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From: phil@amdcad.UUCP (Phil Ngai)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: Re: Reading other peoples' mail
Message-ID: <11651@amdcad.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 12-May-86 16:24:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: amdcad.11651
Posted: Mon May 12 16:24:00 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 13-May-86 09:07:31 EDT
References: <1400@ecsvax> <5662@sri-spam>
Reply-To: phil@amdcad.UUCP (Phil Ngai)
Organization: AMD, Sunnyvale, California
Lines: 51

In article <5662@sri-spam> gds@sri-spam writes:
>I think we've all gotten off the point a bit here.  This all started
>because Andy Beals was reading a piece of mail not addressed to him, but
>what's more he intercepted it and returned it, saying "it wasn't worth
>*his* (emphasis mine) time to send it".
>
>I can appreciate the difficulties of UUCP mail administration (after
>all, I had to do it myself not too long ago) and sometimes you have to
>read the mail that gets left in your queues, but you should only do this
>in the course of administration.  What Andy was doing, in my opinion,
>was outside the bounds of administration, and more along the lines of
>censorship.

You've lumped everything Andy into the category of censorship.  Under
some circumstances I don't consider reading a piece of mail not
addressed to me as censorship. My neighbors go down all the time.  My
UUCP queues clog up. And I have to clean it up. Under those
circumstances I look at whatever I have to. I consider this part
of UUCP mail administration.

As for bouncing junk mail back, that could be called censorship.
However, I think of censorship as something like the Federal
government telling a newspaper it can't run an article critical of
Ronnie. What we have here is a newspaper refusing to run a 50 page
letter to the editor. The author is free to start his own newspaper
and probably should. The author does not have any right to complain
about "freedom of the press". It's not his press.

>Unless he is authorized by Lawrence Livermore Labs to
>intercept mail at his site and return it if he (personally) feels it is
>not worth his time to send, he shouldn't be intercepting it.

I'm sure that if you asked the Department of Energy they would say LLL
should not pass *any* mail for others. You know, of course, the policy
of the ARPAnet has always been that messages must be in support of
government work. DOE probably has the same policy as DOD about misuse
of government resources. (I claim DOE is a branch of DOD but that
belongs in net.politics.)

>This is the kind of thing I was warning about in net.news.*, when people
>would start thinking because they were backbone administrators they
>could do whatever they felt like because otherwise they would eliminate
>certain newsgroups.  I hope the rest of the net is satisfied with these
>forms of net.censorship, I'm sure not.

So start your own backbone.
-- 

 Phil Ngai +1 408 749 5720
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