Abetted by the growing ease and speed of communications, the Internet is increasingly becoming what famed futurist and author Vernor Vinge envisioned in his book, A Fire upon the Deep - "a Net of a million lies." But while Vinge saw this in a far-distant future, his nightmare may, in fact, already be realized in this decade.

EWatch is a service/software program that monitors, searches and identifies just about anything anyone writes or says in some 2,500 online publications; 63,000 Usenet groups and electronic mailing lists; and public discussion groups on America Online. It's an easy, one-step program for those who can pay the $16,000-plus yearly fee.

EWatch is now owned by PR Newswire. Last year, as a private company, eWatch brought in revenue of $162 million, selling its software to businesses, including several prominent public relations firms that resell it to their clients. PR Newswire claims that eWatch is merely a "clipping service" or a "search engine." In the minds of the less charitable, however, it is nothing more than a software cybersnitch.

There are some very valid reasons why companies might wish to avail themselves of a program like eWatch. Suppose someone spreads rumors or denigrates a company, hoping to profit financially from the fallout. Or maybe a supposedly neutral observer trashes a competitor's product in a public forum, damaging the competitor's reputation, management and sales. Using eWatch, a company can keep tabs on untrue, unproven and maliciously motivated rumors.

Credit where credit is due

Marcia Stepanek, the technology strategies editor at Business Week and an online columnist, has a decidedly more critical view of eWatch.

Stepanek interviewed Ted Skinner, eWatch's national product manager, who offered what those of us in the journalism trade call "killer quotes." Unfortunately, the quotes were subsequently disavowed; in a lengthy rebuttal posted to Slashdot, eWatch Vice President Nancy Sells wrote, "According to Ted Skinner, none of the quotes attributed to him in the entire story were from him."

An irate Renu Aldrich, manager of public relations at PR Newswire, told me the company was in negotiations with Business Week editors and wanted a retraction or editor's note about the "errors" and "misquotes" in Stepanek's column. No retraction or editor's note has been written. Columnist Stepanek, a 22-year news veteran, was quick to defend her work. "I stand by the column," she said. "All of the material for the column [came] from various Web sites the company has and interviews with people attached to the company. We're not retracting anything." She concluded the interview by stating: "I write for a living. I report for a living. And I'm accurate at what I do."

I told Aldrich that I'd like to interview Skinner myself. Aldrich said she wanted to be present. At first, I thought: Why not? But then I changed my mind. Since it would be a phone interview, there was always the possibility of out-of-sight note passing and coaching. Aldrich said she had to insist on being present, claiming Skinner was worried about being misquoted again. "No problem," I said. "He can tape the interview. That way if I misquote him, he'll have hard evidence. No word against word. He'll have the tape.

Aldrich's final answer: No.

So what was Skinner denying? He was quoted in Business Week as saying eWatch allowed perpetrators to be tracked ". . . using a variety of methods, such as following leads found in postings and Web sites, working with ISPs [Internet service providers], involving law enforcement, conducting virtual stings and other tactics."

EWatch/PR Newswire's materials recommend a private detective agency, Internet Crimes Group, which can "identify the entity behind the screen name(s) . . . Clients will receive a dossier detailing all the information about the subject during the inquiry [in seven to 10 days] for $4,995 per screen name." The PR Newswire stated that ICG is composed of ex-FBI agents, which means, as prominent computer security specialist James Atkinson put it, "They're doing the job any high school student could do for free, or that someone with a computer security background would do for a 10th of the cost, in half the time."

Spinmeister, spin me a song

At first, Richard Edelman, head of Edelman Public Relations Worldwide, one of the PR firms that resells eWatch, offered the same refrain I had been hearing for three days: "There are good and true reasons companies might want to use eWatch," he said. Edelman said that as far as his clients were concerned, the Net's ease of communication could be a problem, especially if someone with a financial interest in "shorting the stock" were to disparage a company. "We're at a disadvantage if we can't identify the source and then try to put the appropriate person forward as a countersource."

But Edelman - the head of the fifth largest public relations company in the world, with 2,000 employees, an annual $220 million in fees and 42 offices around the world - also admitted that the Internet, and programs like eWatch, permitted unethical and perhaps even illegal activities by its "monitors."

"I think you can distort chat," he offered as an example.

"I think you can pass along a clip from a chat room and say to reporters who are on a deadline, 'This is the basic sentiment of what's going on out there in a discussion of the company's business.' That's bull. It may not be. And that's wrong. There are also people who go into chat rooms, unattributed, and say they're representing themselves, when in fact they're actually hired by PR firms. That's not right.

"I'm sure there are PR firms . . . " and then, almost as if he couldn't help himself, Edelman took a long pause and continued, "In fact I know of PR firms who are doing that. Even pointing reporters to their own chat. That's terrible."

So the potential for abuse wasn't just a paranoid fantasy. Here was the head of one of the largest PR firms in the world, voicing specific, informed concerns that eWatch and similar programs would be - or were already being - used for unethical and quite possibly criminal purposes. "Agencies need to come up with rules and codes that say. 'This is good, and this is not good.' We have to self-regulate here," he concluded. "Otherwise, it's all going to be seen as garbage."

Or perhaps, as Vinge envisioned it, the Net of a million high-priced lies.