There's nothing new about young men acting in ways that put fear into the hearts of ordinary mortals, and we have lots of laws to keep them away from danger. But as several recent news items attest, there's no way to keep them away from the Internet which may have an unparalleled capacity for making mischief. PNS commentator Kerry Tremain is co-author of the upcoming "Witness In Our Time," published by Smithsonian Institution Press.

Young male aggression is as predictable as puberty. That doesn't mean that a killer lurks inside every boy -- all but a very few kids do just fine. But every culture in human history has needed a way to channel youthful aggression. Ours is to hand over technology that can wreak havoc.

I'm not speaking of guns, but of the Internet. Guns are bad enough, but the Internet is an angry boy's dream come true. Ask the 18 year-old Israeli who broke into the Pentagon's computer system. Or the young Filipinos who, angry at the price of Internet access, launched a virus that caused untold millions of dollars in damages.

And although it's remotely possible to imagine a world without guns, almost no one can conceive of a world without the Internet.

Cyber pranks are deliciously devious. Their style of aggression is one that far predates the Internet, substitutes imagination for brute force, and holds out hope of avoiding detection.

In fifth grade, I pulled that sort of prank on the class bully. On our playground battlefield in Missouri, we boys daily recreated the conditions, as best we could, of barbarian life. We played a crude game that we simply called "Ball." The object was for you or a teammate to hold onto a rubber ball as long as possible while the entire other team tried to tackle you.

One day Chuck, the toughest guy in the class, started kicking one of my teammates while he lay on the ground. I challenged Chuck. He punched me hard in the nose. The game went on.

I surely stunted my educational growth by spending many, many hours in class imagining how I'd get even. Brute force was out. Instead, with two pals, I conspired to steal a teacher-parent form, forge my teacher's signature, write a scathing report on Chuck's classroom behavior and mail it to his father.

His father was well-known as a bully, too, and we were sure that, instead of calling the teacher after reading the note, his dad would kick the crap out of Chuck.

Thankfully, the friend who was supposed to mail the document chickened out. I made a show of bawling him out but I was secretly relieved. Our scrawl would probably have given us away and got us in serious trouble.

Even worse, the plan might have worked. Aggression is obsessive and often, like molten lava, takes the path of least resistance. Get loaded, grab a gun and fire.

But my revenge fantasies rarely involve just a shootout. Aggression can also be inventive, devious, and enormously creative. (Like anger, creativity thrives on obsession.)

In the virtual world, crude versions of aggression are available, as any frequenter of chat rooms knows. But online, where barriers to imagination are lowered by anonymity, more inventive forms of aggression are starting to grow their wings.

Adults are certainly getting into the act. Internet auctioneers face increasing fraud. Divorced spouses deliberately destroy their ex's credit rating and wait for the financial cybergods to wreak their revenge.

Indeed, representatives of the world's leading industrial nations are currently meeting to try and craft solutions to Internet crime. The U.S. is already spending millions to protect itself from rogue states who try to disrupt our communication systems.

But so far, the biggest threat has come from angry adolescents. Technology -- cars in my day -- has abetted cultural change in allowing teens to construct a world outside adult care and supervision. We can't put the Internet genie back in the bottle, but perhaps we could pay more attention.

When Onel A. de Guzman, the young Filipino computer student, was questioned about launching the ILOVEYOU virus, he suggested that it was just a prank, that he didn't mean it. That's exactly what I would have said if I'd been caught getting back at Chuck, that I didn't mean it. But I did.