David Hoffman is perhaps an unlikely computer whiz for the 1990s: a bespectacled 56-year-old Brooklyn resident who spent 31 years teaching high school social studies.
But the Anti-Defamation League’s national expert on Internet anti-Semitism travels around the country lecturing about online hate crimes.
One day last week he participated in a panel at U.C. Irvine; the next day he visited the regional ADL’s San Francisco office and the next day he was in Seattle.
“Talk about intimidating — lecturing on the Internet at Microsoft,” he said with a small laugh.
Hoffman’s sympathy for social issues derives partly from being old enough to remember the civil rights movement, desegregation and the birth of Israel firsthand.
Broadening his investigation beyond the obvious anti-Semitic Web pages posted by Nazi sympathizers and Klansmen, Hoffman is looking at how e-mail and other new technologies pose potential dangers.
“People know a swastika is anti-Semitic,” he said. But of equal concern is “how easy it is to send hate mail.”
If a computer operator knows how to obscure e-mail headers and relay messages through other people’s computers, a threatening electronic message can obscure its author’s identity more effectively than a threatening letter, Hoffman said.
At least “snail mail” gets a postal cancellation stamp, he said. Theodore Kaczynski, suspected of being the Unabomber, allegedly had to travel from Montana to the Bay Area to ensure that his packages would bear a misleading postmark.
Right now, the ability to send completely anonymous e-mails is reserved for only those with a fairly sophisticated knowledge of computers. But Hoffman said that re-mailing systems are becoming increasingly available to everyone.
And unlike a regular letter-writer, an Internet user can contact thousands of readers at once.
Hoffman explained that one need only access a Jewish newsgroup and copy and paste a few months’ worth of e-mail addresses into a mailing list before sending the identical threat to thousands of people with one click of a key.
Recently, he said, someone sent a passage of Andrew Macdonald’s anti-Semitic novel “Turner Diaries” to thousands of Jews on Rosh Hashanah.
On the other hand, “I feel very conflicted,” Hoffman said, “because there are very positive aspects to being able to be private and secure” while using the Internet.
Regarding hate mail, however, “I come down on the side of saying that certain things shouldn’t be allowed to be anonymous.”
It is still easy to track a Web page’s origin, he said. But since most readers do not bother to trace these roots and simply take the pages’ contents at face value, the authors often use false identities — claiming, for instance, to be doctors.
In this way, Hoffman said, organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan can appear larger, stronger and more unified than they really are.
The Web has also made it possible for racist and antigovernment groups to work in small isolated cells without any central leadership and without personal contact between them, Hoffman said.
He noted that Timothy McVeigh, upset over the fate of David Koresh’s compound in Waco, Texas, gathered racist information over the Internet from William Pierce, founder of the National Alliance, and developed his plan to bomb the Alfred Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City from there.
It all happened without McVeigh meeting Pierce or, for that matter, Koresh.
As this kind of hate literature becomes better known, people often ask Hoffman what they can do about it.
“The answer is, you can’t do very much,” Hoffman said.
Despite Internet racism, the ADL strongly supports the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of expression, he said.
The only defense against racist ideas is to expose who their authors are, what they do, whom they hurt and where they diverge from generally accepted interpretations of history and society.
That exposure, Hoffman added, should be enough.
“My sense,” he said of racist literature, “is that the overwhelming majority of Americans would reject this.”