Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 10:18:21 -0700 (PDT) From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com> To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Binaries in Usenet (was: News...) Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.93.970420100153.10900F-100000@sidhe.memra.com> In-Reply-To: <5474.861537356@orion.webspan.net>
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On Sun, 20 Apr 1997, Gary Palmer wrote: > AFAIK, the only `illegal' porn is the pedophillia stuff, and if you > rmgroup those, then you're pretty safe last I heard (considering some > friends of mine are going through this right now after a local police > dept asked them to delete groups whose sole purpose was to break the > law (in the US, mere possession of pedophillic material is a felony) Just wait until the local police learn how USENET really works and that newsgroups are not the little boxes they think they are. Then it will no longer be enough to rmgroup some newsgroup titles. > Of course, this leads to an interesting situation. ISP's are not law > enforcement. However, to comply with the law, they have to remove > these groups. This can be classed as censorship (or a lot of lusers > are trying to claim that, I've been following it with growing dismay > in their local groups ... it makes me wonder what class of total scum > is getting on the net these days), which of course is a violation of > the First Ammendment of the Constitution of the United States of > America. You're quite wrong about the 1st. Have you read it? It begins "Congress shall make no law..." and the courts have held that the term "Congress" includes other bodies that get their authority from Congress such as state governments and various government agencies. Basically it boils down to a ban on government actions that might prevent free speech however it does not apply at all to private individuals. If a newspaper doesn't want to print your letter, too bad, go start your own. And if an ISP doesn't want to allow you to publish and/or read something then that's tough luck for you, the ISP doesn't have to do anything with their private resources that they don't want to. > Of course, what really has people pissed off is that the police > department took the action of requesting they delete the groups AFTER > a certain pro-CDA style group wrote both the ISP and the local police > a letter (basically) accusing the ISP of violating the law (which, in > all truth, they probably were). For an example of the sort of letter > that was received, and more information on the `pro-reform' group, go > to http://www.ocaf.org/, and specifically > http://www.ocaf.org/oc03001.html They are actively encouraging people > to act against any (quote) ``ISP Is Distributing Obscenity and Child > Pornography'' (endquote). While I am not against this, IMHO it's best > left to the officers of the law to take action rather than pressure > groups. OCAF has been operating a concerted campaign for over a year now to "educate" locval police departments about ISP's and the porn laws. Their intention is to force ISP's to remove the porn or get the police to lay charges. They are quite serious and there are some ISP's for whom it is probably too late already because the investigations are under way and the evidence has been gathered. > Which makes me wonder what is next. Blocking realaudio streams incase > they carry material (i.e. songs) which have (alledgedly) caused > suicides? Sigh. Whatever happened to the land of freedom? Realaudio streams are not *STORED* on ISP servers like newsgroups are. When the ISP's service looks like a communications medium, i.e. the data is just passing through except for some buffering and caching that is neccessary to the proper operation of the service, then the ISP is clearly off the hook. This even includes running a Squid proxy cache because the info in the cache is not accessible to customers directly. They can only get info from the cahe if they request a web page and the page happens to already be in the cache because of another customer's request. But USENET is not caching. The messages are copied to the ISP's server. The customer then browses through the selection on the ISP's server and downloads the messages from the server. This is virtually identical to downloading a file from a local BBS and there are several cases where a BBS sysop has been convicted even though they had not put the illegal files there themselves. So, given that there is a need to get illegal stuff off USENET servers and given that USENET posters can easily circumvent a rmgroup by crossposting to other bogus groups, what can an ISP do? IMHO, the solution is to zap all binaries. And sooner or later someone will start a binaries cancellation service like ARRM or Cancelmoose that will auto-cancel ALL binaries and the ISP simply needs to accept those cancels and the job is done. And universities that think they are immune from the law can simply alias out the cancellation service and all is well. Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-250-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com
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