The Ku Klux Klan in America, the historian Wyn Craig Wade calls Stetson Kennedy "the single most important factor in pre- venting a postwar revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the North."   This did not happen because Kennedy was courageous or resolute or unflappable, even though he was all of these. It happened because Kennedy understood the raw power of information. The Ku Klux Klan was a group whose power-much like that of politicians or real- estate agents or stockbrokers-was derived in large part from the fact that it hoarded information. Once that information falls into the wrong hands (or, depending on your point of view, the right hands), much of the groups advantage disappears.       In the late 1990s, the price of term life insurance fell dramatically. This posed something of a mystery, for the decline had no obvious cause. Other types of insurance, including health and automobile and homeowners coverage, were certainly not falling in price. Nor had there been any radical changes among insurance companies, insur- ance brokers, or the people who buy term life insurance. So what hap- pened? The Internet happened. In the spring of 1996, Quotesmith.com became the first of several websites that enabled a customer to com- pare, within seconds, the price of term life insurance sold by dozens of different companies. For such websites, term life insurance was a per- fect product. Unlike other forms of insurance-including whole life insurance, which is a far more complicated financial instrument- term life policies are fairly homogeneous: one thirty-year, guaranteed policy for $1 million is essentially identical to the next. So what really matters is the price. Shopping around for the cheapest policy, a process that had been convoluted and time-consuming, was suddenly made simple. With customers able to instantaneously find the cheap-