You open your email and see that a well-meaning friend has sent you an urgent message: a mutual acquaintance has been arrested for some unlikely transgression. Maybe it’s a hoax; maybe not. It turns out there are numerous free websites that make it simple to generate credible looking stories that your friend or co-worker was arrested for “driving naked” or “having sex with a sheep.”253 Even credible news sources get hacked, sometimes by intruders and sometimes by insiders. Long before there was an Internet, when the hard copy version of the Encyclopedia Britannica was the world’s definitive reference work, I heard about an insider there who used a text editor on the encyclopedia’s word processing files to substitute “the Prophet Muhammad” for every instance of “Jesus Christ.” The giant, expensive book set nearly went to print that way. Online pranksters such as “The Yes Men” have also wreaked havoc. In one case, they were able to tank the price of the shares of Union Carbide by putting out bogus news stories about the Bhopal disaster and how the company was planning to atone for it.
