ast Tuesday, on the 18th
anniversary of the lethal gas spill at a Union Carbide plant
in Bhopal, India, that killed thousands of people, journalists
received an e-mail press release claiming to be from Dow
Chemical, which now owns Union Carbide. It was a fake, as
was the Web site called up by a hyperlink in the e-mail.
The release supposedly explained why Dow refuses to clean
up Bhopal or help people who remain sick from the spill. The
link was to dow-chemical.com, a Web site that looked much like
Dow's real Dow.com site, but that included such fake items as
a "draft" of a speech by Dow's chief executive, Michael D.
Parker, disavowing Dow's responsibility for Bhopal.
The hoax was the work of the Yes Men, a group of critics of
business and government who gained attention in 2000 with
Gatt.org, a bogus World Trade Organization site.
This time the Yes Men were too clever by at least half:
they registered the site with Gandi.com in the name of James
Parker, Michael Parker's real son. So the younger Mr. Parker
took ownership, and Dow took the site down last Wednesday
night.
"We thought it would be funny, but it turned out to be
stupid," said Andrew Bichlbaum, a Yes Men volunteer in Paris
who set up the site. "We gave them the chance to claim the
site as their property."
The Yes Men resurrected the site on Friday, as
dow-chemical.va.com.au, whose host is Virtual Artists, an
Australian company. Any visitor can download a copy of the
site, Mr. Bichlbaum said, "so that if Dow gets this one too,
it will continue to exist."
Although no other environmental group has acknowledged
participation in the hoax, at least one voiced approval. "We
support the people who published this site," said Casey
Harrell, the Bhopal specialist at Greenpeace, one of Dow's
most vocal critics.
Dow, meanwhile, maintains that the Web site violated
numerous cyberspace copyright laws.
"It is ironic," said John Musser, a Dow spokesman, "that
groups that position themselves as public defenders against
companies that act irresponsibly, unethically or unlawfully
are turning out to be the poster children for those very
behaviors."