Another Yes Men hoax. The group that has
delighted in bringing derision to the Geneva-based World Trade
Organization has apparently struck again, and their handiwork is
clever indeed. 
Added
2002-05-24, 12:38 pm: The signs all point to the involvement of
The Yes Men and RTMark -- read on for the gory details.
This morning I received a press release
apparently from the communications office of the WTO, with the
headline: World Trade Organization will disband, refound under new
charter.
The press release claimed:
As of September, agreements reached
under the WTO will be suspended pending ratification by the new
organization, tentatively referred to as the Trade Regulation
Organization... Existing agreements... each will be subject to
individual review for compliance with the TRO's charter, which is
based upon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Disbanding for humanitarian reasons sounded quite unlike the WTO I
have come to know and dislike. The press release pointed for further
details to gatt.org. In the past
this site has been central to hoaxes and spoofs at the WTO's expense
-- see for example this mirrored
copy of a New York Times story on a highly amusing speech
delivered to an international group of lawyers meeting in Austria. The
WTO itself has deplored
gatt.org.
Several things made me suspicious of the press release. First, the
domain name gatt.org is registered to someone in Washington
D.C. with the email address jonathan@killyourtv.com. Hmm.
Second, the email headers in the press release revealed that it had
been sent from panix.com, a venerable ISP in New York City but an
unlikely source for a press release from Geneva. Updated 2002-05-24, 12:38 pm:
(Sources tell me there have been rumors about Panix turning a blind
eye in the past to questionable mass mailings, one might almost call
them spam, from RTMark and The Yes Men.) And third, I found the actual
home page of the World Trade Organization at wto.org. It was very similar to the
material at gatt.org except for the press release and its
supposed backup
research. In fact
Updated 2002-05-24, 12:38 pm: many of the
intra-site links at gatt.org point instead to wto.org. See this site map for links to
other gatt.org pages, as well as some on rtmark.com and theyesmen.org.
The emailed press
release was prefaced with a realistic-sounding note:
[NOTE: On May 21, information
regarding the WTO's restructuring was released prematurely at a
special luncheon of CPA
Australia, Sydney. The early release of this information, which
met with overwhelming approval, has accelerated this announcement,
originally scheduled for next Friday.]
The home of the supposed early
release of the news is clever. AAP MediaNet in an Australian site
that carries press releases without verifying their authenticity. The
announcement
appears to have been posted by one Barbara Magee, who is indeed a
press officer of CPA Australia, according to this
page. The release might have been faxed to AAP MediaNet from
almost anywhere; it is not clear that Ms. Magee was involved in the
hoax. (Online submission of press releases to the AAP MediaNet site
requires a membership login. If I were the hoaxters I would not have
wanted to risk a charge of breaking and entering; faxing is safer.)
The hoax goes still deeper. The premature release of the WTO's
plans was supposed to have been made by one Kinnithrung Sprat,
Development and Economic Research officer for the WTO. There is such a
person; he works for the WTO; and he holds that title. Indeed, on May
21 he spoke to a meeting of the CPA Australia organization. But
according to the program,
his topic was the globalization of agri-business, not the dissolution
of the WTO.
Added 2002-05-24, 12:38
pm: OK, now it gets really twisty. A source emailed me
as follows:
I think there may actually be a
grain of truth underlying this all. I'm very foggy on details, but I
believe that one of the rtmark/YM guys actually was down in
Australia giving a talk -- as a representative of gatt.org, no
doubt.
So the possibility exists that CPA Australia's Barbara Magee might
have posted the "news" on the AAP MediaNet site herself, in all
sincerity -- having been taken in by a speaker who was a gatt.org
imposter.
The contact information given in the AAP MediaNet press
release for Sprat and for the WTO's claimed PR spokesman are email
addresses at gatt.org, suspiciously backed up by addresses at Hotmail
and Yahoo.fr. A test message sent to these free accounts bounced
(given the thoroughness of the hoaxters, I'm surprised they didn't
register these addresses). Of course any inquiries addressed to
gatt.org will go to the hoaxters, who will -- if their past behavior
is any indication -- happily confirm the news of the WTO's imminent
dissolution.
Background
The multilateral trading system known as GATT (the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) has been in effect since 1948. In
1995, GATT's oversight transitioned to a new organization, the WTO.
The domain name wto.org was registered in April 1995. The name
gatt.org was registered in October 1997 by Jonathan Prince of
Washington D.C., who runs a blog called Kill Your TV. As far as I can
discover, the name gatt.org was never used by the WTO's
predecessor.
As protesters planned
the disruption of the Seattle meeting of the WTO (Nov. 30 - Dec. 3,
1999), Jonathan Prince was approached by representatives of a shadowy
international organization calling itself The Yes Men. They wanted use of
the domain name gatt.org, and Prince obliged. The Yes Men are
affiliated with anti-corporate hoaxters Rtmark; and it was Rtmark who put up
the first content at gatt.org, according to Prince. The Internet
Archive's WayBack Machine
captured a snapshot of the first
hoax site on November 28, 1999. According to Rtmark's site, gatt.org had
been published 8 days earlier, garnering a fair amount of press coverage.
