on Security and Cooperation in 

Europe, traces its origin to the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in Finland on August 

1, 1975, by the leaders of 33 European countries, the United States and Canada. As of 

January 1, 1995, the Helsinki process was renamed the Organization for Security and 

Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The membership of the OSCE has expanded to 56 participating States, reflecting the breakup of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. 

The OSCE Secretariat is in Vienna, Austria, where weekly meetings of the participating States’ permanent representatives are held. In addition, specialized seminars and 

meetings are convened in various locations. Periodic consultations are held among Senior 

Officials, Ministers and Heads of State or Government. 

Although the OSCE continues to engage in standard setting in the fields of military 

security, economic and environmental cooperation, and human rights and humanitarian 

concerns, the Organization is primarily focused on initiatives designed to prevent, manage 

and resolve conflict within and among the participating States. The Organization deploys 

numerous missions and field activities located in Southeastern and Eastern Europe, the 

Caucasus, and Central Asia. The website of the OSCE is: <www.osce.org>. 

ABOUT THE COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE 

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki 

Commission, is a U.S. Government agency created in 1976 to monitor and encourage 

compliance by the participating States with their OSCE commitments, with a particular 

emphasis on human rights. 

The Commission consists of nine members from the United States Senate, nine members from the House of Representatives, and one member each from the Departments 

of State, Defense and Commerce. The positions of Chair and Co-Chair rotate between 

the Senate and House every two years, when a new Congress convenes. A professional 

staff assists the Commissioners in their work. 

In fulfilling its mandate, the Commission gathers and disseminates relevant information to the U.S. Congress and the public by convening hearings, issuing reports that 

reflect the views of Members of the Commission and/or its staff, and providing details 

about the activities of the Helsinki process and developments in OSCE participating 

States. 

The Commission also contributes to the formulation and execution of U.S. policy 

regarding the OSCE, including through Member and staff participation on U.S. Delegations to OSCE meetings. Members of the Commission have regular contact with 

parliamentarians, government officials, representatives of non-governmental organizations, and private individuals from participating States. The website of the Commission 

is: <www.csce.gov>. 

(III)


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HATE IN THE INFORMATION AGE 

—————— 

MAY 15, 2008 

COMMISSIONERS 

Page 

Hon. Benjamin Cardin, Co-Chairman, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe ............................................................................................................................................. 5 

WITNESSES 

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Simon Wiesenthal Center ................................................................... 2 

Chris Wolf, Internet Hate Coalition/ADL ................................................................................... 6 

Mark Potok, Southern Poverty Law Center ............................................................................... 7 

Tad Stahnke, Human Rights First .............................................................................................. 10 

PARTICIPANT 

Mischa Thompson, Staff Adviser, Helsinki Commission ........................................................... 1 

(IV)


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(1) 

HATE IN THE INFORMATION AGE 

—————— 

May 15, 2008 

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 

Washington, DC 

The briefing was held at 3:06 EST in 432 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington 

D.C., Mischa Thompson, Staff Advisor, Helsinki Commission, presiding. 

Ms. THOMPSON. Hello, I’m Dr. Mischa Thompson with the Helsinki Commission. I 

would like to welcome you to today’s briefing entitled ‘‘Hate in the Information Age.’’ 

We’re actually expecting Co-Chairman Senator Cardin. There are actually votes going 

on and some other things, so he will be here momentarily, but we wanted to go ahead 

and get started. 

I think as many of you may well know, the Helsinki Commission, including Chairman 

Hastings, Co-Chairman Senator Cardin, and other commissioners came together to push 

for the OSCE to begin to address tolerance issues following a spike in anti-Semitic incidents taking place in Europe. 

This resulted in a series of initiatives to combat not only anti-Semitism, but racism, 

xenophobia, and intolerance and discrimination against Muslims, Christians, and other 

religions. 

Now, five years later, the OSCE has an established Tolerance Unit that publishes 

an annual hate crimes report and has developed numerous tolerance education initiatives. 

Included in these efforts has been a focus on the Internet in promoting hate. 

Today, we will focus on how best to address this problem in the face of increased 

hate crimes throughout the OSCE region. 

To start our briefing, I would like to welcome Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon 

Wiesenthal Center, who has been instrumental in keeping this issue on the commission’s 

radar. 

Following Rabbi Cooper, we will hear from Christopher Wolf, chair of the Internet 

task force of the Anti-Defamation League and also chair of the International Network 

Against Cyberhate; Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center; and Tad Stahnke 

of Human Rights First. 

Their bios have been made available outside. Additionally, Dr. Maura Conway of the 

Dublin City University of Ireland is here with us in spirit, and her work regarding this 

issue can also be found outside. 

Rabbi Cooper. 


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Mr. COOPER. Thank you, Dr. Thompson. 

Mr. Chairman and other members of the commission, the Simon Wiesenthal Center 

applauds your leadership and those of your distinguished colleagues in the Helsinki Commission in consistently providing bipartisan leadership in promoting human rights and 

democratic values and in combating the forces of hatred and terror. 

We are here today because, in 2008, the Internet is the prime means of communication and marketing in the world. With over 1,300,000,000 users, it is the mega-mall in 

the marketplace of ideas. 

The Internet’s unprecedented global reach and scope, combined with the difficulty 

in monitoring and tracing communications, make it a prime tool for extremists. 

The findings of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Digital Terrorism and Hate Project 

and our report being released today show that, as the Internet has grown; the escalation 

of extremist sites has kept pace in number and in technological sophistication. 

In April 1995, the first extremist site went online. Today, our center alone is tracking 

some 8,000 problematic sites, terrorist Web sites, and other Internet postings, a 30 percent 

increase over the last year. All areas of the Internet are being used by extremists of every 

ilk to repackage old hatred, demean the enemy, raise funds, and, since 9/11, increasingly 

to recruit and train jihadist terrorists. 

Internet-based hate has inspired some of the most violent hate crimes in America. 

In addition in this election year, the Internet continues to be used to demean and threaten 

African-Americans, Jews, immigrants, gays and virtually every religious denomination. 

In Europe, the Internet is also leveraged as a powerful tool to package xenophobia 

and racism to the mainstream. 

Extremists are leveraging 2.0 technologies to dynamically target young people 

through digital games, ‘‘Second Life’’ scenarios, blogs, and even YouTube and Facebookstyle videos depicting racist violence and terrorism. 

As part of a 10-point action plan, the Wiesenthal Center is launching today 

iReport@Wiesenthal.com to encourage Internet users to forward to us links of terrorists 

and hate postings. 

Finally, there is no single answer to the multifaceted challenges before us. Hate Web 

sites, blogs, and newsgroups constitute much more than hate speech. These postings and 

images are often a click away from terrorist manuals. 

On the one hand, trying to legislate against online hate and terror through more 

international protocols may not yield the results we would all seek and welcome, but doing 

nothing is not a viable option, either. 

We need to empower a consortium led by the online community itself, NGOs, and 

bodies such as this one to effectively monitor, expose and marginalize online hate. A good 

place to start is by launching multilingual sites to confront and thwart the digital subculture of hate, racism and terror. 

I’d now like to ask my colleague, Ricky, who is our senior researcher at the Simon 

Wiesenthal Center and who has the unenviable task of dealing with the 8,000 sites that 

we look at and coordinate our international effort, to just take us through a handful of 

some of the Web sites and postings referred to. 


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We are also using the hearing today to release the Digital Terrorism and Hate 2.0 

report. This contains about 500 Web sites and other Internet postings. And, obviously, 

there’s a focus on the 2.0 technology. 

We’ve tried to take a slice of that report and also, with knowing the focus of the 

committee, as well, Senator Cardin’s leadership is trying to toughen and promote more 

powerful hate crime legislation, we decided just to give you a snapshot of what it is we’re 

dealing with. 

Rick, if you’d go to the first slide, please. 

This is from a presentation by a group or an address called Podlonk. 

You want to try to run it? I’m not sure we’ll be able to hear it too well, but let’s 

go ahead and activate it. 

(Video clip shown) 

Mr. COOPER. The rest of that piece, which we’re not going to run, but thank you 

for that. Had I known we would have had it, we probably would have let it run. 

It’s sort of packages the old hatred, I mean, the worst kinds of racist imagery and 

stereotyping, but using the avatar and using almost a kind of a ‘‘Nightline’’ format. So 

after showing this alleged criminal, they will then bring in caricatures of well-known racists to justify the hatred of them. 

Senator, good to see you. 

Podlonk is just one of, I guess, the kind of YouTube and Facebook rip-offs or knockoffs that are trying to, again, be youth-oriented and to repackage the kind of hatred into 

a pseudo-intellectual basis. 

For those of you who will, you know, take time to look at this report, it will give 

you that one particular example, which is disturbing enough. 

In my formal remarks, I mentioned, of course, that games are also being used as 

a way to mainstream of variety of hate. This ‘‘Border Patrol’’ is available free of charge 

on a number of mainstream portals and Web sites in the U.S. 

It’s a fairly straightforward game. To win the game, you shoot down people coming 

across the Rio Grande into the United States. This is a rip-off of ‘‘Doom,’’ one of the most 

famous games online, and it’s called ‘‘Zog’s Nightmare,’’ ‘‘Zionist Occupation Government,’’ 

AKA Washington, D.C. 

The game, which is quite advanced, one of the people depicted in it, you can see 

across the African-American’s head a headband that has the letters ‘‘NIG’’ on it. 

Let’s go further. I want to just also quickly show you some of the other games that 

are there. This one’s called ‘‘Mind Bonds.’’ It appeared very quickly after the July 7th 

horrors in London and is not a hate site, per se, but it is a, quote, unquote, ‘‘game’’ that 

is impossible to win. 

You end up playing this game, trying to defuse the bombs. And in the end, all the 

people in the London Tube are consumed. 

Similar set-up for 9/11; 9/11 is reduced to game. If you go into it, not even the best 

teenager has any chance of stopping the attacks, but you’re put into a scenario where 

this kind of suffering and terrorism is just reduced to a game. 

Let’s go out, ethnic cleansing. ‘‘Second Life’’—I know how many grandparents we 

have in the room. I had to have my researchers explain to me what ‘‘Second Life’’ is, 


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but this is one of the coming things in the world of the Internet, used, I think, increasingly 

by universities to offer online distance learning. 

I think terrorists are beginning to look at it as a way of distance training. But ‘‘Second 

Life’’ allows you to adopt an online kind of personality, and that includes, of course, already some early examples of neo-Nazi use. 

We just downloaded a few examples on Facebook and YouTube. We took examples 

of some of the most virulent anti-religion attacks. You name the religion, Islam, Judaism, 

Christianity, it’s there. 

We have written to the folks who run Facebook with only about 40 such examples. 

We have yet to get the courtesy of a response on it. 

Wikipedia in the last week or so has been under increased scrutiny for alleged antiSemitism, on the one hand, perhaps pampering on Middle East issues on the other hand. 

But this is a Swedish-based rip-off of Wikipedia, called Metapedia, in which, for example, in the presentation on World War II or Hitler or the Holocaust, there will be whole 

sections of Wikipedia co-opted and then either other sections rewritten or dropped in order 

to promote Holocaust denial or revisionism. In addition to that, it’s a flat-out racist hate 

location against blacks, Jews, and other minorities. 

The blogs we just could have taken a few thousand examples, but, Rick, if you’ll just 

show—that one is from Cincinnati. The next one says Toledo, Ohio, ‘‘Mudville.’’ It has 

an attack on Senator McCain. 

‘‘Hungarian Warrior,’’ one of the countries we’re most concerned about, with the overt 

Nazi activity taking place in an important democracy in Europe. This is a very sophisticated site that looks mainstream, but its message is to promote hatred. 

‘‘Dot Matrix,’’ I’m not even going to repeat the language on this particular blog. Suffice it to say that the two leading candidates to be the next president of the United States 

are already in for a significant racist and hate-targeting including, in this case, Senator 

Obama. 

One other point, as I come to the close of my presentation, is the fact that, especially 

the media keeps saying, ‘‘Well, what are the numbers? You know, 6,000 or 8,000?’’ We’re 

reaching a point, I think, where the actual numerical count will have limited instruction 

for us in the following sense. 

The 2.0 technologies, many of them are by definition viral. So here we have an example of a 20-year-old tape of Holocaust denial, originally broadcast by the Iranians. We 

traced this one tape to about 70 different Web sites, portals. Rick is saying, no, it’s many 

more than that. 

I think we’re going to see more and more of these examples, where the same information is going to find its way, especially if it has a video component, in a variety of areas 

and multiple areas, and, you know, make it all the more difficult. 

This is the same presentation across the board. The one we’re just showing you there, 

a famous wrestler in the U.K., I don’t think he’s a Holocaust-denier. I don’t think he 

even knows about it he’s linked from Web site by one of his fans, who happens to also 

be a Holocaust-denier, so he’s taking the same viral information and posting it worldwide. 

This is a pretty sophisticated rip-off. During the horrible fires that we had last summer in California, this was posted. If you take a look, it looks like the CNN classic posting. 


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It is not. It says ‘‘Headline News.’’ And there you have otherwise really sophisticatedlooking presentation in which migrant workers are blamed for the fires in the West. 

When that stuff happens in real time, and it’s picked up, it can have a tremendous 

impact, even if it’s, in fact, short-lived. 

I know that one of the areas that this commission has looked at on occasion that 

we’ll be coming back to is the fact that the Iranians are making a huge effort in South 

America. And that is being increasingly reflected in online activity, both by their official 

news agency, Irna, and by various blogs that are either pro-Hezbollah or directly proIranian. 

We even have in the report one posting from FARC, the Colombian group, in which 

they pretty much co-opt wholesale the language that is presented by the Iranians. You 

see seepage of that, as well. 

We also pulled up here a link to that particular site to the so-called Christian Party 

here, whose name came across probably to Mark, as well, in the last year, when they 

decided that a plebiscite in the U.S. would be called for to urge blacks to go back to Africa. 

I think you’ve been very generous with my 10 minutes, which we made into a Jewish 

10 minutes. I think I’ll stop at this point. 

Thank you. 

Mr. CARDIN. Well, on behalf of the commission, first, let me welcome our presenters 

here today. Congressman Hastings and I met a little bit earlier today, and I know he’s 

going to try to get over here. We very much appreciate your willingness to come and brief 

the commission on these issues. 

Let me just make one observation, and then we’ll move on with the presentations 

and, I hope, the discussion. 

The issue concerning the rise of anti-Semitism, the rise of racism, xenophobia, and 

other forms of hate activities has been a very high priority of this commission. I am proud 

of the role that the commission has played in making this a priority and getting it acted 

upon by the OSCE. 

You’re all aware of what activities and conferences we’ve had the special representatives that have been appointed, and the game plan that many countries have instituted 

to try to develop best practices to take a prompt action against hate crime-type activities 

or hate organizations. 

There are a lot of challenges. As I was listening to Rabbi Cooper’s presentation on 

what’s on the Internet, I was thinking yesterday I met with representatives of what’s 

happening in China today. Of course, China filters all the information they get on the 

Internet, not for the purposes of filtering out hate literature, but for making sure that 

dissent is not readily available to the Chinese population. 

But it’s a very difficult area to get a grip on. We had a conference on the Internet, 

which I felt was very helpful. The United States, of course, has one of the most open 

laws anywhere in the world on the ability of organizations to be able to set up Web sites 

without fear of government interference and then, of course, can use that as a platform 

to get their material around the globe. 

Rabbi Cooper, you’re absolutely correct. We had our meeting recently with some people who are familiar with the use of the Internet as to how you can get an echo on a 

message. You can take a message that has legitimacy. If you know how to do it, they 


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can get that message repeated thousands of times, if not more than that, on sites that 

appear to be legitimate sources. 

That’s something of tremendous concern to all of us. It is used for very legitimate 

purposes, but in this case it’s being used to try to give legitimacy to hate-type of communications that should not have any place in any legitimate circle whatsoever. 

We’re very much interested in finding out the current status. Then we’re going to 

have to struggle with how we try to keep ahead of what the purveyors of hate are putting 

out there. 

I very much appreciate you being here, and I look forward to the other presentations. 

Mr. WOLF. Thank you, Senator Cardin, and members of the commission. Thank you 

for including me in this important briefing. 

By day, I am an Internet lawyer at the law firm of Roscoe Rose, but extracurricular 

I’ve been privileged for two decades to be a lay leader at the Anti-Defamation League, 

the ADL, and I’m pleased to be joined here by members of the professional staff of the 

ADL. 

Since 2005, I’ve served as chair of the International Network against Cyberhate, 

which is a coalition of NGOs from Europe and North America, including the ADL. 

For over 95 years, the ADL has been at the forefront of fighting hate and extremism, 

while at the same time protecting civil liberties, including First Amendment free speech 

rights. In the Internet era, fighting online hate is a natural and essential part of the 

ADL mission, and that’s because, simply, the Internet has become a powerful and virulent 

platform for hate, hate that has a direct link to terrorism, violence, and to the deterioration of civil society. 

From cyber bullying to the other end of the spectrum, online calls for terrorism, online 

hate victimizes minorities and children, and it does, in fact, inspire and facilitate realworld violence. 

Now, significant attention to the problem of Internet hate is paid in Europe by governments and by NGOs. And attention is paid here in the United States, regrettably only 

by a few, including those represented here today and by this commission. 

Even with the demonstrated link between hate speech and violence, the issue of hate 

has not, however, been a priority for the Internet community as a whole. Issues of child 

predation, obscenity, fraud, spam, domain name, cyber-attacks, all admittedly serious 

matters, have eclipsed the online hate issue on the public policy agenda for quite some 

time. 

But the time has come for governments, NGOs and the Internet community to redouble their efforts to fight the presence and effects of online hate speech. New peer-to-peer 

and video technologies, like those we saw, that are embedded in Facebook, MySpace and 

YouTube, among others, make online hate an even more urgent problem today than it 

has been in the Internet world. 

There is the epidemic of cyber bullying, kids targeting kids with cruelty, cruelty that 

can lead to more destructive behavior. 

Now, one response to online hate is to pass new laws. But as an Internet lawyer, 

it may surprise you to hear that I think that laws addressed at Internet hate are perhaps 

the least effective way to deal with the problem. Empirically, the law has not stemmed 

the tide of new Web sites and social networking sites that contain hate speech. 


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Now, there are clear cases where the law has played and will play an important 

role, where an identifiable group is targeted for harm, for example. There are also cases 

where legal action serves to express a society’s outrage against speech that goes beyond 

the pale of acceptability. 

In countries like Germany and Austria, the enforcement of laws against Holocaustdeniers serves as an appropriate message to all citizens that it is literally unspeakable 

to deny the Holocaust. 

It’s a fact that the blessings of our First Amendment also make the United States 

a safe haven for almost all kinds of hate speech. Therefore, shutting down a Web site 

in Europe or Canada through legal channels is far from a guarantee that the contents 

have been censored for all time. 

The borderless nature of the Internet means that, like chasing cockroaches, squashing one does not solve the problem when there are many more waiting behind the walls 

or across the border. 

The best antidote to hate speech is counter speech, exposing hate speech for its deceitful and false content, setting the record straight, and promoting the values of tolerance 

and diversity. To paraphrase U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brandeis, sunlight is still the 

best disinfectant. 

In addition to counter speech, education is hugely important, because kids are the 

most impressionable, susceptible victims of hate speech. The anti-cyber bullying curriculum of the ADL is one example of a curriculum designed to counter online hate speech. 

What is urgently needed is the cooperation and direct involvement of the Internet 

community, ISPs and others, to join in the campaign against hate speech. And they have 

been visibly absent. 

That may mean enforcement of terms of service to drop offensive content. It should 

also include public service advertising and instructional campaigns. 

In the era of search engines as the primary portal for Internet users, cooperation 

from the Googles of the world is an increasingly important goal. Most of all, it is time 

for Americans and the Internet community that is centered here in America to recognize 

that online hate is a scourge, requiring much more attention than is being given today. 

Thank you for your attention. 

Mr. POTOK. Thank you, Senator Cardin, Dr. Thompson, so much for having us. I’m 

Mark Potok with the Southern Poverty Law Center. I’m the director there of the Intelligence Project. 

Our bailiwick is smaller than the Wiesenthal Center’s, in the sense that we look only 

domestically, what’s happening in this country. 

I want to say just a couple of sets of things. One, I wanted to expand a little bit 

on what Chris said in talking about the difference between the American system of laws 

and European countries, most of them, and Canada. 

You know, it’s worth understanding that the Supreme Court of the United States 

has found that Internet speech is comparable to speech in the press, in the printed mass 

media. In other words, no prior restraint is allowed. 

That leaves a very narrow band, of exceptions, where people can be gone after in 

a criminal way. You know, one of those is a true threat. In other words, somebody sent 


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an e-mail threat saying, ‘‘I am going to kill you,’’ in such a way that it is believable and, 

in fact; there have been several cases like that made. So that is an exception that works. 

There is the matter of criminal incitement, which to my knowledge I don’t believe 

there’s ever been a case brought over the Internet. Criminal incitement is incitement to 

imminent lawless action. And typically it happens in an excited situation, where I say 

to Rabbi Cooper, ‘‘Go kill that person there, right now, in this excited situation.’’ 

There was an important case filed in 1997 which established that, in some situations, 

you could limit what was put up on these Web sites. This was a Web site—I’ll make 

a complicated case very simple—this was a Web site that put up materials having to 

do with abortion physicians, abortion providers, including a great deal of personal data 

and photos of the doctors the cars they drove, pictures of their spouses, where their kids 

go to school, even routes on occasion they drove to work. 

In that case, the court found that the jury should be allowed—and this was upheld 

on appeal—the jury should be allowed to know the context of this page. The page itself 

never called for, you know, ‘‘We should kill these people,’’ or anything along those lines. 

However, it certainly implied that. It carried the names of abortion providers. And 

when one was killed—a number have been killed, seven doctors and assistants—they 

would draw a line through this person’s name. 

Additionally, the site was linked to a letter which was written by a man who, in 

fact, had murdered a doctor, talking about the joy he felt. With that entire context, the 

courts ultimately shut down this site—or, actually, didn’t totally shut down the site, but 

it forbade people to provide it with information about these physicians. 

I want to drop back and very briefly say that, from the point of the view of the radical 

right in the United States, the hope of the Internet was that this was the tool that would 

finally allow these groups to bypass the sort of media masters, the editors of the New 

York Times and every other newspaper and broadcast operation in the country. 

They felt very strongly that, ‘‘We’re able finally to go too directly to the people, the 

white people in this case,’’ that surely, you know, the masses will rise and there will 

be an Aryan revolution and all the rest. 

That has over the years proven to be most definitely not true. And let me say, again, 

that I’m not talking about foreign Hamas-type sites or other terrorist sites. I’m really 

talking about our domestic scene. 

Actually they’ve had relatively little success, in my opinion at least, in recruiting 

directly through the Internet. I don’t mean to downplay the importance of the Internet. 

It’s been extremely important for the radical right, in terms of organizing events, 

in terms of people who formerly felt very isolated from one another and kind of powerless 

in the society, feeling that they are part of a movement, a movement that is happening. 

Every day, things are happening. 

The average Klansman wakes up in the morning and turns on his computer and 

sees hundreds of stories sent to him, all kinds of things, outrages, you know, sort of ‘‘White 

Woman Raped in Dubuque,’’ that kind of thing. So it gives energy to the movement that 

I think is very important. 

Of course, there are many, many pages out there that contain information on how 

to build bombs, on how to construct fire bombs, and so on. And the Internet provides 

anonymity, which is particularly appealing for many of these people. It’s not like going 


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to a strip club where people kind of see you walk into this place and you may feel some 

shame about it. 

I want to say, because I think people are covering different aspects of this, that I 

think a couple of things. I think really most of the real important action on the Internet, 

at least in terms of domestic American groups, is in the interactive fora. 

I think what time has shown is that a lot of the hate groups’ Web pages are actually 

very static. They don’t change a great deal. And so, really, what they act as is a kind 

of pamphlet. And it’s the same as any other kind of Internet page. 

You can only go up and read, you know, a page or two worth of propaganda about 

the evil Jews or evil black people or whatever it may be. And then you get bored. 

What we found is that the action is in e-mail groups and list-serves, in bulletin 

boards, like Stormfront, which was the first hate site on the Net that Rabbi Cooper mentioned. It was started about a month before the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. 

I want to speak very quickly, and then I will relent, about what I think is an important new trend out there, in addition to the social networking sites and so on that the 

rabbi mentioned. 

There are a number of people out there, neo-Nazi leaders and their ilk, who have 

become very adept at coming right up to the edge of the First Amendment, to the protections of the First Amendment, so that we are seeing more and more every single day 

now language on the Internet that comes extremely close to a true threat, to a real death 

threat. 

To get at what I’m talking about are the kinds of postings that say, ‘‘Lynch the Jena 

Six.’’ And then, beneath this posting, with a lot of ugly language, which I won’t repeat 

here, are, in fact, the home addresses of the six young black men in Jena, Louisiana, 

who provoked that huge demonstration last September 20th. 

This very week—that came from a man named Bill White, a neo-Nazi leader, leader 

of the American National Socialist Workers Party, based in Roanoke, Virginia. 

There’s another fellow who’s very adept at this kind of thing named Hal Turner. 

He’s a kind of independent Internet radio show host out of North Bergen, New Jersey. 

This very week, as I started to say, he’s got something up on his site. He’s talking about 

all three presidential contenders and his contention is, quote, ‘‘a well-placed bullet can 

change the world.’’ 

This is hardly the strongest thing that Hal has done. Hal Turner posted at one point 

the home addresses of all justices of the New Jersey Supreme Court. This was taken so 

seriously by the authorities in New Jersey that they, in fact, provided police protection 

for close to a year at the homes of these justices. 

Turner also boasts quite a lot about the fact that he once posted the home address 

of a judge, a U.S. district judge in Chicago named Joan Lefkow, who had presided over 

a case involving a white supremacist group. He published her home address. About two 

years later, as I recall, her husband and her mother were, in fact, murdered in her home. 

As it turned out, it’s quite certain that the killer had nothing to do with the Web 

site. He was not a neo-Nazi at all. He was a kind of disgruntled person who’d been in 

her court years before. 

But Turner has taken advantage of the fact that there was this incredibly horrible 

murder to say on his Web site again and again, ‘‘See how effective I am? See?’’ 


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Turner does all kinds of things like that. I know he’s being looked at by the authorities for recently posting a very explicit threat against a school superintendent in Lexington, Massachusetts, who introduced a kind of diversity curriculum to his schools. 

It goes on from there. I mean, my own home address and those of many of my colleagues have been posted, along with suggestions about what might be done to us. You 

know, this fellow, Bill White, posted something recently saying—it was headlined, ‘‘Kill 

Richard Warman, man behind human rights tribunals abuses should be executed.’’ 

Richard Warman is actually a personal friend of mine, I’m sure of many of my colleagues here, a former Crown attorney in Toronto and Canada, who has been responsible 

for filing a lot of the complaints before the Canadian human rights tribunal. 

This posting was accompanied by Richard’s home address, needless to say. Warman 

has tried very hard to get the U.S. authorities to act on this threat. You know, from the 

Canadian point of view, you can imagine that it’s a complete outrage that the Americans 

will do nothing, but, in fact, that’s the case. 

We’ve looked at all of these cases. I worked at a place that is teeming with lawyers 

who are interested in bringing cases around these kinds of events. Almost none of them, 

at least in the opinion of our own lawyers, are really prosecutable under American law. 

However, there was a case in which Hal Turner about a year ago posted the following. 

There was an antiracist activist, a man who had been in a hate group and who has spoken 

for many years since then against hate groups. 

He had been invited to Newark, New Jersey, to speak. That’s near Hal Turner’s home. 

And Hal Turner posted something—and also said this on his radio show—he said, ‘‘I have 

gathered together a group of friends of mine’’—this is a paraphrase—‘‘who are going to 

intercept this person’’—Floyd Cochran is his name—‘‘and I am here to tell you that if 

Floyd, in fact, shows up at this event, that I’m quite certain he will end up in University 

Hospital.’’ 

In the opinion of our lawyers, that was a case that could have been made, but I 

will point out that neither the FBI nor the Newark Police Department felt that this was 

a case that could be won. 

Speaking domestically, I think that is really a quite terrifying development. As I said 

earlier, I’m not sure that these Web sites are quite as effective as some of us might have 

feared at recruiting people, at recruiting young people, but there’s no doubt that they 

are a part of the apparatus that helps this movement to grow, and it certainly has been 

growing. 

Thank you. 

Mr. STAHNKE. Thank you. 

Thanks for the commission, Senator Cardin, holding this briefing and inviting Human 

Rights First. And, also, thank you for your leadership on the tolerance and nondiscrimination issues in the OSCE that’s been mentioned. 

I’m Ted Stahnke. I’m the director of the Fighting Discrimination Program at Human 

Rights First. We have been, since 2002, seeking to reverse the tide of racist, anti-Semitic, 

anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and homophobic violence across the OSCE region. 

Unfortunately, our monitoring has shown that violent hate crime is a serious and 

growing human rights problem throughout the region. And I guess my role here today 


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is to talk about some of the violence that’s been going on, as, I guess, a leading edge 

of and manifestation of the hatred that we’re seeing proliferating on the Internet. 

In 2007, we put out a comprehensive survey of the 56 OSCE countries that documented a rise in hate crime in many parts of Europe and North America. And now we’re 

in the process of preparing our survey for 2008, and the review of preliminary data suggests that the violence continues to rise in several areas. And it’s continuing in historically 

high levels in other areas. 

I would point out just a couple of examples: a large increase in racist violence and 

murders in Russia, as well as in Ukraine; increasingly violent anti-Semitic attacks in 

France; as well as historically high levels of hate crimes in Canada and the U.K. 

These are just some of the countries that have come out with data for 2007. So, obviously, this is a problem that continues. 

It’s a problem that’s shared, really, by all countries around the OSCE region. And 

while that is deplorable, on the one hand, it also presents an opportunity for governments 

to work together to combat it. And so one of the big questions for us is, what are governments doing about this problem? And, again, unfortunately, our research shows not 

enough. 

We did a report card of the 56 countries in December of 2007 regarding how well 

these governments were responded to violence in two important areas. One was monitoring and reporting; the other area was hate crimes legislation and its implementation. 

And we found that, despite there being some progress in North America and some 

Western European countries, the response to violent hate crimes in the vast majority of 

OSCE countries was weak. There’s a lot more that governments can do. It’s detailed in 

our written testimony. I won’t go into it now. 

We are also are promoting 10 things that governments can do to combat hate crimes. 

But, again, just very briefly, I could point to Russia, where there hasn’t been a particularly 

vigorous response yet to a large spike in racist murders. 

Ukraine, where the government has expressed itself to be more interested in responding and has done some things, but still there’s much more to be done there. 

But, also, Western countries, Greece, Italy and Spain, for example, still do not 

produce even basic reliable data on hate crimes in their countries, despite the fact that 

there are press and media and NGO reports that these type of crimes are going on. 

Just a note about the Internet, obviously, from our point of view, any response to 

violent hate crimes has to include some sort of strategy to address the potential of the 

Internet to incite violence. 

And we would note that there was an OSCE meeting back in 2004 in Paris on this 

subject. The U.S. government put forward a 10-point plan for addressing the Internet 

as an avenue of incitement to violence. And we think that those recommendations should 

be returned to and the outcome of that conference should be returned to and really pressed 

upon governments, what they have done, or haven’t done to implement them. 

I believe the view is, is that there’s not much that’s been done in countries across 

the region to implement those things. 

A brief personal example of the Internet. We work closely with a group in Russia 

called the Sovicenter. The Sovicenter is their main person who monitors hate crimes, has 

been sponsored by this commission, done briefings before this commission. 


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His name and some of his colleagues appeared on a death list a couple of weeks 

ago that was being circulated by a Russian neo-Nazi group and hosted on several sites 

around. And many of us contacted the people who are hosting these sites and pressed 

them to take these things down. 

While many of them did so, it’s also the case that this list, which identifies people’s 

names and includes an exhortation to kill them, is still floating on—not so much hosted 

on Web sites themselves, but on various blogs and chatrooms, et cetera. It’s still out there; 

it’s still circulating around. So this is obviously a very disturbing development. 

Well, I’d like to just move to recommendations, because, from our point of view, we 

think that there’s a lot that can be done to impress upon governments to do something, 

do more to implement their commitments that they’ve undertaken under the OSCE. And 

there’s more that the U.S. government can do, building on the positive steps that have 

already been taken. 

And so I’d like to mention three areas. The first is the OSCE. My colleague and I 

were recently in Vienna talking to key delegations of the OSCE. And our view is that 

the high level energy that was behind the tolerance mechanisms and these mechanisms 

that were put together with consistent support by the U.S. government and by this commission, that the energy there is clearly dissipating, and something needs to be done to 

energize it again. 

There is a perception that we heard several times that the United States government 

at the highest levels is not interested in the OSCE, and this is an unfortunate perception 

to be out there. 

The Finnish chairmanship has done several things that are helpful on hate crimes, 

on a technical level I think that the next chairman in office, the Greeks and the Kazaks, 

probably won’t be exercising the vigorous leadership that we would all hope on these 

issues. 

There are several specific recommendations that we’ve put forward in our testimony. 

I’ll highlight one here, and that is that the United States has pressed for a high-level 

conference on tolerance issues in 2009. 

We found, when we were talking to delegations, that even sympathetic delegations 

had not yet heard a convincing rationale for such a conference. They didn’t want to have 

a repeat of what had happened in Bucharest before, which was viewed as a disappointment. 

We believe strongly that focusing on violent hate crimes is an excellent way to draw 

high-level attention and energy back into the OSCE on this issue. It brings together people 

who are concerned about different forms of discrimination and intolerance. It’s a way to 

focus and press forward on some of the technical work that’s been done. 

We would hope that the U.S. government would press this and begin to work now, 

because, certainly, if there’s going to be such a thing in 2009, there needs to be a country 

who’s willing to host it and work and put forward on an agenda. 

Two other things that I’ll mention briefly. The first thing, the OSCE. The second 

is Ukraine. 

My colleague has just returned from the Ukraine after a visit there. As I mentioned, 

there’s a very serious spike in hate crimes going on. 


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The response of the government has been uneven. Different parts of the government 

have taken different points of view, but we think there’s a real opportunity here. 

The government at high levels has expressed a willingness to work with the international community on this problem. In this case, the United States has leverage, but 

also much to offer by way of assistance to Ukrainian police, prosecutors, and judges. 

This is believed in Ukraine something that a government response could do something about and try to rein in this growing neo-Nazi problem. So we’re going to be developing further specific recommendations over the coming weeks. I would be happy to share 

them with you at that time, but our main point has been that the issue of hate crimes 

should be a prominent point in the bilateral agenda with Ukraine. 

My final point is about support for NGOs. And NGOs are critical to the process of 

combating hate crimes. They monitor cases; they monitor the Internet; they can put pressure on government. 

We’re in constant contact with NGOs, especially from the eastern part of the region, 

and they need help. They have little capacity. They need help; they need support; they 

need funding. 

Catherine Myer was here testifying not so long ago and affirmed that this was the 

case. 

There’s a lot that the U.S. can do to support NGOs that are trying to combat hate 

crimes. Russia is one example. USAID is considering focusing on hate crimes as part of 

the next phase in its work in Russia and democracy promotion there. And we think this 

is an excellent idea that should be encouraged. 

Also, the ODIHR has recently rolled out a civil society training program for the 

OSCE. And there is a lot of enthusiasm about this program. The U.S. mission supports 

it, and we believe that ODIHR should be asked and given the resources to press this 

training program out into countries where there’s a real demand to do that. 

With that, I’ll stop there and take any questions. 

Mr. CARDIN. Well, thank you. Let me first make a few comments. 

There’s reason to be concerned as to how much weight is being given to the OSCE 

by the various countries of the OSCE, including the United States. When we look at the 

administration’s budget, there’s reason to have some concern, particularly as it relates 

to ODIHR’s functions. 

Having said that, we had the opportunity in the Foreign Relations Committee to have 

a hearing with the secretary of state. And with the questioning from both Senator Voinovich and myself, the secretary couldn’t have been stronger in her commitment to the importance of the OSCE and what it’s doing in all three baskets, and with particular reference to the human rights issues and dealing with some of the issues that you’ve talked 

about today. 

I just really want to put that on the record. 

The last point is that we’re now getting the administration’s appointment, and I think 

the commission should have pretty much its full complement, including representatives 

from the executive branch. 

We’re optimistic about the support in the United States for the OSCE and for what 

it’s been able to accomplish, though we are obviously concerned about the support in other 

countries. 


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On the commitments as it relates to the anti-Semitism, the racism, the anti-Muslim 

activities, xenophobia, there were commitments made by the OSCE states in documents 

that came out of the various meetings. The enforcement of that has been mixed. 

Whereas we all support conferences coming together to try to make additional 

progress, we believe that one of the most important roles that future conferences can have 

is to follow up to see whether recommendations were carried out and commitments were 

complied with. 

That’s particularly important as it relates to the meeting in Paris. I remember the 

lead-up to Paris, where we were concerned as to whether the United States could play 

a constructive role, understanding the restrictions that we have. I don’t want to call them 

restrictions, but the policies that we have on protecting the right of speech and how important the right of speech is to our tradition and to our laws. 

We came out of Paris with fairly positive result. There was more harmonization than 

there was difference. And I couldn’t agree with you more: I think we haven’t followed 

up on that. 

I would hope that part of this will be to look at ways to follow up some practices 

that we think can be helpful in this area. 

Mr. Wolf, you mentioned, I guess, two of the most important recommendations that 

have come out of our conferences in fighting hate speech. One is to make sure the right 

information gets out there, to make sure the record is correct. 

I might add to that from credible sources, so we want leadership. We want the government officials; we want the church leaders; we want the business leaders all to be prepared 

to counter this type of speech, so that the record is clear as to what, in fact, is correct. 

Second, is dealing with our young people, which was an issue that we talked about 

a great deal at these meetings, as to how we can best get educational programs and outreach to young people so they are aware of history and aware of what’s happened and 

are protected against the vulnerability of this information having an impact on their lives. 

My one question would be, I understand the Constitution of the United States. Maybe 

I don’t know if I understand it, but sometimes the courts change it around a little bit. 

But are you recommending in regards to hate literature on the Internet that there 

be either changes in U.S. law or other recommendations implemented by Congress or the 

administration as it relates to the readily available information on the Internet in the 

United States? 

Mr. WOLF. I’m actually not recommending any legal changes, but I think, as I mentioned in my remarks, that the Internet industry can play a role through its voluntary 

actions. 

There are on almost every Web site, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and any other 

Web site you want to mention, terms of use. And many of them have high-minded admonitions against hate speech, bullying, any kind of harassment of other users. 

They are almost never enforced. They can be enforced voluntarily by the Web sites. 

And if that happens, it may only be symbolic, but it at least will tell the users of those 

Web sites that, in that Internet community, bullying, racism, homophobia, xenophobia 

is not acceptable behavior. 


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What we’ve found is that, when we report those incidents, sometimes they pay attention to them. And if we report them loudly enough and repeatedly, they will pay attention 

to them. 

My point is that they should be more proactive and be participants in the monitoring 

of that content and the filtering of it voluntarily, not by government edict, because I think 

that would run afoul of the First Amendment, but as a responsible member of the Internet 

community. That is a role they can and should play. 

There was a recent example of the racist Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, who 

had a very virulent anti-Muslim video called ‘‘Fitna,’’ which just the mere mention of it 

or preview of it actually resulted in YouTube being banned in Pakistan altogether. 

Network Solutions was the host of the site that was to premier this video. Network 

Solutions was concerned that it violated its terms of service and voluntarily took down 

the site because it feared that that content would be so offensive and so inflammatory 

and so racist that it was simply not something they want to be a party to, not because 

the government said so and not because of any threats from the Muslim community, but 

because it was the right thing to do as a member of the Internet community. 

We think that that kind of proactive, voluntary cooperation is something they ought 

to do, because they’re making money from content flowing across the Internet, but because, more importantly, they are the backbone to the Internet community and should 

take responsibility. 

Mr. CARDIN. I know Rabbi Cooper wants to respond, but let me just point out there 

are filters that are used by the Internet servers. They can use filters. There’s nothing 

that prevents that. 

In certain countries, they must use filters in order to be able to do business in those 

countries. So if there is material that is protected under the Constitution of the United 

States, because it doesn’t fall outside of the—it falls within the protected speech, there’s 

still the ability of the entities that make that information available on widely viewed sites 

to put filters to prevent that information from being viewed. 

How much is that being done in the United States? 

Mr. WOLF. Almost not at all. I think the filtering that’s going on, to the extent it’s 

happening, is in response to complaints by NGOs, like the ADL and the Wiesenthal Center 

and the members of ENOCH. 

There is no voluntary filtering of hate speech that I know of. And, of course, the 

last thing we want is any governmental entity setting up standards, because, as you mentioned, in China, you know, they have standards that we certainly don’t agree with and 

elsewhere around the world. It will result in the filtering of what we would consider 

counter speech. 

But in the marketplace of ideas, filtering is just as important as publishing, I think, 

when it comes to Internet hate. And there can be pressure in the marketplace as to what 

should or should not be hosted or posted on a site, and that can be done within the Internet community without the involvement of government. 

Now, interestingly in the United States, the Congress gave immunity to Web site 

operators and Internet service providers in Section 230 of the Communications Decency 

Act, basically absolving them of any responsibility, except for copyright infringement and 


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certain criminal activity, but basically saying, ‘‘You’re not responsible for the content of 

third parties.’’ 

Well, a concomitant obligation ought to be—it wasn’t written into the law, it may 

have been a good idea—you should take some voluntary responsibility for protecting minorities and children from the effect of hateful content by third parties. And you can do 

that on your own without any governmental involvement and working cooperatively with 

NGOs. 

Mr. CARDIN. Rabbi Cooper. 

Mr. COOPER. Thank you, Senator. A few points. 

Whenever we combine the two words ‘‘hate’’ and ‘‘speech,’’ it’s kind of a third-rail 

effect. I think we simply—no one in America wants to see government intervention in 

stopping, quote, unquote, ‘‘free speech.’’ 

But I think we have to take a second or third look at the way in which hate is promoted online. We’re usually just a click away from very specific instructions as how to 

act out on a hateful idea. 

To follow up on one of the previous statements, it’s absolutely true that, in the first 

decade of this kind of activity, we can see that no extremist group in the United States 

or in Canada or in Europe, for that matter, has been successful in using the Internet 

to create a mass movement or to sustain one. 

But those same groups, having understood that, have now very often shifted to the 

lone wolf concept of saying, ‘‘We don’t want a mass movement. Don’t come and join us 

over the weekend, because chances are law enforcement are coming to our meetings anyway. Stay away. And if you have the courage to take that next step, click to another 

site that’s going to help you to take the kinds of terrorist actions that really comprise 

hate crimes.’’ 

While from a philosophical point of view the whole notion of the American instinct 

is the answer to hate speech is more speech, that’s correct, but we could all construct 

100 Web sites. We cannot necessarily bring the public or young people directly to them. 

There’s no direct correlation between a Web site that vilifies all African-Americans 

and 10 Web sites that would explain why that kind of activity is wrong. 

Congress does have a role, in terms of the bully pulpit, of bringing in the online 

community, the companies that are making a tremendous profit, and generally doing a 

great job to empower all of us in the communications and marketing area to, at the minimum, be responsive to their own template of terms of usage. 

If we can bring them to that and put a few people on payroll just to be responsive 

to parents or teens or organizations like ours, when we put it in play, not to be responsive 

to the law, but their own rules, that would go a long way not to eliminating hate, which 

we can’t do in the real world anyway, but to marginalizing it. 

The other areas which is probably going to be for a different hearing is for all of 

us to remember that, just like there are no boundaries between states geographic locations 

on the Internet, there’s not much of a boundary between the postings of hate groups and 

those that constitute the support system for terrorists. 

Once we talk about terrorist activity, they’re using the Internet in a much more sophisticated perspective beyond, I think, the discussion for this particular gathering. 


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But it is interesting. Last month in Beijing, I actually had an opportunity to sit down 

with one of the main censors working for the Chinese government. I don’t think he was 

more than 30, 35 years old. And I certainly wasn’t going to turn around Chinese policy 

at one meeting. 

But I made two comments to him. First, that he was—they’re basically wasting their 

time. They should trust and free the genius, collective genius of the Chinese people, not 

waste their time trying to stamp out ideas from the Internet. 

But then I asked him the following question: What was the Chinese government or 

the Internet experts doing about the following? You have portable GPS available and now 

the new enriched technologies of cell phones. Put one in your right hand, one in your 

left hand, and you have command and control from any place in the world to any place 

in the world for terrorist activity. 

He looked at me and finally said, ‘‘Well, do you have any ideas?’’ And I said why 

doesn’t the government of China sit down with the U.S. and with the international entities 

to discuss that? 

I would think that a more multifaceted involvement of Congress on these issues, and 

especially for the Helsinki Commission, is absolutely vital, or we’re just going to come 

back every year and report on, you know, the latest strike. 

Mr. CARDIN. Thank you for that. 

Mr. Potok, I wasn’t clear whether you agree that the laws are adequate. There are 

laws that prohibit certain information from being distributed on the Internet. You can’t 

put child pornography on the Internet. That’s illegal. We have law enforcement that regularly polices that. 

Certain, well, terrorist activities on the Internet is also illegal. And we have law enforcement going after that. 

It seems to me that a person who publishes the home addresses, with other information out that is clearly seeking physical action against those individuals, that, if that is 

not illegal, that laws could be constitutional to make that illegal. 

Mr. POTOK. You know, as I say, I’m not a lawyer and it seems to me very possible 

that a lot of these cases that I talked about are prosecutable ultimately, but that people 

are quite unwilling to take a chance on them. That was really, I think, the attitude, for 

instance, of the Newark Police Department with regard to the threat to that particular 

anti-racist activist. 

I mean, essentially what they told the complainants was, ‘‘Look, we might make it 

stick; we might not.’’ 

Mr. CARDIN. I’m a strong defender of the First Amendment rights. I think someone 

publishing home addresses of judges, and putting it on the Internet, and giving the clear 

impression that these judges ruled wrong, and you should take action against them, that 

is not protected under our Constitution. 

If the laws are inadequate to deal with it, then maybe we should be looking at laws 

to deal with those types of activities and within the framework of our Constitution. 

Mr. POTOK. Yes, perhaps you’re right. I can’t say for sure. I think that the Planned 

Parenthood case gave one a sense that the existing law might be inadequate—if juries 

were able to hear the threats in full context, in other words, they may not say, ‘‘Kill SenVerDate Sep 11 2014 05:15 Sep 01, 2015 Jkt 075645 PO 00000 Frm 00021 Fmt 3191 Sfmt 3191 E:\HR\OC\A645.XXX A645

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ator Cardin, kill Mark Potok,’’ but that may be implied very strongly, there it is, with 

our home addresses. 

I don’t feel completely adequate, not being a lawyer, to really respond to whether 

it’s prosecutable or not. 

One kind of ancillary point I wanted to make is that one thing that hasn’t been said 

in all of this is that it’s true that Congress and leadership in general can act in a sort 

of bully pulpit fashion to try and get these Internet service providers to act. 

What’s happening though, increasingly, is that these sites are moving to white supremacist-owned servers. So in that case, there’s nobody you can go complain to, right? 

When the Stormfront server, Don Black, the former Klansman who runs Stormfront, 

rents out his server space to other people, you know, you’ve got no ISP you can go to, 

so it may be that, in fact, that some law or some clarification of the law might be needed. 

Mr. CARDIN. Once again, I think the point there about letting people know what that 

Web site’s about would be helpful, so that you can affect it economically by people having 

more information about what the Web site is about. 

Mr. POTOK. I think that’s true. And I think that’s very much what we’ve been about. 

There was a policy followed years ago in the ’50s and ’60s, during the kind of reign of 

the American Nazi Party, where a lot of agencies, NGOs would approach newspaper publishers and say, ‘‘Please don’t cover the American Nazi Party.’’ 

The policy was informally called the quarantine policy. I think it’s obvious. That’s 

completely out of the question. You can’t possibly pursue a policy like that, because there’s 

so many different kinds of media. 

I think that really inoculation, insofar as it’s a practical thing, is the policy to pursue. 

And sometimes it means at a very personal context. I’ve got a 13-year-old boy. So what 

that means is taking my son, Nick, to a Holocaust-denial site, Nick, who really doesn’t 

know anything much about the Holocaust, and talking to him about those kinds of things. 

That may sound a little Pollyannaish, but I think that, as a general matter, maybe 

that involves Web sites like the Web sites of the Wiesenthal Center, the ADL, the Southern Poverty Law as kind of counter information sites. 

We all try and do a lot of kind of publicity work to bring attention to certain—for 

instance, the fake Martin Luther King site that purports to be an educational resource 

for kids, but really is recitation of white supremacist views of Martin Luther King. 

Mr. WOLF. Senator, on that point, there is a law that Congress can pass to provide 

funding for education of children, just as Mr. Potok’s point. 

The Commonwealth of Virginia is starting—I think it’s the first in the nation—Internet education program. They provide driver’s education. They provide personal hygiene 

information. 

Kids are not taught in an organized way how to deal with the bad neighborhoods 

on the Internet. That’s not the intent of the Virginia program; it’s a more general program. 

But certainly dedicated funding to teach children how to filter. Filter on their own what 

they’re seeing by being taught about these sites would be, I think, a very useful law. 

In response to your earlier question, I do think criminal law is adequate to deal with 

the kinds of episodes that Mr. Potok talked about. 

Mr. COOPER. If I can just add on the statistics over this—the trends over the last 

year, the number of Web sites have actually flattened somewhat, in terms of the growth. 


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I still think it would be a great idea, using the cockroach concept from before, having 

good citizenship online from the mega-companies is something that we sorely need. And 

if there’s a way to segregate the bad material on those other sites, I think it would be 

positive. 

But, secondly, what we’re seeing—the reason why the numbers still spike is they’re 

going to Facebook, they’re going to YouTube, they’re going to the sexy new technologies 

that are viral in the way they operate. So the numbers are just runaway. 

We need to get the attention of those, you know, cutting-edge companies to throw 

some resources at being better, more responsive to the community, before we have to have 

special hearings on it. 

Mr. CARDIN. I agree with you, but the whole philosophy of a YouTube is that it’s 

self-selecting by the user. And if it is trash, the user won’t use it. I mean, that’s their 

whole philosophy. 

It’s counter to their philosophy to prejudge the appetite for it. it basically is current. 

It happens and it’s off the YouTube pretty quickly, at least normally. 

I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you. I’m just saying I think it’s going to be a 

hard sell to get that type of entity—to screen, because that’s not what they do. 

Mr. COOPER. Well, let me clarify. I’m not talking about screening. I’m talking about 

being responsive when a parent or an organization comes and says, ‘‘Look at this stuff,’’ 

and not getting any response at all. 

And then we could always bring in a witness from China to fill us in about how 

profoundly they’re committed to their business model and fill such time as a big client, 

like China says, we want you to bend. 

There’s plenty of wiggle room out there if you push the right way. 

Mr. CARDIN. Good point. 

Mr. POTOK. I just want to say, it’s worth saying that YouTube enforces pretty strictly 

anti-porn policies. That does not seem dissimilar to me. 

Mr. CARDIN. With that, I’m going to turn it over to Dr. Thompson and let her continue 

this discussion. I have some conflicts in my office with some guests that I have from other 

countries, and then I think we have votes that are going to be starting on the Senate 

soon. 

This has been extremely helpful to me, I know to the commission, and we thank, 

again, our four guests. And I’m going to let Dr. Thompson, the time that remains, to 

open it up to discussion by anyone who would like to join us. 

Ms. THOMPSON. And, actually, I’m going to take this opportunity to open questions 

up to the floor. And we have a chair here with a microphone set up for anyone that would 

be interested in presenting any questions to the panelists. 

AUDIENCE. Hi. My name is Steve Clark, and I’m with the Library of Congress. Of 

course, we do research for Congress. And one of our responsibilities is to be very balanced 

in the reports that we do. 

Listening to the panel, I got the impression that problem of Internet hate speech, 

of which I know nothing—I have never gone and looked at any of those sites, so I’m not 

an expert in this field—it is pretty much solely a problem of what you call the radical 

right. 


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And that made me wonder, are there no leftist, revolutionary hate speech sites, 

groups advocating violence from a leftist perspective, or are we only dealing with a rightwing, kind of kook phenomenon here? 

Mr. POTOK. Yes, there exists some left-wing sites like that. I mean, the one that comes 

immediately to mind is the Animal Liberation Front, which actually provides an arson 

guide. You know, how do you burn up your animal oppressors, farm, or burn up SUV 

dealerships, and that kind of thing. 

You know, beyond that, I think what you might consider something from the left 

would be really more in your world than mine. 

Mr. COOPER. Sure, you have it across the board. We didn’t talk about them today— 

the fact that the Internet is the perfect incubator for conspiracy theories. 

Sometimes they’re benign, and sometimes they’ll lead individuals and/or groups to 

go in—or in the case with, say, the Iranian regime—to co-opt the Holocaust denial. A 

lot of these, you might say, were either invented or kept on life support system or resurrected by virtue of this kind of technology that really fits them very much. 

The other area which we didn’t talk about today at all, which we always put together 

in our reports, but we deal with as two distinct areas, is the whole food chain and feeding 

chain of terrorism. 

There you have entire—the whole jihadist worldview, which is not only identifying, 

you know, U.S. is Great Satan and Al Qaida having an anti-Semitic site, a hate site, 

nothing new on there but sort of making their statement that way. 

You have certain Islamic sites which attack other Islamic groups, religious groups, 

as not being religious enough by their definitions. You have a whole kind of Solar System 

out there, including the insurgent groups in Iraq all see the Internet as front and center 

to how they do, what they do, their agenda, their fundraising, their justification, and their 

propaganda efforts against U.S. and coalition forces. 

Sometimes those two worlds do collide very interesting, again, in terms of the Internet. You have a Queens, New York, group, an Islamist group, called Islamic Thinkers 

Society. Now, they’re the ones who talked about a coming nuclear attack on New York. 

They burned the flag in 2003, I think, on the streets of New York City. 

When we went a couple of days ago onto their Web site, the first that we’ve seen 

it, on the front page of their presentation, they co-opted some of the worst Holocaustdenial material, conceived of, written and thought through not by any Arabs or Muslims, 

but by Europeans and Americans. 

You have also this crosspollination and the potential for a lot worse than just ideas 

co-mingling, but you mentioned the Animal Liberation army. I think a lot of us and some 

law enforcement are very concerned that the immense amount of material available online 

that just can teach you how to deploy as a terrorist, the potential there for that kind 

of melding is very apparent and, as I said, may be beyond the scope of this particular 

discussion. 

But feel free to take one or two of these and get an introduction into this neighborhood. It’s a little bit broader than what you heard today. 

AUDIENCE. Thank you very much. 


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Ms. THOMPSON. And I will say that the OSCE is in the process now of looking at 

terrorism more and also this idea of radicalization, and I think the role of the Internet 

and some other things, as well. 

If there were any more questions from the floor at this point, if anyone was interested 

in asking questions, please feel free to come up. 

If not, now I’ll give people time to get to the chair as well. One of the things that 

I’d also wanted to mention was that Dr. Maura Conway, who’s in Ireland, hopefully joining 

us via the Net at this point, had also documented a number of things in her research, 

which we have available here, in terms of how or what it is Internet service providers 

can do. 

And some of those things that she had noted in her work are I think, number one, 

just changing the order on which Web sites come up through a search engine. So there 

have been examples where there have been hate sites that come up above others. 

That’s been one of the issues that’s been brought up, and the use of geolocation software to actually identify users and then, if necessary, report them to law enforcement. 

We’ve also talked about this preventing of the use of search sites of hate sites. France 

and Germany are some of the European countries that are doing that. 

Additionally, purchasing the domain name addresses of certain, negative terms, that 

hate groups might want to use as a beacon to their sites were some of the other things 

that came up. 

I think Chris Wolf had mentioned—— 

Mr. WOLF. Yes, I was just going to say, with respect to getting search engines to 

alter the results of their algorithms, it’s not going to happen, certainly not at Google, 

where they view their algorithm as sacrosanct. 

We were able to work at the ADL to work with Google, when you types in the search 

term ‘‘Jew,’’ one of the top hits was a virulently anti-Semitic site called Jew Watch. 

Google would not change the order, certainly wouldn’t remove that from the listing, 

but did agree at no cost to provide a sponsored link that they normally charge for with 

a link to the ADL site and with a banner that said, ‘‘One of the first results you will 

see is from a hate group,’’ or words to that effect, ‘‘so if you’d like to put it into context, 

click here.’’ 

We thought that was a great advance, and we’d like to see more of that, frankly. 

But I think the notion that search engines are going to filter out hate sites, while it may 

be a laudable idea, is practically not going to happen. 

Mr. COOPER. I just wanted to share—I think it was in 2004, the hearings, the big 

meeting in Paris that the OSCE was involved with. And part of my presentation, I showed 

six major French hate sites, pretty virulent stuff, that had been removed by the French 

authorities. 

It’s not often that an American Jewish human rights organization is going to say 

nice things about the French, but we did, and they were very, very happy and proud 

for about 30 seconds, until we showed the next slide, in which all six of the sites were 

at that .fr.rr, whatever it was, one additional addition it took by these organizations to 

find their way back to the Net. 

We should say, again, applaud the governments or the companies involved for making 

the statement and knocking them off for at least a while and pushing them on to the 


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margins, but I think we all have to be honest enough to admit that you’re never going 

to be fully successful in keeping any idea off the Internet. 

With that basic starting point, we still have to figure out what we can do to 

marginalize that. 

Mr. WOLF. I actually want to say a couple of very nice things about the French. Ambassador Levitte, who’s now President Sarkozy’s national security adviser, had a special 

interest in the subject of hate on the Internet, was very much behind the French hosting 

the OSCE conference in 2004, came up with me and briefed the Senate and the House 

on the issue. 

And the French embassy here in Washington is hosting a major conference next November at Lemee Sans Frances on Internet hate speech. So I don’t want to be too tough 

on the French. I think that they’re actually a leader in the world on this issue. 

Ms. THOMPSON. And, Mr. Stahnke, you had mentioned earlier that the use of, I think, 

cell phone technology, Internet, et cetera, and having increased, I guess, with the use 

of some of the groups that are targeting human rights defenders and actually even persons 

of certain groups within Russia, Ukraine, and some of the other OSCE countries. 

I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you’ve seen that being 

manifested and, also, how it is that these governments have responded and if you’ve seen 

anything in particular where they’ve actually either looked at the Internet or just in general how it is these groups are trying to publicize themselves via new technology. 

Mr. STAHNKE. We were recently in Russia. And one of the things that was happening 

was a strong rise in neo-Nazi skinhead attacks on foreigners, on Asians, on Africans, in 

Moscow and St. Petersburg and elsewhere. 

One of the disturbing aspects of it is that, while these attacks were taking place, 

someone would take a cell phone video of it. And that would be posted on the Internet 

as a way to promote what they had done, laud what they had done, and encourage others 

to do similar things. 

This was a very disturbing thing. There was a video that was posted that purported 

to be an execution by neo-Nazi groups of Central Asian people who looked Central Asian 

in Russia. 

So it’s certain that these neo-Nazi groups are using the Internet, they’re trying to 

use their cell phone technology in order to spread their message. 

What we’ve been focused on is to try to get the government to use its tools against 

violence as a way to marginalize the activities of these skinhead groups. 

It’s clear that they really haven’t done an awful lot. I mean, Russia has laws. They 

have laws against hate violence. They have laws against extremism and other things. 

It’s a mixed picture how those things have been implemented. In some cases, they’ve 

done some laudable things, maybe not from a First Amendment point of view, but in the 

Russian context. 

But in other cases, they’ve turned their extremist laws against political and religious 

dissent in that country, and it’s sort of manifesting the fears that you have outside societies, where the rule of law has much more traction. That’s a problem. 

Then the other thing in Russia is that, with the spike of murders, there has been 

a little more awareness by the police and the government to do something about it. 


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Perhaps the tide is about to turn, but the response—there’s a lot of fear that the 

response of the government will be too strong, that they’ll rely on methods of violence 

themselves to crack down on some of these neo-Nazi groups, and that that will just be 

a short-term politically expedient way of dealing with the problem, rather than a real 

long-term effort to end impunity for these sorts of attacks. 

It comes back to, our point and that is that it’s impunity for violence that can fuel 

the power of groups and their messages that are operating throughout the Internet and 

other forms of technology. 

That when governments in particular speak out condemning violence, when civil society speaks out to do that, but when governments actually put in and implement tools 

to combat it and end this sort of impunity, that that also helps to marginalize what’s 

going on. 

Mr. COOPER. I think the first major example of this kind of cell phone activity was 

first reported during the riots in the Paris suburbs, in which you had the young toughs 

actually spread out among—within a couple of blocks radius, the police had their hands 

full, and it took them a while to realize that they were actually using the broadcasts 

from phone to phone to inspire both the tactic, the target, and to inspire similar activity. 

In our digital terrorism CD–ROM, we do have a whole section dealing with this, including the reformatting of some of the earlier material that’s been online, some of it 

by the Iraqi insurgents, but others, as you mentioned here the neo-Nazi example, we actually put it on the cover of the report, because it’s that concerning to us. 

We have a couple of examples. 

(Video clip shown) 

Can you just give us a brief description? This says, ‘‘SMS to U.S.’’ This is an insurgency group. And we all know about text messaging, but actually the imagery here is 

actually sending back body bags of American soldiers. 

There’s been now for a couple of years an Internet creation—is it called Jewba— 

of an alleged sniper who comes home after a hard day of work in Iraq, shooting down 

American soldiers, keeps a diary. 

It has a component—I think a Brazilian cartoonist is doing a comic book, an online 

comic book. And now, for the first time, we’ve seen that particular material finding itself 

reconstituted so it can be sent to a cell phone and transmitted to a cell phone. 

For those who are also in the—having the job of trying to quantify the nature of 

the threats and the trends, this kind of activity is going to make it more and more difficult, 

without any question. 

Ms. THOMPSON. Also one of the things that you all have spoken to here are the need 

for various voices to come together. Those that are concerned about combating hate 

crimes, hate propaganda on the Web, and those that are also concerned about free speech, 

freedom of assembly, and related issues to come together. 

As you were talking, actually, about the cell phone use, I was thinking about, from 

my own experiences being in countries that shall remain nameless at this point, where 

text messaging wasn’t working and had purposefully been cut off because of concerns 

about uprising and actual, I would say, meetings. 


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The governments had said that they were concerned, actually, about uprisings. But 

when you looked at the groups that they were worried about organizing, they were actually student groups and some other groups. 

There’s clearly a balance and that needs to be struck here. And I think the necessity 

for people to be able to come together from all angles to really talk about these things, 

I think especially as we’re looking within the U.S. context and broadening that out to 

some of the OSCE countries in Europe. 

Unless there were any other questions from the audience—— 

Mr. POTOK. I think it’s worth pointing out that not all of the kind of racist propaganda 

that ultimately results in criminal violence appears in the context of Web sites with swastikas on them or that kind of thing. 

What I’m talking about is the kinds of theories, the conspiracy theories we hear now 

about how Mexicans are coming to destroy our country, the North American Union conspiracy theory, the Aztla ́n theory , they’re coming here, they’re secretly planning to conquer our country. 

You know, this stuff exists probably more plentifully on, quote, unquote, ‘‘mainstream’’ Web sites. You know, there are probably tens of thousands of blogs out there 

that contain this material. 

No legislation is ever going to help you with that in any way, right? I mean, the 

only answer is counter speech. That there’s some leadership—it hasn’t been helpful in 

the case of the North American Union theory that 20 houses of representatives, 20 different state houses of representatives, has passed resolutions opposing this fictitious entity. 

That’s when you turn to Congress and say, ‘‘Maybe it’s time for somebody to say 

something about this.’’ The Bush White House has put out a little—and more power to 

them for doing it. They put out a little page saying it’s B.S., this stuff is not true. 

But I think clearly there’s things that can be done that are really beyond the power 

and scope of what these NGOs can do. And that’s the only way you’re really going to 

take this stuff on in a head-on way. 

Ms. THOMPSON. Thank you. I appreciate it. And if there are no more briefings, we’ll 

end the briefing at this point. 

Thank you. 

Æ 


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