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Computer Undergroud Digest Vol. 06 Issue 77
Computer underground Digest Sun Aug 28, 1994 Volume 6 : Issue 77
ISSN 1004-042X
Editors: Jim Thomas and Gordon Meyer (TK0JUT2@NIU.BITNET)
Archivist: Brendan Kehoe
Retiring Shadow Archivist: Stanton McCandlish
Shadow-Archivists: Dan Carosone / Paul Southworth
Ralph Sims / Jyrki Kuoppala
Ian Dickinson
Copylate Editor: John Holmes Shrudlu
CONTENTS, #6.77 (Sun, Aug 28, 1994)
File 1--Static in Cyberspace (The Nation reprint) (fwd)
File 2--The Internet and the Anti-net
File 3--GovAccess.044: changing GovAccess, ballot info, civicnet policies
File 4--EPIC Statement on Wiretap Telephony Bill
File 5--Cu Digest Header Information (unchanged since 28 Aug '94)
CuD ADMINISTRATIVE, EDITORIAL, AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION APPEARS IN
THE CONCLUDING FILE AT THE END OF EACH ISSUE.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 1994 20:46:29 -0500 (CDT)
From: Charles Stanford <cstanfor@BIGCAT.MISSOURI.EDU>
Subject: File 1--Static in Cyberspace (The Nation reprint) (fwd)
This article is reprinted with permission from the June 13, 1994
issue of The Nation magazine. (c) 1994 The Nation Company, Inc.
Special offer to new subscribers: 24 weekly issues for just $13.95
(a savings of $40.05 off the newsstand price). Box CP, 72 Fifth
Avenue, New York, NY 10011.
For more information, e-mail:
nation-info@igc.apc.org
Jon Wiener, a contributing editor of The Nation, teaches history at
the University of California, Irvine.
STATIC IN CYBERSPACE
Free Speech on the Internet
JON WIENER
At a time when Paramount Communications and Time Warner and
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation have achieved near-total
domination over all hitherto existing media, many people have come
to view the Internet--the computer network linking millions of
users in a hundred countries--as a free space where critical and
independent voices can communicate, liberated from the mainstream
media's obsession with profits and hostility to the unpopular. It's
"the most universal and indispensable network on the planet," The
New York Times Magazine recently proclaimed, because, at a time
when the "giant information empires own everything else," the
Internet is "anarchic. But also democratic." Harper's Magazine
joined the utopian talk: The Internet marks "not the beginning of
authority but its end." Computer networks create "a country of
decentralized nodes of governance and thought," in which "the
non-dogmatic--the experimental idea" and "the global perspective"
all work to undermine centralized power and official opinion. U.S.
News & World Report declared in January that, on the Internet,
"everyone has a virtually unlimited right to express and seek
information on any subject."
The "Net" is a free space, the argument continues, because
no one controls it and no one owns it; it has no center. Instead,
it has thousands of nodes, each of which permits those with
access to a computer, a modem and a modest budget to send and
receive messages and to read, copy and distribute documents,
manifestoes, essays and exposs. No one is excluded because of
race, ethnicity, creed or gender. And it's growing like kudzu: The
Internet Society reported last year that 1.7 million host computers
provided gateways for 17 million users to enter the Infobahn.
Those who operate computer bulletin board systems ("bbs"),
newsgroups and mailing lists are mainly volunteers working for
free. According to Harley Hahn and Rick Stout, authors of The
Internet Complete Reference, the Net provides "living proof that
human beings who are able to communicate freely and conveniently
will choose to be social and selfless."
It all sounds great. But despite the claims made for the Net,
its freedoms are restricted in familiar ways; it reproduces many
problems and obstacles found outside cyberspace, in what the
hackers disparagingly term "real life."
The largest collection of news and discussion groups on the
Net is Usenet, which involves millions of people reading and
posting messages on more than 5,000 topics, ranging from "artifi-
cial intelligence" (comp.ai) to "Japanese animation" (rec.arts.anime).
Usenet bulletin boards recently dramatized the power of the
Internet as a weapon to fight government censorship. The Canadi-
an government has been trying to prevent Canadians from learn-
ing about the sensational sex-torture-murder trial of Karla Homol-
ka and her husband/accomplice, Paul Bernardo. Homolka pleaded
guilty in July 1993 after confessing gruesome details of two
murders and naming her husband as the instigator. The Ontario
court imposed a gag order on the media, seeking to prevent
potential jurors in her husband's separate trial from learning
about the case. None of the Canadian media challenged the ban,
but industrious computer networkers in Toronto set up a Usenet
newsgroup, alt.fan.karla-homolka, on which they posted daily news
of the trial. (Putting it in the "alternative-fan" area was a maca-
bre touch.)
Then "the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (R.C.M.P.) showed
up in the newsgroup and said we were all going to jail," recalled
Joel Furr, a Usenet moderator responsible for editing messages on
some bulletin boards. "They said they were recording our names
and contacting our site administrators." Most Canadian institutions
on the Net, including all universities, shut down local access to
the bulletin board. Undeterred, the hackers started a new one,
"alt.pub-ban.homolka," on which they continued to post news of
the trial. "It took the R.C.M.P. about a month to find that hiding
place," Furr said. When that one was shut down, they started
posting Karla Homolka information on still other bulletin boards.
The gag order remains in effect, since jury selection in
Bernardo's trial won't begin until fall. But as a result of the
postings on computer bulletin boards, Stephen Kimber wrote in the
Halifax Daily News, "the ban has become a joke." Global communi-
cations systems "are now beyond the short arms of narrow-minded
Ontario judicial regulators." Kimber, a journalism professor at the
University of King's College in Halifax, got the banned information
"through an electronic labyrinth from a double-blind anonymous
posting service based, I believe, in Finland--a service often used
by those who discreetly post adult personal classified messages on
the Internet." Every effort by court authorities to prevent trial
news from reaching the public "has simply led individuals to find
more innovative ways to distribute it." (I got the grisly story by
e-mail from a gentleman in Texas with the address abdul@io.com. A
lot of what was posted included rumors, hearsay and people
indulging their taste for bizarre news, which is an inevitable
consequence of such an open forum.)
When Wired magazine did a short piece on the story in its
April issue, the Canadian government banned the issue and confis-
cated copies from distributors. Wired fought back in cyberspace,
making the text of the banned article available on the Internet
through their own "infobot"--a software program that provides
information on demand--and on networks accessible to any Canadi-
an with a modem.
Fighting the Mounties presents the Net at its best, and
shows how people could obtain other more significant information
their governments might want to keep secret. But the same strate-
gy for resisting government authority is available to more malevo-
lent forces. A news item on the "SN GrapeVine" bulletin board,
datelined Munich and headlined "Nazis Online," reports that
German neo-Nazis have established their own bulletin boards on
which users can "exchange ideas on how to rid Germany of for-
eigners, coordinate illegal rallies and swap bomb-making recipes."
The "Thule Network," named after a 1920s proto-Nazi group,
consists of a dozen bulletin boards in three states, access to
which is protected by passwords. Neo-Nazis are using the network
to avoid detection by police who are not yet familiar with the new
technology.
For everyone from neo-Nazis to anti-censorship activists, cyber-
space does indeed provide a free space. But how free is the
speech on the Internet? Most of the Usenet bulletin boards are
completely open to anyone with any message--a rich information
anarchy, limited only by self-regulation, that can't be found in
any other medium. But this utopian ideal is abandoned in bulletin
boards that are "moderated" by volunteer system operators who
have the power to edit or refuse to post messages they consider
irrelevant or objectionable.
To see what an unmoderated bulletin board looks like,
I checked the Usenet Bosnia discussion group (soc.culture.bosna-
herzgvna). The first posting read, "Serbs in world wars? O yes, I
remember.... Russians come and liberated Belgrade. Serbs were so
grateful that they did not mind, let say, missbehaviour of Russian
soldiers towards local women. Or was raping a kind of a sign of
frendship." It was signed by Damir Sokcevic, Department for
Theoretical Physics, Rudjer Boskovic Institute, Zagreb, Croatia.
The next message read, "Why should we let you `holy
Armenian crooks' get away with the Muslim Holocaust's cover-up?...
The ex-Soviet Armenian government got away with the genocide of
2.5 million Muslim men, women and children and is enjoying the
fruits of that genocide." It had been posted by "Serdar Argic."
This is the ugly side of freedom of speech. Garbage postings like
these can devastate regions of cyberspace. The Usenet discussion
group soc.history "has been absolutely destroyed by Serdar
Argic," Usenet moderator Joel Furr wrote in April on an internal
news bulletin board. "Upon reading the group today, I found 200+
active articles, of which 175 were from Serdar Argic and 20 were
complaining about him." That group has now been replaced by one
with a moderator who censors Serdar Argic. (His 175 messages on
soc.history were all different, but all had the same nutty theme:
Turks didn't kill Armenians in 1915, it was the other way around.)
I e-mailed Joel Furr for more details, and he replied with a
startlingly archaic suggestion: I should telephone him, so we could
"talk." On the phone, he explained that "`Serdar Argic' seems to
be several people, anti-Armenian Turks, with software that scans
bulletin boards for keywords and automatically generates respons-
es out of a database of megabytes of messages. Several universi-
ties have kicked him off their networks, but he's currently got
access through a firm called UUNet in Virginia. There's nothing
we can do about him from a legal standpoint." Other
Usenet groups have had problems with freedom of electronic
speech: The "guns" discussion group (rec.guns), which is moder-
ated, "flat out prohibits ANY discussion on gun control," reports
Usenet moderator Cindy Tittle Moore, "because they know from
experience that's just one long flame war." (To "flame" is to hurl
abuse on-line.) If you are against guns, you are not allowed to
tell it to the Usenet "guns" discussion group. And the gun nuts
have virtually taken over the Mother Jones Usenet bulletin board
(alt.motherjones), swamping it with pro-gun diatribes cross-listed
from talk.politics.guns and alt.fan.rush-limbaugh. The energy of
these people is astounding: The unmoderated group
talk.politics.guns had 2,096 new postings in the week I checked-
-300 a day.
The underlying problem, Furr says, is that "the Internet is
expanding at logarithmic rates. A million new users will bring a
few sociopaths. Until recently we had complete anarchy with self-
regulation. Now some human will have to look at everything and
decide what to post. It's unfortunate."
But it's not necessarily censorship. The moderated bulletin
board or newsgroup is edited like a magazine letters-to-the-editor
page: Relevant material is posted, objectionable or useless or loony
stuff is kept out. In this respect communication in cyberspace is
closer to ordinary publishing than to a new realm of freedom. (On
the other hand, the extent of communication possible is far richer
and freer than in any letters page.)
Commercial advertising presents a different threat to the
freedom of the Internet. Attorney Laurence Canter of Phoenix
showed how to do it: In April he placed an ad for his services as
a "green card" immigration lawyer on Usenet--not just on bulletin
boards where it might be relevant, like misc.legal and alt.visa.us,
or the "business" area, but on every one of more than 5,000
discussion groups. It appeared on rec.arts.erotica and on the anti-
Barney alt.tv-dinosaurs.barney.die.die.die. This ambulance chasing
on the information superhighway resulted in "a nuclear level
flame," Furr said. The network was bombarded with thousands of
protest messages from outraged users. Despite his violation of
"netiquette," Canter is unrepentant; he told The New York Times,
"We will definitely advertise on the Internet again."
There's no good way to stop him. "These things that are
written into the Internet culture are not written into the law,"
said James Gleick, who runs a commercial Internet gateway in
Manhattan called the Pipeline. Usenet groups could be swamped
with advertisements that would drown out noncommercial speech,
and the rich discussion of common interests that now takes place
would wither away.
In real life, freedom of speech is also limited by libel laws. But is
there libel in cyberspace? A federal court ruled in 1991 that
CompuServe couldn't be sued for libel for a message it transmit-
ted. That case (Cubby v. CompuServe) set a vital precedent for
free speech in the electronic age: U.S. District Court Judge Peter
Leisure of New York ruled that, since computer networks do not
exercise editorial control over the messages they transmit, they
are not liable for defamation.
Individuals, however, are still responsible for their
own words communicated through cyberspace. The first trial for
libel by e-mail--held in Australia--concluded with a substantial
fine being imposed on the offending e-mailer. In that case, an
anthropologist fired by the University of Western Australia sued
another anthropologist, claiming he had been defamed in a comput-
er bulletin board message. The case went to the West Australian
Supreme Court, which ruled in April that libel in cyberspace is
actionable. David Rindos, who has a doctorate from Cornell Univer-
sity, was dismissed last June because of insufficient productivity.
A supporter of Rindos posted news of the firing on the DIALx
science anthropology international computer bulletin board; many
colleagues e-mailed their support for him, but Gil Hardwick, an
anthropologist working in the field in Western Australia, posted a
message criticizing Rindos. According to Justice David Ipp, it
declared that Rindos's career was based not on academic achieve-
ment "but on his ability to berate and bully all and sundry." The
message also contained "allegations of pedophilia," in the words of
Rindos's lawyer, and falsely implied that sexual misconduct had
some bearing on his firing by the university.
Twenty-three thousand people around the world have access
to the bulletin board on which Mr. Hardwick's message appeared,
and most of them are professional anthropologists and anthropolo-
gy students. "The defamation caused serious harm to Dr. Rindos's
personal and professional reputation," Justice Ipp declared. "The
publication of these remarks will make it more difficult for him to
obtain appropriate employment.... The damages award must compen-
sate him for all these matters and vindicate his reputation to the
public."
Although it's easier to win a libel case in Australia than in
the United States, the same circumstances here would produce the
same result, according to Martin Garbus, an attorney and a libel
law authority. The Internet is not a free space when it comes to
libel; it is subject to the same libel law as any publication.
In the Australian case, the libelous message had been posted
on a bulletin board available to thousands; but even individual e-
mail messages can cause legal problems. The day is not too distant
when an e-mailer will find himself or herself in court, perhaps in
an employment discrimination suit, for a statement uttered only in
a single e-mail message. E-mail messages, like other written
communications, are discoverable in legal proceedings, according to
William Parker, director of the office of academic computing at the
University of California, Irvine--they can be subpoenaed and
presented as evidence in court. And that's only the beginning: It
turns out that your old e-mail is not necessarily gone just be-
cause you deleted it. At my campus of the University of California,
and probably at most universities as well as private corporations,
backup copies of most e-mail messages are retained on tape as
part of the nightly backup of the main computer. Ollie North was
unable to destroy evidence of the Iran/contra cover-up because
the White House maintained a backup copy of the e-mail system on
which he had plotted his crimes. Erasing his hard drive and
shredding his paper copies didn't help. Most e-mailers are as
vulnerable today as North was. Parker's advice: "You should not
say anything via e-mail that you would not say publicly."
Those who see the Internet as a free space neglect another
important limitation to that freedom: Cyberspace is still a male
space. Despite the universal access and non-discrimination on the
Internet, despite the fact that physical appearances and attributes
are absent, the great majority of users are men, and women's
voices tend to get drowned out in cyberspace. Even in feminist
discussion groups, says Ellen Broidy, history bibliographer at the
U Cal, Irvine, library, "two or three men will get on and dominate
the conversation--either by being provocative, or by flooding the
system with comments on everything. It's like talk radio, only
worse." Cindy Tittle Moore, a moderator on Usenet's soc.feminism,
says, "It should be mandatory for every male on the Net to
seriously pretend being female for two weeks to see the differ-
ence." They will get sexually explicit invitations from other men,
she says, "some polite, some gross." And the styles of disagree-
ment are different. When a man disagrees with another man on a
bulletin board, "he's likely to go for a point by point argument
and pretty much stay on topic," Moore says. "With a female, he's
likely to call her a bull-dyke bitch and leave it at that." Cyber-
space, concludes Katherine Hayles, who teaches English at U.C.L.A.,
will not "free us from the straitjacket of physically marked
categories such as race, class and gender."
The Internet has demonstrated its effectiveness as a weapon
against government censorship and as a means of communication
untrammeled by corporate control. It makes available immense
information resources on an unprecedented scale. It makes instan-
taneous communication easy, which could strengthen democracy.
It's also fun. But it's not a new world of freedom, significantly
different from our own; in terms of free speech and censorship,
libel and defamation, gender and social hierarchies, not to mention
advertising and commerce, the moral of this story seems to be, in
cybertalk, "VR mirrors RL"--virtual reality hasn't escaped the
bounds of real life.
** End of text from cdp:media.issues **
***************************************************************************
This material came from PeaceNet, a non-profit progressive networking
service. For more information, send a message to peacenet-info@igc.apc.org
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 03 Aug 1994 14:28:08 -0800
From: nicka@mccmedia.com (Nick Arnett)
Subject: File 2--The Internet and the Anti-net
THE INTERNET AND THE ANTI-NET
Two public internetworks are better than one
BY NICK ARNETT
Networking policy debates tend to paint a future monolithic
internetwork that will follow consistent policies despite a number of
independent operators. Although that's how the interstate highway and
telephone systems -- favorite metaphors for network futurists --
operate, historical comparisons suggest that it is probably not what
the future holds. Two distinct, interconnected publicly accessible
digital internetworks are likely to emerge, which is surely better
than just one.
One of the future internetworks will grow out of today's Internet,
whose roots are in the technology and scientific/academic communities,
funded by government, institutions and increasingly, corporate and
individual users. Although the Internet will support commercial
services, they rarely will depend on advertising. The other great
internetwork will grow out of the technology and mass communications
industries, especially cable and broadcast industries. The "Anti-net"
will rely on advertising revenue to recoup the cost of the
infrastructure necessary to create cheap, high-speed bandwidth. (I
call this second network the Anti-net not to be a demagogue but to
make a historical allusion, explained shortly.) All three communities
-- technology, science and academia, and mass media -- will
participate in many joint projects. The most successful new ventures
often will arise from three-way collaborations; skills of each are
essential to create and deliver network-based information products and
services.
The Internet community reacts with profound anger and resentment at
Anti-net behavior on the Internet -- in net-speak, "spamming"
advertising messages into hundreds of discussions. The outrage is
based in part on the idealistic traditions of academic and scientific
freedom of thought and debate, but there's more behind it. Anger and
resentment fueled by the world's love-hate relationship with the mass
media, particularly television, surface in many other contexts. Nearly
everyone in the modern world and large segments of the third world
watches television; nearly all think broadcast television is stupid,
offering a homogenized, sensationalized point of view that serves
advertising interests above all others. In competition with
television's hypnotic powers, or perhaps simply due to the high cost
of distribution, other mass media have followed suit.
Idealistic defenders of the Internet's purity believe they are waging
a humanitarian or even a holy war that pits a democracy of ideas
against the mass media's empty promises and indulgences. Television
and its kin offer the false idols and communities of soaps, sitcoms
and sports. The mass media tantalize with suggestions of healing,
wealth, popularity and advertising's other blessings and temptations.
Internet idealists even question the U.S. administration's unclear
proposal of an "information superhighway," suspecting that the masses
will be taxed only to further expand the Anti-net's stranglehold on
information.
The same kind of stage was set 500 years ago. The convergence of
inexpensive printing and inexpensive paper began to loosen the Roman
Catholic church's centuries-old stranglehold on cultural information.
The church's rise to power centuries earlier had followed the arrival
of the Dark Ages, caused in Marshall McLuhan's analysis by the loss of
papyrus supplies. The church quickly became the best customer of many
of the early printer-publishers, but not to disseminate information,
only to make money. The earliest dated publication of Johann Gutenberg
himself was a "papal indulgence" to raise money for the church's
defense against the Turk invasions. Indulgences were papers sold to
the common folk to pay for the Pope's remission of their sins, a sort
of insurance against the wrath of God. Indulgences had been sold by
the church since the 11th century, but shortly after the arrival of
printing, the pope expanded the market considerably by extending
indulgences to include souls in purgatory. Indulgence revenue was
shared with government officials, becoming almost a form of state and
holy taxation. The money financed the church's holy wars, as well as
church officials' luxurious lifestyles.
Jumping on the new technology for corrupt purposes, the church had
sown the seeds of its own undoing. The church had the same sort of
love-hate relationship with common people and government that the mass
media have today. The spark for the 15th-century "flame war," in
net-speak, was a monk, Martin Luther. Outraged by the depth of the
church's corruption, Luther wrote a series of short theses in 1517,
questioning indulgences, papal infallibility, Latin-only Bibles and
services, and other authoritarian, self-serving church practices.
Although Luther had previously written similar theses, something
different happened to the 95 that he nailed to the church door in
Wittenburg. Printers -- the "hackers" of their day, poking about the
geographic network of church doors and libraries -- found Luther's
theses.
As an academic, Luther enjoyed a certain amount of freedom to raise
potentially heretical arguments against church practice. Nailing his
theses to the Wittenburg door was a standard way to distribute
information to his academic community for discussion, much like
putting a research paper on an Internet server today. In Luther's
time, intellectual property laws hadn't even been contemplated, so his
papers were fair game for publication (as today's Internet postings
often seem to be, to the dismay of many). Luther's ideas quickly
became the talk of Europe. Heresy sells, especially when the
questioned authority is corrupt. But the speed of printing technology
caught many by surprise. Even Luther, defending himself before the
pope, was at a loss to explain how so many had been influenced so
fast.
Luther's initial goal was to reform the church. But his ideas were
rejected and he was excommunicated by his order, the pope and the
emperor, convincing Luther that the Antichrist was in charge in Rome.
Abandoning attempts at reform, but accepting Biblical prophecy, Luther
resisted the utopian goal of removing the Antichrist from the papacy.
Instead, as a pacifist, he focused on teaching and preaching his views
of true Christianity. Luther believed that he could make the world a
better place by countering the angst and insecurity caused by the
Antichrist, not that he could save it by his own powers.
Luther's philosophy would serve the Internet's utopians well,
especially those who believe that the Internet's economy of ideas
untainted by advertising must "win" over the mass media's Anti-net
ideas. The Internet's incredibly low cost of distribution almost
assures that it will remain free of advertising-based commerce.
Nonetheless, if lobbying by network idealists succeeds in derailing or
co-opting efforts to build an advertising-based internetwork, then
surely commercial interests will conspire with government officials to
destroy or perhaps worse, to take over the Internet by political and
economic means. Historians, instead of comparing the Internet to the
U.S. Interstate highway system's success, may compare it with the
near-destruction of the nation's railroad and trolley infrastructure
by corrupt businesses with interests in automobiles and trucking.
The printing press and cheap paper did not lead to widespread literacy
in Europe; that event awaited the wealth created by the Industrial
Revolution and the need for educated factory workers. Printing
technology's immediate and profound effect was the destruction of the
self-serving, homogenized point of view of a single institution.
Although today's mass media don't claim divine inspiration, they are
no less homogenized and at least as self-serving. The people drown in
information overload, but one point of view is barely discernable from
another, ironically encouraging polarization of issues.
Richard Butler, Australia's ambassador to the United Nations, draws
the most disturbing analogy of all. Butler, a leader in disarmament,
compares the church's actions to the nuclear weapons industry's
unwillingness to come under public scrutiny. Like the church and its
Bible, physicists argued that their subject was too difficult for lay
people. Medieval popes sold salvation; physicists sold destruction.
Neither was questioned until information began to move more freely.
The political power of nuclear weapons has begun to fall in part due
to the role of the Internet and fax communications in the dissolution
of the Soviet Union.
The truly influential and successful early publishers, such as Aldus
Manutius, were merchant technologists who formed collaborations with
the scientific/academic community and even the church, especially
those who dissented against Rome. Out of business needs for economies
of scale, they brought together people with diverse points of view and
created books that appealed to diverse communities. The Renaissance
was propelled in part by books that allowed geniuses such as
Copernicus to easily compare and contrast the many points of view of
his predecessors, reaching world-changing conclusions.
Today we are at a turning point. We are leaving behind a world
dominated by easy, audiovisual, sensational, advertising-based media,
beginning a future in which the mass media's power will be diluted by
the low cost of distribution of many other points of view. Using the
Internet is still something like trying to learn from the
pre-Gutenberg libraries, in which manuscripts were chained to tables
and there were no standards for organization and structure. But like
the mendicant scholars of those days, today's "mendicant sysops,"
especially on the Internet, are doing much of the work of organization
in exchange for free access to information.
Today, the great opportunity is not to make copies of theses on the
digital church doors. It is to build electronic magazines, newspapers,
books, newsletters, libraries and other collections that organize and
package the writings, photos, videos, sounds and other multimedia
information from diverse points of view on the networks. The Internet,
with one foot in technology and the other in science and academia,
needs only a bit of help from the mass media in order to show the
Anti-net how it's done.
_________________________________________________________________
Nick Arnett [nicka@mccmedia.com] is president of Multimedia Computing
Corporation, a strategic consulting and publishing company
established in 1988.
Comments about this article e-mailed to [antinet@mccmedia.com] will
be linked to a copy of this essay on Multimedia Computing Corp.'s
World-Wide Web server: <URL:http://asearch.mccmedia.com/>
Recommended reading: "The printing press as an agent of change:
Communications and cultural transformation in early-modern Europe,"
Vols. I and II. Elizabeth Eisenstein. Cambridge University Press,
1979.
Copyright (c) 1994, Multimedia Computing Corp., Campbell, Calif.,
U.S.A. This article is shareware; it may be distributed at no charge,
whole and unaltered, including this notice. If you enjoy reading it
and would like to encourage free distribution of more like it, please
send a contribution to Plugged In (1923 University Ave., East Palo
Alto, CA 94303), an after-school educational program for children in
under-served communities.
--
Multimedia Computing Corp. (strategic consulting)
Campbell, California
----------------------------------------------------------
"We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunity." -- Pogo
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 1994 15:39:23 -0700
From: Jim Warren <jwarren@WELL.SF.CA.US>
Subject: File 3--GovAccess.044: changing GovAccess, ballot info, civicnet polici
es
Aug.22, 1994
GOVACCESS WILL CHANGE FORMAT FOR FUTURE NOTICES
I will be changing the format/style of GovAccess postings after this
"issue." Hereafter, I will simply transmit or echo items of
information mostly one at a time, mo'less as I get 'em, rather than
combining multiple [often-unrelated] items into uniformly-formatted
'newsletters' like this one.
MORE MESSAGES; SHORTER MESSAGES
This means that you will be getting more separate messages, but each of
them will be shorter and concern only a single topic.
This GovAccess.044 will be the last numbered GovAccess distribution.
There are several reasons for this change:
1. I'm gettin' cooked. I think this is a [very] valuable service, and am
happy to be doin' it, but it's pro bono [contentedly so], and I'm doin' it
alone ... and it's a real time-suckah!
This change will help reduce that "sound of time sucking." :-)
2. Collecting and formatting multiple goodies for un-periodic newsletter-
format retransmission is delay-prone, and some of this stuff is highly
time-sensitive. There have been multiple instances in the past half-year
when I simply coudn't/didn't distribute information as fast as was needed.
Firing msgs off with minimal diddling will fire 'em faster.
3. Many may find it more useful for items to arrive singly, rather than in
the unrelated globollas of my current and past GovAccess postings. That way,
ya can save whatcha find interesting without having to cut-n-paste, and flush
what you find boring, easily and quickly.
Electrons are *so* easy to recycle. :-)
4. For some years, Dave Farber [farber@cis.upenn.edu] has been distributing
several-or-more messages per day about whatever varied topics interest him to
his large "interesting-people" list (which could more-accurately be called
"interested-people").
It has proven easy, fast and useful to those who receive it.
(Most of Farber's traffic concerns net issues, expecially net-related policy
issues - but he often includes wildly-random exotic items of interest. He's
an outstanding self-inflicted net-surfing Editor Extraordinare!. If you have
the time to try it out for a bit, ask him to add you to his distrib list.)
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
CALIFORNIA BALLOT "PAMPHLET" NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE
As what may be another net 'first,' California's acting Secretary of State,
Tony Miller, has arranged to make the volumous content of the state's
ballot pamphlet available online. His Deputy SoS just called this morn to
say that it is now available to anyone who can use Internet ftp or gopher
at secstate.public.ca.gov .
Yet another advantage of *modern* mass information-access: The pre-landfill
*paper* ballot pamphlets won't arrive in voters' snailmail boxes until late
September.
Check id oudt! - and send your comments to Miller and his staff at
comments@secstate.public.ca.gov . [And it it is in any iota imperfect,
let him know gently and give him a chance to improve it. Miller *is*
*strongly* dedicated to opening up his records to online public access.]
[Do you know of any other state jurisdiction that has done this, via the
*public* nets, i.e. the Internet? If so, please tell jwarren@well.com .]
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
CONTROLLING COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION IN COMMUNITY/CIVIC NETWORKS
[I recently transmitted this to a number of folks who are planning how
best to create/implement a civic network for the communities of Palo Alto,
Calif. The question had been raised of whether a discussion group or
listserv that would be open to public commentary by community members
should be moderated. Sez I -- ]
The experience in Santa Monica's PEN system (the oldest city-run civic net
in the nation) was that unmoderated community-discussions were soon
dominated by a small minority who had lots of time, fast fingers and a
tenacious willingness to vigorously trash anyone who dared to disagree with
them - a result that is predictable to anyone who has spent much time
online. The PEN folks said it chased *lots* of people out of their
"immoderate" discussions.
I've suggested that the most appropriate approach - particularly for
city-operated or egalitarian systems, that have at-least implicit mandates
of free speech and free assembly - is to offer *both* an unmoderated area
or list (sort of an electronic Hyde Park where any luminary or looney can
spout forth, unfettered) AND moderated areas/lists of two types --
1. A "auto-moderated" list where anyone can say anything, but only for
a limited number of bytes and only once per time-period (day? week?), and
2. A *set* of fully-moderated lists, absolutely-controlled by each list's
moderator -- but where any person who desires to set up such a list and be
its moderator can do so.
The auto-moderated list is analogous to a city-council meeting in which all
members of the public have an opportunity to speak, but are given only a
limited amount of time. It has the advantage of not needing a human
moderator, if the appropriate software is available to auto-truncate
over-long postings and auto-reject (*with* explanation!) postings in excess
of the specified time-period. [But, do be wary of SMOP - Simple Matter of
Programming. The sofware may or may not be available, and *does* have some
design complexities.]
The set of automatically self-created, moderated lists is analogous to
permitting any community group to convene its own private meeting in an
open public meeting facility, but nonetheless fully control and chair its
own meeting. Those that are "good" or "interesting" meetings that are
fairly moderated will be well-attended. Those that are space-case
dictatorships (eye of the beholders) will have a membership of not-many, but
nonetheless meet the democratic mandate of equal *opportunity* for access.
Oh -- and now that I've mentioned the "a" word -- "access" -- just one
observation: *THE* most serious access barriers and inequities - BY FAR! -
are (1) the inability to read and/or communicate in writing, and (2) the
inability to type. *ALL* other access inequities *pale* in comparison.
(I ain't sayin' that the cost and availability access problems shouldn't be
addressed. I'm just pointing out the *real* access problems.)
Apologies for the length. [but, those who know me, know this *is* brief :-) ]
--jim
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 1994 15:29:43 -0700
From: email list server <listserv@SUNNYSIDE.COM>
Subject: File 4--EPIC Statement on Wiretap Telephony Bill
EPIC Statement on Wiretap Bill
*DISTRIBUTE WIDELY*
EPIC Statement on Digital Telephony Wiretap Bill
The digital telephony bill recently introduced in Congress is the
culmination of a process that began more than two years ago, when the
Federal Bureau of Investigation first sought legislation to ensure its
ability to conduct electronic surveillance through mandated design
changes in the nation's information infrastructure. We have monitored
that process closely and have scrutinized the FBI's claims that
remedial legislation is necessary. We have sponsored conferences at
which the need for legislation was debated with the participation of
the law enforcement community, the telecommunications industry and
privacy advocates. We have sought the disclosure of all relevant
information through a series of requests under the Freedom of
Information Act. Having thus examined the issue, EPIC remains
unconvinced of the necessity or advisability of the pending bill.
As a threshold matter, we do not believe that a compelling case
has been made that new communications technologies hamper the ability
of law enforcement agencies to execute court orders for electronic
surveillance. For more than two years, we have sought the public
disclosure of any FBI records that might document such a problem. To
date, no such documentation has been released. Without public scrutiny
of factual information on the nature and extent of the alleged
technological impediments to surveillance, the FBI's claims remain
anecdotal and speculative. Indeed, the telecommunications industry
has consistently maintained that it is unaware of any instances in
which a communications carrier has been unable to comply with law
enforcement's requirements. Under these circumstances, the nation
should not embark upon a costly and potentially dangerous re-design of
its telecommunications network solely to protect the viability of fewer
than 1000 annual surveillances against wholly speculative impediments.
We also believe that the proposed legislation would establish a
dangerous precedent for the future. While the FBI claims that the
legislation would not enhance its surveillance powers beyond those
contained in existing law, the pending bill represents a fundamental
change in the law's approach to electronic surveillance and police
powers generally. The legislation would, for the first time, mandate
that our means of communications must be designed to facilitate
government interception. While we as a society have always recognized
law enforcement's need to obtain investigative information upon
presentation of a judicial warrant, we have never accepted the notion
that the success of such a search must be guaranteed. By mandating the
success of police searches through the re-design of the telephone
network, the proposed legislation breaks troubling new ground. The
principle underlying the bill could easily be applied to all emerging
information technologies and be incorporated into the design of the
National Information Infrastructure. It could also lead to the
prohibition of encryption techniques other than government-designed
"key escrow" or "Clipper" type systems.
In short, EPIC believes that the proposed digital telephony bill
raises substantial civil liberties and privacy concerns. The present
need for the legislation has not been established and its future
implications are frightening. We therefore call upon all concerned
individuals and organizations to express their views on the legislation
to their Congressional representatives. We also urge you to contact
Rep. Jack Brooks, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to share
your opinions:
Rep. Jack Brooks
Chair, House Judiciary Committee
2138 Rayburn House Office Bldg.
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-3951 (voice)
(202) 225-1958 (fax)
The bill number is H.R. 4922 in the House and S. 2375 in the Senate. It
can be referred to as the "FBI Wiretap Bill" in correspondence.
Electronic Privacy Information Center
666 Pennsylvania Avenue, S.E.
Suite 301 Washington, DC 20003
(202) 544-9240 (voice)
(202) 547-5482 (fax)
<info@epic.org>
EPIC is a project of the Fund for Constitutional Government and Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1994 22:51:01 CDT
From: CuD Moderators <tk0jut2@mvs.cso.niu.edu>
Subject: File 5--Cu Digest Header Information (unchanged)
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End of Computer Underground Digest #6.77
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