LONDON, England -- Ah, the first day of soccer in England, a tradition as rich as baseball's Opening Day in the States.
Cardiff v. Millwall. Spirited play by the players, cracked heads for the fans. A hard day's work for the medics, who treated 14 bloodied participants, and for the riot police, who arrested six. Same as it ever was.
Except this time, there was a very modern twist to the aggro -- the Net was blamed.
The reason for the ruckus, if the nation's print media are to be believed, was Paul Dodd's Web site, which amounts to little more than an advert for the self-confessed hooligan's book, England's Number One: The Adventures of a Serial Soccer Yob.
The excited journalists also focused on a message board on the site that was allegedly used to arrange the violent clashes in Cardiff and provided a "running commentary" on the violence.
No one dared to ask the question: How could this be done? Yobs with laptops and wireless connections?
Perhaps they doubled as shields for bricks thrown by the opposition.
Founder of UK cyber rights group Internet Freedom, Chris Ellison, was unimpressed by media reports that the Net was to blame. "It has become almost impossible to open a newspaper these days without coming across a scare story about the Net," he said.
While conceding it was possible that fans could exchange plans to organize violence on the Web, he said, "They'd have to be nuts. Everyone knows the police monitor these Web sites very closely."
An inspection of Dodd's message board reveals hundreds of messages, mostly of the "Your-team-are-rubbish" kind (although at times the language is, ahem, more colorful).
Duleep Allirajah of the soccer fans network Libero! said that the media obsession was "fairytale stuff" and claimed there are no longer any real soccer hooligans. Rather, he said, there are "highly organized set-piece confrontations."
He said that the cop's obsession with stamping out violence near soccer grounds has meant that the thugs have gone underground, and that they might be using the Net.
"It's plausible they could use Web sites," he said, adding: "No doubt they also use train tables."
While the Net might be as much an accessory to the crime as train timetables, there are worries that the hooligans are tooling up with the latest in high technology.
According to Gail Kent, spokeswoman for the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) and its Football Intelligence Unit, the hooligans are becoming more organized and violent. "They use mobile phones, pagers, and the Internet," she said.
While the criminal element may be taking advantage of the new technology, law enforcement agencies are not far behind.
The NCIS recently published Project Trawler, which identified soccer hooligans as a challenge to existing forms of law enforcement and order and recommended new teams of cybersleuths with specialized IT skills.
The government is also updating existing surveillance laws to ensure that criminals do not use the Net to bypass existing snooping legislation.
A review of the government's existing legislation, the Interception of Communications Act, was unveiled by Home Secretary Jack Straw in June. Among the proposals was new legislation to enable the police to force ISPs to hand over private emails to the police.
Now that should frighten the hooligans.
