Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!know!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!lavaca.uh.edu!menudo.uh.edu!sugar!karl
From: karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Re: Evidence (was Re: Musing on Constitutionality)
Message-ID: <6740@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Date: 7 Oct 90 21:39:37 GMT
References: <8306@helios.TAMU.EDU> <26938:Sep1814:48:2390@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <4572@qip.UUCP> <1990Sep20.221955.10879@spectrum.CMC.COM> <6657@sugar.hackercorp.com> <43541@sequent.UUCP>
Reply-To: karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer)
Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston
Lines: 83

In article <43541@sequent.UUCP> jimp@crg1.UUCP (James Pilcher) writes:
>While I agree with you that holding sysop responsible for everything would
>be a disaster, you should note that a phone line is SUPPOSED to be private,
>whereas a net is assumed to be public. Bulletin boards have been misused in 
>all kinds of ways; should a sysop who runs a board for child molesters
>be free of all responsibility? This has happened, here in Portland, by
>the way.

At the kind of data densities and volumes we're talking about with a
Usenet feed, approximately 10 megabytes per day and growing geometrically, 
it is entirely possible that this sort of thing will go on without the sysops 
knowledge at all.

Sure, if your login banner or other things put up by the sysop solicit or
encourage the use of the system for illegal purposes, or if it is somehow 
clear that illegal activities are going on with the Sysop's knowledge and 
consent, I think the sysop should get in trouble.

But on some of the hotter BBSes these days, your are talking hundreds of
megabytes of data and soon gigabytes of data, and if some users have found 
some unseen/unused nook or cranny to conspire or otherwise make trouble, I 
don't think the sysop should be hassled.  Likewise as I mentioned earlier, 
the sysop of a big system *cannot possibly know* the contents of every message 
that's coming through from the Usenet feed.  

To hassle the sysop in a case like this would be the equivalent of hassling
Kroger's because some kids had been using an empty woodpecker hole in a tree 
behind one of their stores as a mail drop.

(I submit the opinion that any law requiring sysops to read all messages
 received at their machine would be unconstitutional as it limits free
 speech.  Many have said that free speech doesn't apply because the
 systems are all owned by someone, etc, and as owners their control of
 their systems is absolute, but it is not clear to me that at least
 some aspects of the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech would
 not apply to bulletin boards and networks, as they do serve as a transmission
 medium for information and the opinions amongst their users, and in
 previous comp.org.eff.talk articles Mike Godwin quoted some court opinions 
 along the lines of that any means of transmitting an idea was protected.)

Now once the sysop has discovered or, say, been notified by a user that
illegal activities are going on, is the sysop obligated to notify the 
authorities or take other action?  I think so, if the activity is in a
non-private manner, i.e. a newsgroup or equivalent.  (Email, I think, 
should be private to the degree possible, and people should start routinely
encrypting mail to each other to help insure that privacy, but that's
another matter.)  

So if for example I was notified by a user that some child molesters (Is
it really true about a child molestation BBS in Portland?  I kind of assumed
it was an urban legend.) were secretly using comp.protocols.tcpip.eniac
with a distribution of "local" as a means of conspiring to abuse children,
I would call the cops.

Hopefully the sysop would be allowed some discretion such that, for
example, a user who was chronically abusive to other users could, after
repeated warnings, be kicked off the system -- not the net, just the system.

Another opinion, even though Houston Chronicle reporter Joe Abernathy
seems to hate the idea that the Usenet is so anarchic, its implementation
in the United States is such that it is harder to control centrally or
censor than most other networks.  I submit that cooperative networks with 
distributed ownership of the nodes and communication paths are inherently 
safer from central control than the single-owner variety.  Plus they
fragment better, that is, in the face of a massive failure or the intentional
shutdown of some big backbone sites, the broken-off subnets thus formed
still work among themselves, and it takes only one site willing to spend
a little extra time and/or money in each of a pair subnets to reconnect
those two subnets back together into a larger net.  Thus Usenet has continued
to function over time as various big sites (seismo et al) came and went.
Thus have the other public nets (Fido) become gatewayed to Usenet.
Thus Usenet is fault-tolerant, at least in a kind of queasy, quivering way.
(i.e. the scramble to replace a lost feed, occasionally unreliable email 
delivery, the article-with-a-space-in-the-ID bug, sites running too-old 
software, etc)

It's great stuff, and I find the continuing advancement of the capabilities
of the net to be quite exciting.  I hope we can manage to keep the government 
from taking it all away from us.  I guess that's what the EFF is all about...

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