Prelude to a Riot?

Another elaborate email hoax reminiscent of last year's AOL 4.0 cookies scare is now rapidly spreading among America Online's 12 million members.

The three-week-old message, essentially a chain letter, warns of an "AOL riot" scheduled for June 1, during which the service is to be "taken over" by hackers and turned into a "war zone" to protest "the outrage of AOL's increasing prices."

"We will be sending viruses out to thousands of AOL users," proclaims LcW – a possibly fictitious organization billing itself as "AOL's most elite hacker group."

"We will be terminating accounts. We will be hacking into Guide chat rooms and kicking guides offline. There will be no AOL Staff – just complete pandemonium."

The text is impressively bombastic and will no doubt achieve its purpose of frightening a good many America Online members, but on close examination it reveals itself to be little more than a hastily concocted slurry of lies, idle threats and laughable inconsistencies – i.e., it really is just another hoax, folks. AOL members can safely disregard it.

Here's the soon-to-be infamous warning:

AOL's security wing, headed by Tatiana Gau, Vice President of Integrity Assurance, has already swung into action to counter the disinformation. "The June 1, 1998 riot e-mail is a hoax," reads the official statement released by her office. "The allegations relating to the spreading of viruses and the tracking of whom the e-mail is forwarded to are false." (See the CIAC Hoax Page from the U.S. Dept. of Energy.)

Elaborating for ZDNN's Maria Seminerio (see her article, Scared of the 'AOL Riot'? Don't Be), Gau characterized the chain letter's claims as "idle threats." According to Gau, there's no feasible way for email to be tracked in the manner described, nor is it possible to terminate accounts or gain access to credit card numbers from outside the system.

Ironically, participants in anti-AOL Usenet forums mostly agree with Gau and have dismissed the riot warning as "a joke." Recently posted articles mock the absurdity of the self-proclaimed "elite hackers' group" threatening to compromise AOL's security while appending their individual screen names to the document, inviting cancellation of their own accounts.

Other Usenet articles make light of various inconsistencies in the message – for example, the author(s) evidently couldn't decide between May 1 and June 1 as the target date for the riot, so both dates are cited; nor, apparently, could they make up their minds how recipients who fail to forward the message ought to be punished. First they claim that disobedient users will have their AOL accounts terminated as of June 1; later they threaten to upload viruses to those same users' computers on the very date their accounts are to be cancelled.

So far, no one is convinced that an organization calling itself "LcW" even exists. There are no public references to it anywhere prior to its mention in the chain letter.

Yes, but is there going to be a riot?

The warning itself may be 99 percent bunk, but a question that will likely remain unanswered till June 1 is: will there or won't there be a riot?

As David Cassel, publisher of the AOL Watch newsletter, has observed, similar threats have come to a kind of fruition in the past, even though they, too, began in ignominy. The most recent example was the so-called "Valentine's Day Massacre of 1997," wherein a few hundred loosely-organized troublemakers showed up on February 14 to disrupt AOL chat rooms with a variety of harmless but annoying online pranks (see transcripts courtesy of AOL Watch). The same thing could happen on June 1, and wary users might want to avoid the chat rooms on that day in case there's a ruckus.

According to Cassel, the 1997 Valentine's Day was also billed as a "hackers' revolt," though in practice it had little to do with hacking per se:

It was a folk protest, friends. As I wrote in my follow-up to the mailing list, those 300 rioters were really just malcontents gathered to "voice their angst, their anger and their dissatisfaction." Elaborately honed macros spewed grafitti across a billion-dollar-a-year corporation; it was the disempowered raising voices against dubious statements about capacity expansion.

AOL must bristle at this apparent romanticizing of activities it would characterize as malicious, but there's a nugget of truth in the implication that a "David vs. Goliath" mentality lurks behind these doings.

In its headlong rush to become the world's largest online service, the company has laid itself open to the perception by members and outside observers alike that it's motivated by pure greed and cavalier in its response to the deteriorating quality of service bemoaned by existing members. Email bottlenecks, system outages, a spam explosion, and persistent security breaches have tarnished AOL's public image over the past couple of years. The coup de grace for many users came when a price hike for unlimited service was announced this February.

"Because of the outrage of AOL's increasing prices, LcW has decided to create a riot," says the message at hand. It's the language of protest, sure enough, expressing the sentiments of a good many America Online members. Does that confer folk hero status on its authors? Hardly, considering that the bulk of the message consists of threats and lies directed at innocent rank and file users. If it was intended to make a serious point, which is doubtful anyway, it fails on account of its utter insincerity.

If the June 1 riot comes to pass – whatever the motivations of its participants – it certainly won't be remembered as an event which humbled the great and powerful AOL. Much more likely, it will be remembered as an hour or two of juvenile hijinx during which the signal-to-noise ratio in AOL chat rooms grew even more unbearable than usual – hardly the stuff of which legends are made.

Related articles:

• Attack of the 'Blinking Buddy Chat Invites'
• 'Help Save Unlimited Access' Petition
• Instant Messages Stole My Password!
• Will AOL 4.0 Cookies Invade Users' Privacy?

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