had never heard of, amidst all the predictable noise from a thousand sources about the dangers of social media. McKenrick and her team, for their part, watched the reaction from the right-wing press and the hard core of the Republican Party, her natural constituency. There was interest in what she had said. It was high time that someone got control of the anti-life, anti-gun and anti-Americanism that passed for normal on so much of the internet, and if Diane McKenrick thought she could do it, then she ought to come on out and tell the nation how.
The senator talked to people whose support would be critical if she decided to take things further. She concluded that enough of them were behind her.
Two weeks after the Denver bombing, Diane McKenrick stood up in front of a press conference, waved a copy of Andrei Koss’s statement, read the first sentence, and said that someone in Congress had to take a stand. She then issued a five-point plan for regulation of social networking sites, involving higher levels of transparency, increased accountability, and, most radically, the holding of officers of social networking companies personally answerable for enabling criminal activities that could be demonstrated to have been planned or promoted by use of the site. She announced that she was sponsoring a bill to put her proposed measures in place before any further catastrophes befell the American people.
McKenrick’s proposal was challengeable on at least three constitutional grounds and, in normal circumstances, wouldn’t have merited discussion. But in normal circumstances, Diane McKenrick, who was as wily an operator as any three-term senator, wouldn’t have put the proposal forward. Challenges would take years. If her legislation did make it through, only to be struck down later, it would make little difference to her. By then the election would have taken place, and she would either be the US president or still have another four years in her term as senator. And if the legislation didn’t make it through, she would still cement her place as the champion of the hawks and have a host of targets amongst her rivals to beat up on security grounds as she made her run for the presidency.
If Diane McKenrick was hoping to touch a chord on the national stage, she did, to an extent that not even she could have envisaged.
Her proposal polarized the nation. Emotion was pent up after Denver on all sides of the political spectrum, just waiting for a valve to vent. Hardcore users of social networks – disproportionately young, educated and affluent – came out against the senator with visceral revulsion. Light or non-users of social networks – disproportionately old, poorly educated and blue collar – swung behind her. The committed right, bruised by the fact that Buckett and Hodgkin had emerged from their own shadowy fringe, saw in McKenrick’s attack a way of shifting the blame towards a target they could excoriate. The committed left saw it as an assault on freedom and diversity. But in those early days after Denver, it took courage to make a case that people should be free to say what they chose and exchange whatever information they desired without being castigated as soft on terrorism. Many liberal politicians spoke softly or went to ground. Right-wing politicians felt empowered to raise the volume, telling hair-raising stories of things that had been done and said on social networks that were severely distorted, if not entirely fabricated. The first amendment was in retreat before a posse of enraged vigilantes who seemed to have the wind at their backs. Not sure which way the chips were going to fall, the president prevaricated. His press secretary announced that the White House was studying the senator’s proposal.
In the furore, the facts of what Buckett and Hodgkin had actually done on Fishbowl became unimportant. Ideas of creating an American Taliban, which Buckett had aired a couple of times, were treated largely as a joke by others on the website, who failed to grasp his intent. Reading his posts carefully now, it was possible, with hindsight, to find clues that pointed to Denver, although there was nothing approaching an explicit plan that he enunciated, and the ravings of some of the other participants in these forums were even more lurid. In this world of violent fantasy, it seemed, Buckett had been a rare example of someone who was prepared to act. Nothing in his words picked him out as that person.
But someone in the FBI was leaking information