[Newspoetry] NYTimes.com Article: The Long and Winding Cyberhoax: Political Theater on the Web

Sun Jan 7 12:14:22 CST 2001

This article from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by Joe Futrelle futrelle at ncsa.uiuc.edu.

Newspoetry

A nice view through our window of opportunity

Joe Futrelle
futrelle at ncsa.uiuc.edu

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The Long and Winding Cyberhoax: Political Theater on the Web
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/07/weekinreview/07WORD.html

January 7, 2001
WORD FOR WORD / TWEAKING THE W.T.O.
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

IT'S well known that some regions of cyberspace   Internet chat
rooms, for instance   are rife with poseurs and imaginary
characters. But the World Wide Web is also a breeding ground for
more elaborate deceptions, as demonstrated by the following
cautionary tale about gall and gullibility in the information age.

 The story begins with www.gatt.org, which looks at first glance
like an official Web site of the World Trade Organization, the
five-year-old Switzerland-based successor to the organization that
oversaw the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Unfortunately
for the organizers of an October legal seminar on international
trade in Salzburg, Austria, a glance was all they gave it before
clicking on the "contact" link and sending a speaking invitation to
Mike Moore, the W.T.O.'s director-general. 

 Big mistake: it turns out the site is run by the Yes Men, a
loose-knit group of anti-free-trade activists that views hoaxes as
a legitimate weapon of protest. 

 Excerpts of what transpired follow, culled from e-mail
correspondence and faxes posted at www.theyesmen.org/wto. 

BARNABY J. FEDER

It didn't take long for the Yes Men to
accept the invitation in Mr. Moore's name, with a caveat:

 Thank you for your kind invitation. 

 I may not be able to attend
personally, but I would like very much to send a substitute. Would
this be possible? Please let me know and I will begin the search
process. 

 Thank you,

 Mike Moore

The director of the seminar's sponsor was happy to oblige:

 Dear
Mr. Moore: 

 Michael Devine advises me that you wish to send a staff member to
speak at the 26-29 October conference in Salzburg. 

 If you will confirm name of the individual and contact
information, I will have further information sent. 

 Regards, Dennis Campbell

 Center for International Legal
Studies

At this point, Charles Cushen, a computer programmer in Los Angeles
who had been masquerading as Mr. Moore and "Alice Foley," Mr.
Moore's secretary, created Andreas Bichlbauer (choosing the name at
random from a Vienna phone book), and made travel arrangements for
Dr. Bichlbauer and two "security agents," including a cameraman.
Dr. Bichlbauer raised eyebrows with his speech, titled "Trade
Regulation Relaxation and Concepts of Incremental Improvement:
Governing Perspectives from 1970 to the Present":

 Dear Ms. Foley: 

 We were somewhat puzzled by Dr. Bichlbauer's
participation at the conference. . . .

 The essential thrust of his speech appeared to be that Italians
have a lesser work ethic than the Dutch, that Americans would be
better off auctioning their votes in the presidential election to
the highest bidder and that the primary role of the W.T.O. was to
create a one-world culture. 

 In the late afternoon, a cameraman (I think it was the same one
who filmed Dr. Bichlbauer's speech) appeared at the hotel and
sought to interview our delegates. He said Dr. Bichlbauer had been
hit in the face with a pie outside the hotel and wanted to know if
the delegates thought Dr. Bichlbauer's speech had provoked the
attack. . . .

 Several of our delegates (including work-ethic impaired Italians)
approached me to express concern about the speech, the alleged pie
incident and the cameraman who sought interviews in the late
afternoon. 

 Your clarification will be appreciated. 

 Regards, Dennis Campbell

Alice Foley's immediate reply:

 Indeed
you are correct, Dr. Bichlbauer was in fact "pied" after speaking
at the Salzburg C.I.L.S. conference. At present we are not
completely certain of all the details, but it appears that the
cameraman you mention had something to do with it. . . . This
cameraman . . . seems to have essentially been an agent provocateur
who planned the pieing from the start. . . .

 We hope you understand that this sort of incident reflects
primarily the unfortunate circumstances under which the W.T.O. must
accomplish its work, and that our security can never be entirely
adequate to the situations we face. 

After another message from Mr. Campbell in which he reiterated that
some delegates found Dr. Bichlbauer's remarks offensive or
flippant, the doctor offered his side of the story:

 I was disappointed to hear from Alice Foley that some people in
the audience on Saturday disliked my lecture. . . . Those who were
upset by the lecture were clearly unreceptive to any message
departing from the simple W.T.O. "party line" as it is presented in
larger arenas. At this conference we hoped to examine this "party
line" through repackaging in a clearer and more carefully
delineated fashion, for the sake of more lucid examination and a
greater awareness of "issue extremes" for use in more politic
descriptions   those intended for the consumption of larger blocs
of the consuming public. . . . 

Two days later, hoping to elicit further response, Mr. Cushen
slipped again into his Mr. Moore persona:

 Dear Professor Campbell: 

 I was dismayed to learn of your
unfortunate experience with our representative, Andreas Bichlbauer.
. . . I will recommend that Dr. Bichlbauer be required to attend a
refresher course on public speaking, communication and policy
before any further appearances on behalf of the W.T.O. . . . 

 However, having examined the presentation exhaustively, I am
forced to conclude that never in any particulars do Dr.
Bichlbauer's statements . . . depart from the spirit   if not the
precise letter   of our intentions and aims. That is, while we of
course do not advocate vote-selling or siesta-banning at the
present time, it is quite true that efficiency and the streamlining
of culture and politics in the interests of economic liberalization
is at the core of the W.T.O.'s programme, and such practices as
described by Dr. Bichlbauer are useful in clarifying the long-range
interests of global development as promoted by our organization and
others. 

On Nov. 1, Alice Foley had more bad news for Professor Campbell:

The situation has, I regret to say, somewhat deteriorated from an
already unpleasant state of affairs: Dr. Bichlbauer has contracted
a rather serious infection from the pie, which forensic analysis
shows contained an active bacillus agent. It is not certain whether
foul play was involved. . . . I know that this question will sound
harsh, but could any of the lawyers present have been angry enough
at Dr. Bichlbauer's lecture to do this? . . .

On Nov. 6, using addresses collected in Salzburg, Alice Foley
e-mailed six conference participants with the message that Dr.
Bichlbauer was near death from his infection and concluding:

 Please, please let us know if anything at the conference struck
you as strange, or if you can imagine anyone performing this
masterpiece of cowardice, that so threatens to delete Dr.
Bichlbauer from our midst in the prime of his usefulness.

A similar e-mail message sent two weeks later to 77 delegates
elicited a range of responses, most indicating that the insult to
Italian work habits had made the biggest impression. Dr.
Bichlbauer's death was announced via e-mail on Nov. 27. The legal
center's response on Nov. 29 provided the first clear sign that it
finally recognized the hoax and asked the Yes Men to "let it rest."
Alice Foley issued the following pseudo-clarification to the
delegates:

 Those who found Dr. Bichlbauer's talk "peculiar," "puzzling" and
so on were alert to a situation that has only now become clear to
our overcentralized eyes: Dr. Bichlbauer was an impostor! . . . He,
his "security guard" and his "cameraman" . . . belong, it turns
out, to an anti-trade cabal called "The Yes Men," whose interests
run exactly counter to our own, and who will stoop to any level
whatsoever to make points. (The point they were attempting to make
with this trickery, according to the handwritten letter which we
received by this morning's post, had something to do with
"corporate power" and "democracy," though the syntax and
handwriting of the letter are, truth be told, too execrable to make
much of. . . . It is of course extremely embarrassing to us that we
can have been conned, like common dowagers, in this way. . . .

Postscript: A W.T.O. spokesman said last week that while his
organization deplored the Yes Men's deceptive Web site and the
hoax, it respects the nature of the Internet as a forum for free
expression. Mr. Cushen said "Mr. Moore" had recently received an
invitation to a textile conference in Finland and that his group
was hoping to scrape together the money needed to send a successor
to Dr. Bichlbauer. "We think the ethical thing to do is to
represent the W.T.O. more honestly than they represent themselves,"
he said.

The New York Times on the Web
http://www.nytimes.com

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