WHITE POWER'S NEW FACE / Shocking murders of judge's husband and mother point up Internet's potential for breeding 'lone wolf' supremacists

Without Matt Hale, the white supremacist who sits in a Chicago jail cell awaiting sentencing for plotting to kill a federal judge, his once-prominent hate group has splintered and dwindled in size. But authorities say the white-power movement doesn't need Hale, who once held rock-star status among skinheads, to be dangerous. It has the Internet. "Someone with a computer and a DSL line who starts following this stuff thinks he's going to be a hero if he kills someone," said Pat Webb, a former San Francisco FBI agent who investigated the Aryan Nation in 1984. "It would be a mistake to underestimate these people's potential for violence." The Web was where white supremacist groups posted a barrage of hateful information about the judge Hale plotted to kill, Joan Humphrey Lefkow, before her husband and mother were slain last week in her home in Illinois.