Surfing the Web for Contraband

Want to take a trip into a netherworld where everything the government controls or prohibits is available 24 hours a day? AK-47s, no questions asked. Steroids, pot and painkillers, no prescription necessary. Bootleg copies of your favorite band's music, that $700 Photoshop program you can't afford or your own copy of the next Hollywood block-buster before it appears in theaters: They're all here, just for the ask-ing. And, thanks to the Internet, it's no longer necessary to drive through weird neighborhoods, slip down alleys or rub elbows with sketchy characters. These days, you can score goods on the virtual black market without leaving your living room or dorm.

Just how much illegal traffic cruises the information highway is anybody's guess. Two years ago, when eBay introduced the joys of online buying and selling, the commerce was mostly harmless stuff: old Twister games, Poké-mon cards and Beanie Babies. Soon guns, knives, horns from endangered rhinos and other items that are illegal to possess, own or sell began appearing on the market. Recently, there was the much-publicized sale of a baby (which was bid up to $109,000) and a kidney ($5.7 million), both of which turned out to be hoaxes. "The nice, warm personal community that eBay was in its early days experienced some growing pains as it became popular," says eBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove. Although he didn't elaborate on exactly where it hurt, the Federal Trade Commission, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the New York State Department of Consumer Affairs demanded the company clean up its act. EBay has since nixed the gun ads and has hired private investigators to aggressively enforce the user agreement and report illegalities to the proper authorities. But instead of being eradicated, the illegal activity has simply moved elsewhere.

Nailing down perps in the vastness of cyberspace is problematic enough; throw in the exponential increases in traffic, and the leg-tripping among local, state, federal and interagency jurisdictions, and it's not hard to figure out why Uncle Sam hasn't made much of a dent. From the ATF to your local precinct, you'd be surprised how few officers and agents even have e-mail accounts. According to special agent Steven Berry, supervisor of the National Press Office of the FBI, any proactive policing of cyberspace revolves almost exclusively around two words: child pornography. Everything else, Berry says, gets passed on to other agencies. It's the same at Customs. Because a lot of illegal goods are sold from foreign websites, the U.S. Customs Service, which must inspect all the packages, has had a cybersmuggling unit since 1997. Spokesman Bill Anthony says his unit is aware of the online trade in drugs, knives and Cuban cigars, but that it has no manpower to deal with it. "Basically," he says, "we're after big bad guys, not you in your house."

Still, the eBay debacle finally goaded our political leaders into some kind of action. In August 1999, Vice President Al Gore created the Interagency Working Group to Examine Unlawful Conduct on the Internet. Its first task, naturally, is to issue a report. In the meantime, for anyone with an Internet connection and less-than-noble intent, there's a world of potentially deadly contraband at your fingertips.

Bullet Train

It's easy for any person in this country to anonymously order paramilitary-grade firepower from his home computer and have it delivered right to his door or post office box--no age, background or other pesky questions asked. Typing the word gun into a search engine will link you to a world wide web of arms marketeers, auctions and virtual swap meets. (Type something more specific, like "firearms," and you don't have to sift through all the Daisy rifles and Sega toys.) Take a look at these:

For sale: Uzi-model B. excellent condition preban model B9mm manuf. by IMI Israel comes w/3 clips soft bag and hard case some ammo. Pict. available. $1400.

Private sale: AK-47 folding stock model with ammo, case, magazines and original box $800.

For sale: Glock pistol-19. The perfect carry pistol in 95 percent condition with Ashley Express tritium big dot night sights, one 15-round mag and one 10-round (both factory drop free). Free shipping. Texas private seller. $500.

These goods, and plenty of others like them, can be at your door within days, whether you're an honest Joe, a kid logging on to his father's AOL account or an armed robber on parole.

"We view the Internet as an ongoing gun show," says Bill Kinsella, spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. "In some areas it's used by people who cannot otherwise legally purchase a gun." In 1998, for instance, Illinois gun dealer Thomas Bellas was arrested and charged with selling weapons to a 17-year-old. The boy's parents discovered the cache and called the police. Bellas, however, died of a heart attack before he could be tried.

But it's not the licensed gun dealers who have turned the Internet into an easy-access arms mart. It's private parties, Kinsella says, who have little to lose by cutting a few corners in an un-supervised marketplace. If eBay no longer offers guns, try heading over to Yahoo's Auctions and Classifieds. One of the site's senior producers, Susan Carls, acknowledges that guns are bought and sold with little monitoring. More hardware can be found at gun-centered sites such as the Firearms Trading Post, where many user agreements actually tell buyers and sellers that they're on an honor system. It didn't take long to find individuals at both these sites who were willing to ship heavy-duty firepower to an out-of-state address, c.o.d.--which is both illegal and scary--after nothing more than an exchange of e-mail. So how many agents does the federal government have enforcing gun laws online? "We don't have anybody like that," says Kinsella. "If we get allegations, the ATF will have someone take a look at it." Reassuring words with which to pack your kids off to high school.

The Friendliest Pharmacy

For decades, if you wanted to self-medicate, you were forced to deal with the vagaries of a street score or persuade a doctor to write a prescription. Nowadays, you just log on. Marijuana, pills, GHB (ecstasy in a bottle or a date rape drug, depending on who you ask), Viagra, Xanax and codeine are all available on the web.

"No prescription? No problem," reads a home page, one of perhaps hundreds of U.S.-based web pharmacies. Answer a few quick questions, enter your credit card number and, for around $7-$14 a pill, plus a onetime "consultation fee" ($50-$100), your Viagra will be on its way in a day or so. These pharmacies sell other unscheduled prescription drugs (substances the Food and Drug Administration has determined have little to no potential for abuse) such as Xenical, Celebrex, Propecia and Well-butrin. Last year, the American Medical Association issued an ethics statement against Internet prescribing unless the patient and doctor meet face-to-face, and the feds have begun to investigate.

"Congress and state legislatures have enacted safeguards to protect consumers against injuries resulting from unsafe products, counterfeit products and the inappropriate practice of medicine and pharmacy," says an FDA spokesman. "The Internet makes it easy to bypass those safeguards." There is only one documented death associated with online prescribing. A man with a family history of coronary disease ordered Viagra and then had a heart attack after he used it as directed.

The inventory at domestic web pharmacies doesn't extend much beyond Viagra and Propecia. To score serious meds, druggies used to have to drive to Tijuana. Now pharmacies in Mexico, Thailand and other countries with lax oversight of their pill dispensaries have opened shop on the web, offering hundreds of scheduled drugs--Xanax, codeine, steroids and many that have no FDA approval--and will deliver via UPS with just your credit card number.

The aggressive marketing among domestic Viagra mills makes them relatively easy to find and patronize, but locating the right overseas operation is a bit more difficult. "Painkillers are the hardest medicines to access no matter how you go about it, because they are commonly abused," says one customer who claims he suffers from osteoarthritis. He orders codeine and related drugs from overseas websites without a prescription, "because local doctors just want me to live with the pain." He says he found out about the websites through Usenet newsgroup postings and by word-of-mouth.

"You can get Vicodin, hydrocodone [Percocet], Xanax and anabolic steroids over the web without prescriptions," says Bobby Douglas, who operates a website from his home in Orlando, Florida. For $10.95 a month, billed to a credit card, customers get a password to their "top secret" website and a "yellow pages" of names, addresses and inventories of foreign pharmacies along with a rating of their reliability. Douglas claims to have over 2000 subscribers and says he makes a lot more money than he did when he was an aeronautical engineer.

"In 1995 there were only a handful of sites," says a spokesman from Meds-R-Us, another pharmacy-information peddler. "Now we have several hundred in Europe, Asia and Africa. They supply people with meds for a short time, and then Customs starts seizing their shipments. The sites then change their URLs and their packaging and use a different carrier, and--presto--they're back for another few months. Knowledge of which online RXs are delivering and which ones have just been shut down is precious information."

The FDA admits it's virtually powerless to regulate drugstores outside the U.S., and because the goods come in plain packaging, Customs officials say they usually have no way to identify them. Even something as pungent as marijuana, ordered from websites in pot-friendly Amsterdam, easily finds its way to our shores. Michelle Goldberg, a reporter for San Francisco-based Speak magazine, says someone in her office discovered a virtual coffee shop and "as a lark" mailed $92 in cash to the address in Amsterdam. "We were really surprised when it came, and that it came so fast," she says. Inside the plainly wrapped package was a quarter ounce of weed. Other URLs, belonging to outfits in Canada and Holland, offer seeds. There's even a medical-marijuana outfit that operates from within the U.S.

What gets the FDA's attention is GHB and one of its precursor chemicals, GBL. Although GBL is ostensibly a cleaning fluid, it is widely advertised on drug-related newsgroups and websites. "We already have a number of enforcement actions against those people--injunctions, seizures and developing cases. We are taking action to shut down those sellers," says an FDA spokes-man. Within weeks of this statement, at least one GHB operation had disappeared from the web.

Screen This!

But for the occasional appearance of an audience member's silhouette in the (continued on page 172) Web Contraband (continued from page 148) foreground, you wouldn't know that the version of South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut playing on the laptop wasn't rented at Blockbuster. But this screening occurs months before the first legitimate copy of the South Park movie hits the stores. And then there's the fact that nobody actually paid for it. A 16-year-old high school student with a fancy computer and a high-speed Internet hookup downloaded it in about five hours from a secret site he'd heard about in a chat room. He then "burned" the movie onto two blank CD-ROMs and gave it to a friend.

This bootleg South Park is what's known as a "camera job," a film that is pirated on a digital camera in a movie theater and then made available over the Internet. Other, rarer bootlegs are "screeners," digitized movies made from stolen copies of the advance-view video-cassettes that circulate within the film industry. Even LucasFilm, working with the FBI, couldn't prevent Phantom Menace screeners from premiering on cyberkids' laptops at the same time it did in theaters.

"There is a whole universe of activity and it is going to take off," says Ric Hirsch, senior VP and director of the worldwide antipiracy program for the Motion Picture Association of America. Right now, movie piracy requires special know-how, not to mention some pricey hardware and software. But the future doesn't look good for the industry. Technological breakthroughs in data compression along with faster Internet hookups mean that even a feature film can be downloaded in a few hours. Other digital formats, such as MP3, can whip across the planet even faster. There are so many varieties of bootleg software, known as warez, that it has its own glossary. Most people in the Internet underground say that the real exchanges don't happen so much on the world wide web (cyberspace's Main Street) but through FTP, Internet Relay chat rooms and the obscure Hotline--communication platforms most casual web users don't even know exist.

"These files are for private purposes only and should not be downloaded or viewed whatsoever. If you are affiliated with any government or antipiracy group, you cannot enter."

Yeah, right. Click through this disclaimer and you dive into a virtual goody bag of illegal stuff. The listed contents are a screener of The Blair Witch Project, some MP3s and "backup" copies of every popular software program. The only limits to how much you can leech come from your conscience and your connection speed.

But unlike the gun buyers and druggies who have only the government to worry about, data bandits piss off a more menacing beast--the private sector. Attack-dog groups including the MPAA, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Business Software Alliance--funded by just about every large corporation in the world--have gone on the offensive.

"We've hired a number of people to surf the Net and find these sites, investigate them and try to identify the people at the other end," says Bob Kruger, who serves as vice president of enforcement for the BSA. "We probably shut down between 50 and 100 operations a month." But Kruger is frustrated by the assistance he's getting from the Department of Justice. The software industry often resorts to civil means, like rattling a few cease and desists, to protect copyrighted product. "But the goal," Kruger says, "is to get some of them thrown into jail."

Lonesome no More

It shouldn't come as a shock that the oldest profession is being plied along the information highway. Check out the thousands of listings that come up when you type "escort service" into any search engine (most have banner ads for Viagra, too). How does this sound? "Petite, sweet, absolutely adorable Japanese/Korean college girl. Very fresh and bright, fair skin, slender body, fun and vivacious, sexy." It's more convenient than rifling through the Yellow Pages or the ads in the backs of adult newspapers. Many cyberbrothels provide thumbnail photos (just don't be naive and expect to get the exact woman pictured) and cities where she can travel. Then, after reference checks and a charge of $300 and up, the woman of your dreams--and, often, a driver-bodyguard--will show up at your home or hotel. Occasionally, you'll find solo operators prowling the adult chat rooms.

Smoking

If Fidel Castro has thumbed his nose at the U.S. embargo in decades past, he's laughing it up in the information age. On one Usenet group there's usually somebody hawking genuine Havanas. "If you are looking for authentic Habanos, I can assist," claims one e-mail solicitation, the result of which is a price list of 53 varieties of cigars unavailable to U.S. buyers. Offshore outfits can do their business on the world wide web. An e-mail query about how orders from the U.S. will be handled yields this explanation: "I believe that you know that there are two options: (1) Sending a normal shipment to a non-U.S. address. (2) Reboxing and sending the bands separately in an envelope."

Go to the Head of the Class

Are you a college student who has no qualms about handing in a 10-page essay on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals that you didn't write? Well, for around $90 you can download one in minutes. Outfits such as termpapers-on-file.com charge between five and 10 dollars a page for their inventory (10s of thousands) of off-the-rack papers on topics ranging from accounting to zoology. Some listings even show the grade the paper received the first time around. Cheapskates can cruise free sites such as Dorian's Paper Archive, or hunt through Usenet groups where many students simply post papers for the taking. While universities can discipline students for submitting plagiarized work, selling "research material" is perfectly legal. As anyone who actually read his report on constitutional law before he handed it in knows, these businesses are protected by the First Amendment.

Paging Siegfried & ROY

There is one kind of online contraband that puts even the occasional dabbler at high risk of getting a visit from the G-man. "As soon as eBay started getting popular and became accessible to a lot of people, we'd search the site for 'skins' or for 'taxidermy' and hundreds of auctions would come up," recalls U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent Neil Mendelsohn. "Some of the things we've seen are tigerskin rugs, leopardskins, all the spotted cats. Rhino horn is very valuable--and protected." Mendelsohn finds that most Internet sellers are not professional poachers but people who are offering trophies and pelts they just happened to find in their attics.

As a taxidermist, Michael Moore should have known better. But it was mid-1999 and eBay fever was running high, and he was scouring his shop for things to sell. He settled on a stillborn white tiger and a leopard pelt that had been left in his shop 20 years ago. Together they went for $1500 on eBay. "I was packing the stuff up when Mendelsohn and two other special agents showed up at my house," he says.

These days, it's hard to find endangered species online. Animal and environmental advocates are quick to report any listing they find that involves endangered animals. A site such as eBay posts lists of forbidden items--which takes away the ignorance excuse--and their presence on the Internet means the goods are automatically considered as being offered for interstate sale. "These are tailor-made federal violations, and they're just a few keystrokes away," Mendelsohn says. "It really is a lot more convenient."

How does this sound? "Petite, sweet, absolutely adorable Japanese/Korean college girl."