What’s really freaky is that a woman from Walkers or a similar discussion group—out of all the thousands on the Net—calls up _The Diane Rehm Show_ and ever so politely shreds the arguments that Stoll has made in _Oil_. A few years ago he wrote _The Cuckoo’s Egg_, a wonderful book about his battles against errant hackers, and parts of _Snake Oil_ do ring true, but oh how wrong he is about the more cosmic issues. Confronted with the Walkers-style example, Stoll acknowledges that, yes, maybe the Net could be of use to people who need support. After all, the very anonymity he’s assailed can work in favor of honest dialogue. Exactly. One of the glories of Walkers, however, is that depressed people can be as open or nameless as they want. What’s more, they can even go Face to Face. Several Walkers near me, for example, will spend hours and hours talking in person with others dogged by this scourge of Lincoln and Churchill. Dave Harmon is the man behind the Walkers list. He’s a twenty-eight-year-old Harvard grad, bearded, bespectacled, and a little on the heavy side, as he describes it. I learn that he works as a programmer for a company that writes software to use with mice—the computer kind. His depression is moderate. Come the middle of the night, he may wake up in a cold sweat; he can also suffer flagging energy. Several years ago Harmon was crouched in a Boston bus shelter, enjoying a break from a crowded but rainy New Year’s Eve celebration, when he took out a notebook and wrote a poem. “I am the Walker in Darkness,” it read in part, “I am the bringer of light.” The next day Harmon called the company that had hooked him into the Internet—he wanted to start a list for depressed people interested in art and magic. “The thing that makes the Net so powerful is that you don’t have to get into a big deal to start a minor newsgroup or a mailing list.” The newsgroups and the mailing lists can precisely reflect Netfolks’ interests, loves, and fears—much more closely than, say, CBS or the _New York Times_, or even niche programs on cable. Oklahoma City and the Ban-the-Bomb-Manual Panic A citation for _The Terrorist’s Handbook_ popped up on my screen a minute after I started a search of the World Wide Web under the word “explosives.” I apparently would be able to make “book bombs,” “lightbulb bombs,” “phone bombs.”