Xref: utzoo alt.config:3513 news.admin:11799 comp.org.eff.talk:1146 Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!rpi!uwm.edu!linac!att!pacbell.com!ucsd!ucbvax!pasteur!galileo.berkeley.edu!jbuck From: jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck) Newsgroups: alt.config,news.admin,comp.org.eff.talk Subject: Re: Anonymous postings Message-ID: <10129@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 10 Jan 91 22:36:11 GMT References: <1991Jan7.190403.9267@alphalpha.com> <1991Jan09.175609.6303@looking.on.ca> <40305@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU Reply-To: jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck) Lines: 107 In article <40305@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>, gwh@tornado.Berkeley.EDU (George William Herbert) writes: > What I'm suggesting is this: We create an administrative policy guide > for News admins. Simply; it is not the responsibility of a news site to check > any information about any incoming news; however, if the site admin is notified > that an article at that site is illegal/libelous/etc, it is that site's > responsibility to as soon as reasonable locally cancel it. > Supporting this, we mount a drive to get the US Congress to approve a > law that supports this: basically, absolving any computer owner from legal > responsibility for an article that they did not origionate that they did not > know to be illegal in some way. George, Usenet is an international network. Brad Templeton, who raised this issue, is a Canadian. The US congress has jurisdiction of only a very limited part of the worldwide network. Different countries have different laws. Most western democracies besides the US have limits on racist speech; in many cases these laws were put on the books to help keep the Nazis and Fascists from rising again. This has caused problems in the past. Anyone remember Don Black? He identified himself as an "identity Christian" -- this is a hate group that claims Jesus Christ was really of Teutonic stock and had nothing to do with the Jews, and that denies that the Holocaust ever took place. Many of his postings explicitly violated the laws of many European countries -- they were often extremely anti-Semitic (I am not talking anti-Israeli; I am talking about explicit pro-Nazi stuff). For the early part of his Usenet career, net.politics went to Europe. While one of the reasons for cutting the transmission was cost, several system administrators cited laws against "hate literature" as a reason as well. Even if this weren't a problem, getting the attention of Congress to the legal status of Usenet is likely to backfire. Can you imagine what Jesse Helms will do when alt.sex.bondage is brought to his attention? Or even soc.motss? I'm afraid that any attempt to "fix" the ambiguous legal situation will only make the problems worse, and that the best solutions are to treat problem articles on a case-by-case basis. Here are some suggested responses to various possibilities; they are only suggestions based on my seven years or so around here: Example 1: someone posts a stolen credit card number on the net. Action: any system administrator who sees it should immediately forge a cancel message, and alert news.admin and other appropriate channels so it is removed wherever possible. Example 2: someone posts proprietary or licensed software on the net. This has happened before. ONCE IT HAS BEEN MADE CERTAIN THAT THE POSTING WAS ILLEGAL, procedure #1 should be followed. (In one of the more notorious occurrences of this, Reed College removed itself from the net completely after a student there illegally posted source code). In addition, a news.announce.important message should alert people at sites where cancel messages may not have reached that the indicated software is illegal and should be deleted. Software companies are familiar enough with how networks operate that I anticipate no trouble from them is this procedure is followed thoroughly. Example 3: "hate literature" type postings (extremely vile and racist postings that may be illegal in some countries) In the US, let them stand; flame the hell out of the jerk that sent them. In the past, it's often turned out that for the really sickening postings, the real sender is not the person in the From: line and that person is an innocent victim of a forged posting. If system administrators in other countries have a concern, they can decide on their own to cancel the articles: control messages should be limited in distribution to specific countries (this works best in those areas where the network is more closely organized and administered). The net as a whole can be made aware of problems in news.admin. Example 4: allegations of libel/slander. 99 times out of a hundred, this is just a round of namecalling that's gotten out of hand -- I prefer to work on soothing the ill feelings and correcting any errors than to treat it as a legal issue. There was only one semi-serious threat of a suit that I recall -- the idea was that harrassment of women on the net was so severe that companies that carry the net in the US could be sued under the equal employment opportunity/affirmative action rules, for providing conditions that discriminate against women. The person in question was the infamous Mark Ethan Smith. Nothing ever came of it, partly because comp.society.women was approved (oh, what a glorious war that one was). I think that in such cases we should look for some kind of face-saving compromise for all parties; usually the person making the noise does have a legitimate grievance but has lost all sense of proportion. As someone said, "after all, it's only ones and zeros..." Some purists say that no one should ever post forged cancel messages under any conditions. Given that the US government has seized people's computers and threatened them with jail because actions #1 or #2 above were done to their BBSes, can you really expect system administrators and owners from taking that kind of risk? -- Joe Buck jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu {uunet,ucbvax}!galileo.berkeley.edu!jbuck