jbs@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU (Jeff Siegal) (05/20/86)
In article <1259@mulga.OZ> isaac@mulga.OZ (Isaac Balbin) writes: >[...] The facts are: >(1) You CAN say what you want. >(2) It MIGHT be illegal in some other country >(3) Is it you or "usenet" or the system admin or whoever who is the > vehicle for the illegal publication of your material? >(4) If it is NOT you who is responsible, why should anyone else be? >Please address this issue and not America Vs the_rest_of_the_world First off, I've added some newsgroups which are appropriate for the discussion. Usenet, as it exists, is a medium for the free exchange of ideas. If this is not compatible with the laws of another country, it should not be distributed there. Neither individual posters (in other countries) nor Usenet in general (whatever that means) are in violation of any foreign law for publishing these ideas. It is quite obvious to me that no country (other than, perhaps, the United States) has the right to legislate what I may or may not post on an MIT machine, nor what MIT machines may or may not send to other machines at MIT or elsewhere in the United States. Having accepted this (and I don't believe any postings have disputed it), we can look at the parties who _possibly_ could be in violation of some foreign (say French) law. 1) French posters for violating laws about what may or may not be communicated, in the electronic or by print media (which, if either apply to Usenet is not clear). 2) French system administrators and/or owners, for providing equipment to aid those breaking laws in (1), or for breaking laws limiting the publication of certain forms of information and/or expression. Additionally they may be violating laws similarly restricting distribution. 3) Owners/sysadmin of sites in France which import and/or export information and/or forms of expression which are restricted for import and export. 4) (Questionable) Owners/aministrators of sites in other contries which distribute to sites in France, for breaking laws similar to those in (3) Several conclusions may be drawn from this: 1) That the average Usenet contributor, reader, or system owner/administrator is in no way affected by laws other than those applicable in their place of residence, place of work, and the site(s) of machine(s) they communicate with are located. 2) That Usenet readers, contributors, and/or system owners/administrators in coutries which have laws similar to those described above may be limited in what they may read, post, maintain on their machine, allow readers to read, and/or redistribute. 3) That the existance of laws similar to those described above, applied as described in (2) may make the existance of a system like Usenet impractical in certain countries. Note that laws being considered in this country could have similar effects. 4) That by my interpretation, there is very little difference between these issues as applied to Usenet are not significantly different from the same issues as applied to other media. Example: Pornographic materials imported by Japan are "edited," (at least they used to be, I'm not sure any more) but in no sense does this mean that Japan ('s goverment) has any authority over the publishers of this material nor does it mean that these publishers are violating any Japanese laws which may prohibit publishing exactly what they are publishing. That (3) is not desirable is, I think, not disputed. What is disputed is how it can be avoided and/or corrected. I am strongly of the belief that it is for the citizens of a country to avoid and/or correct. I do not want to see Usenet become sanitized medium, reduced to some common level acceptable to even the most restrictive laws. I also do not believe that this could be done. The ability of readers to freely post articles goes beyond what some governments are willing to permit. In summary, I sympathize with users in countries where local laws may prohibit communication of the form Usenet provides, but must respectfully tell them it is their (or if similar laws are passed here, our) problem. Sorry for the length. I hope the content is thoughtful enough to justify it. Jeff Siegal
jbuck@epimass.UUCP (Joe Buck) (05/21/86)
In article <2026@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU> jbs@mit-eddie.UUCP (Jeff Siegal) writes: >Usenet, as it exists, is a medium for the free exchange of ideas. If >this is not compatible with the laws of another country, it should not >be distributed there. Neither individual posters (in other countries) >nor Usenet in general (whatever that means) are in violation of any >foreign law for publishing these ideas. The USA isn't as free as you think, Jeff, and your posting doesn't address the problem. According to your definition, importing Usenet traffic into the US is illegal as well, because a European poster might post a message that is considered legal there but is considered pornography in the US. In some areas the US is less free than, say, Denmark for example. Basically there are four classes of laws that might make a Usenet message illegal in some country (I'm speaking here of Western-style democracies): 1) Libel or slander. As I understand this, the US has a narrower definition of libel than most countries. Just the same, am I as a system administrator in trouble if you smear someone? 2) Obscenity/pornography. Did you know that it's illegal to use four-letter words over the phone in the US? This is never enforced unless someone complains, but you may be violating the law. Similarly, Sen. Paul Trible wants to pass an absolutely ridiculous law restricting computer bbds, that, if passed and enforced, would put net.singles and net.motts out of business and would make us moderate everything. 3) Racism. The US had a lot to do with imposing this kind of law on Europe and Japan at the end of WWII. Some of these laws were (and are) excessive, but millions of dead Jews are quite an incentive to make sure the Nazis don't rise again. A couple of American neo-nazis had a lot to do with keeping net.politics out of Europe. 4) Violation of privacy. Some countries have passed laws protecting the privacy of personal data in computer data bases. These might be construed as applying to Usenet if someone in one of these countries posted a message containing personal information about someone else in violation of that person's wishes. I hope this clarifies your understanding of some of the issues. -- - Joe Buck {ihnp4!pesnta,oliveb,csi}!epimass!jbuck Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, California Better living through entropy!
jbs@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU (Jeff Siegal) (05/22/86)
In article <230@epimass.UUCP> jbuck@epimass.UUCP (Joe Buck) writes:
[all about how freedom of expresion really isn't totally free]
Joe,
I think you misinterpreted the purpose of my article. I was NOT to
proposing that someone has the right to post whatever they damn well
please. If that was what I had intended to discuss, I would not have
posted it to net.mail (nor should your partially-accurate discussion
of limits on free speech have been).
The issue I addressed was whether a Usenet user should be forced to
acknowledge his reponsiblity to obey whatever foriegn laws may apply
to his posting, whereever it may be distributed. I argue that no such
responsibility exists.
I hope this makes the context and direction of the my original article
clearer.
Jeff Siegaljohn@frog.UUCP (John Woods, Software) (05/23/86)
Well, something implores me to jump into this (I even tried lying down and it didn't go away, sorry)... > In article <1259@mulga.OZ> isaac@mulga.OZ (Isaac Balbin) writes: > >[...] The facts are: > >(1) You CAN say what you want. > >(2) It MIGHT be illegal in some other country As a practical matter, it cannot be illegal in some other country for me to sit here in Somerville, Massachusetts, USA and say something distasteful to a foreign lawmaker. A law forbidding a statement within a jurisdiction can't have effect outside that jurisdiction, and a law forbidding the statement anywhere in the Universe is pretty pointless. Those of us on the side of liberty are not afraid of being dragged out of bed for maligning Gorbachev's tailor (or Mitterrand's, either [Is it against the law in France to misspell his name? I don't have a reference handy... My apologies to anyone burned at the stake for forwarding this message if it is :-) ] ). > >(3) Is it you or "usenet" or the system admin or whoever who is the > > vehicle for the illegal publication of your material? > >(4) If it is NOT you who is responsible, why should anyone else be? > >Please address this issue and not America Vs the_rest_of_the_world > If your government forbids you from receiving certain messages from me, then you'd best prevent receiving ANY messages from me -- your law is your problem, and you can not safely rely on my self-control. If you think that you are being shortchanged by not having the benefit of my glowing wit on those few legal things I say (:-), then you can either take your chances, or work to overturn the authoritarian laws that make concerned that I might say something offensive. Or, in short, if you enjoy surrendering your rights, unplug your modem and cower in the dark. Don't complain to me. -- John Woods, Charles River Data Systems, Framingham MA, (617) 626-1101 ...!decvax!frog!john, ...!mit-eddie!jfw, jfw%mit-ccc@MIT-XX.ARPA "Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining." Jeff Raskin, interviewed in Doctor Dobb's Journal
dee@cca.UUCP (Donald Eastlake) (05/29/86)
It seems to me that a lot of this is oversimplified. A sovereign nation
can make anything it wants illegal, including acts outside its borders.
If a US citizen commited espionage by traveling to a foreign country and
while in that foreign country originating a message that revelead
certain information to a foreign government with the intent of injuring
the United States, they would be committing a crime. For example, if I
went to Japan (which has no law against espionage as far as I know) and
while there electronically commnicated secrets to the Tokyo embassy of
the USSR I would clearly be inviolation of US law and might even be
extraditable depending on the treaties between US&Japan. Most people
would think this was a reasonable extra-territorial application of
criminal law. One can think of lots of other examples. What if I sit
in country A and send and receive lots of messages for the purpose of
managing an organized crime syndicate in country B? How much difference
should it make what country I am a citizen or national of? What if
country A is the United States and country B is Canada and the Canadian
crime is the distribution in Canada of hate material that I know is
false which urges the extermination of all X (Jews, blacks, ...
whatever), something which would be allowed in the United States?
Anyway, my point is that real situations can be complicated and I think
that the claim that you can arbitrarily disseminate communications in
one country ignoring all other country's laws is ridiculous.
--
+1 617-492-8860 Donald E. Eastlake, III
ARPA: dee@CCA-UNIX usenet: {decvax,linus}!cca!deerb@ccird1.UUCP (Rex Ballard) (06/04/86)
There are several different views that could be taken with reguard to usenet and BBS's in general. 1: Usenet, et al are "mail boxes" which the reciever chooses to read. In this case, within the if the reader is offended by something said in a group, he can "unsubscribe". The "mail" groups are very much like this, but usenet is a little more "public". 2: Boards are "party-line common carriers", again the parties involved can send a great deal of information which the reader "chooses" to "listen to". If you think homosexuality is obscene, then you don't subscribe to motss. The reason the "call me for obscene conversation" numbers are not illegal is because the obscenity is requested by the caller. 3: Boards are "news media". This is definately NOT the case. News media are managed by Editorial staff which monitors both the quality and the content of what is published. In some ways, the division into many groups provides some editorial management, but only the "mod" groups are really editorially managed. 4: Boards are "Bulletin boards". This would be very similar to the boards seen at many shopping centers and grocery stores. Again however, someone can quickly examine the board and find/remove offensive notices. This is not the case with boards which may recieve >4 million lines of new information per day. 5: Boards are "Bathroom Walls" or graffiti boards. This is the least flattering, but most accurate description. At one time, it was quite trivial for me to post as guest, post as another account, switch to a non-existent machine, change to/from lines, or otherwise post anonymously. A system admin would have a hard time protecting his machine from someone who changed his "from" line. Currently, all of these approaches have been discussed. Eventually, there may be a number of different legal types of "boards". Compuserve may be legally different than usenet which may be different than the "background bbs" running on someone's CoCo. What could be done to insure that the net is innoffensive as possible? To begin with, the information in net.announce.newusers is one of the most important. Ideally, that should be the only "default" group that can be read without specifically "subscribing" to it. This group includes postings which describe, in detail what types of information you might be interested in, or want to avoid. Groups should be very specific. For example, if net.singles starts getting some "kinky" topics, it might be appropriate to have a net.singles.kinks group to get that type of thing out of the more general group. Net.general shouldn't even exist, because it is too easy for someone to put something really offensive in that group and the unsuspecting reader could accidentally read it. Cross postings shouldn't be possible. Instead, the posting should be put in one catagory and a "see also" message could be put in the others, which would show the heading and offer the user the opportunity to "call" that article if desired. Anybody should be able to "Kill" an article which is clearly in violation of their confidentiality. Personally, I am suprised at the number of people who put their home phone #, personal mail address, and even social security number on their signature lines. I gave my address once in a technical group and got more junk mail than I had recieved in years. Of course, if someone were to put my VISA number on every restroom wall in town, unless they were actually caught in the act of putting it there, I would have little recourse, except to get a new card. Even if the merchant were to paint over it, there might be some other commode wall that had that number painted on it. Strange as it may seem, even usenet is a controlled distribution. If some company chooses to broadcast their BBS contents over the airwaves, then additional security measures should be taken. But for "common carrier" distributed nets, the componant users should be thought of as "gossip networks" ala the old "party line" phones. Looking for legal infractions that might occur on usenet or any other BBS is a little like looking for a needle in a grain silo. The offensive matter may only be 10 or 20 bytes per billion.
jacob@chalmers.UUCP (Jacob Hallen) (06/06/86)
In article <880@frog.UUCP> john@frog.UUCP writes: > >As a practical matter, it cannot be illegal in some other country for me to >sit here in Somerville, Massachusetts, USA and say something distasteful to >a foreign lawmaker. If you say it on the net you are in fact publishing your statement in every country that the net is distributed to. You have to take the consequences of any illegalities in your statement, the consequeces being a risk of being taken to court when you visit a country that has a law against public display of the opinions in your statement. Also, you are the only one who can be held responsible. To hold a host responsible would be as absurd as to hold US Mail responsible if you sent your statement by ordinary mail. Jacob Hallen
ricker@bunker.UUCP (ricker) (06/09/86)
In article <597@chalmers.UUCP> jacob@chalmers.UUCP (Jacob Hallen) writes: >In article <880@frog.UUCP> john@frog.UUCP writes: >> >>As a practical matter, it cannot be illegal in some other country for me to >>sit here in Somerville, Massachusetts, USA and say something distasteful to >>a foreign lawmaker. > >If you say it on the net you are in fact publishing your statement in every >country that the net is distributed to. The poster is not directly publishing his or her article. The poster is submitting it to the net to be published. >Also, you are the only one who can be held responsible. To hold a host >responsible would be as absurd as to hold US Mail responsible if you sent >your statement by ordinary mail. > >Jacob Hallen The comparison of USENET and U.S. Mail is not correct in this context. USENET is more like publishing or other broadcast media. The national gateway only receives one copy of a posted article. That gateway then assumes the responsibility of broadcasting copies of the article. It may be that international law holds the originator responsible for sending illegal materials (I don't know I'm not a lawyer), but I would think any law would have to hold the local receiver/diseminator responsible as well. Anyway, this whole discussion points up the stupidity of censorship. Could you imagine how much more slowly ideas would be shared, if our governments had not allowed a single byte of these discussions be transmitted until they had come up with the "perfect" information control policy?
rb@ccird1.UUCP (Rex Ballard) (06/16/86)
In article <1188@bunker.UUCP> ricker@bunker.UUCP (ricker) writes: >In article <597@chalmers.UUCP> jacob@chalmers.UUCP (Jacob Hallen) writes: >>In article <880@frog.UUCP> john@frog.UUCP writes: >>> >>>As a practical matter, it cannot be illegal in some other country for me to >>>sit here in Somerville, Massachusetts, USA and say something distasteful to >>>a foreign lawmaker. >> >>If you say it on the net you are in fact publishing your statement in every >>country that the net is distributed to. > >The poster is not directly publishing his or her article. The poster is >submitting it to the net to be published. This is only true on a "mod" newsgroup where mail is sent to the moderator. In a "net" newsgroup, publication is accomplished as soon as pnews puts the article in a directory which is accessable to more than one user (/usr/spool/news...). On the other hand, since news is distributed by common carrier, it isn't really "published", any more than a "gossip net" of voice connections would constitute publication. The law is not real clear on what a common carrier network really is. If the same information is distributed by unencrypted broadcast media, THEN it would be publication. >>Also, you are the only one who can be held responsible. To hold a host >>responsible would be as absurd as to hold US Mail responsible if you sent >>your statement by ordinary mail. Of course, the country with a grevance against you would have to prove that you, rather than someone using your login, actually posted the article. Possible, but not easy. > >The comparison of USENET and U.S. Mail is not correct in this context. USENET >is more like publishing or other broadcast media. The national gateway only >receives one copy of a posted article. That gateway then assumes the >responsibility of broadcasting copies of the article. It may be that >international law holds the originator responsible for sending illegal materials >(I don't know I'm not a lawyer), but I would think any law would have to hold >the local receiver/diseminator responsible as well. Telephones have been used for illegal purposes for years, not once has AT&T been held criminally liable. In fact, the courts have ruled that warrants are required even though AT&T may give permission for a phone tap without one, since it is the privacy of the originator, not the common carrier that is being invaded. Internationally, some common carriers may be "tapped" by the government without permission. In those cases, the government might actually request that a host delete an improper message. Of course, finding that message in the 1MB/day might not be so easy :-).
ricker@bunker.UUCP (ricker) (06/18/86)
In article <482@ccird1.UUCP> rb@ccird1.UUCP (Rex Ballard) writes: >This is only true on a "mod" newsgroup where mail is sent to the >moderator. In a "net" newsgroup, publication is accomplished as >soon as pnews puts the article in a directory which is accessable >to more than one user (/usr/spool/news...). > I insist that the person typing the article is only submitting it to be published. Just because the organization which disseminates it relies on automatic equipment does not absolve the organization of the responsibility to police its traffic. Of course it is almost impossible to police this much traffic. That is why censorship sucks. +---------------+ +----------------+ +---------------+ | Author |--------->| Publisher |----->| Subscriber | +---------------+ | | +---------------+ | | | | +---------------+ | |----->| Subscriber | | | +---------------+ +----------------+ If USENET only passed on all traffic as bitstreams then it might have the same standing as a company operating a voice switch. But USENET organizes the data into semantically logical sets including moderators (editors) which to me is a clear analogy to hard-copy publishing. I am not, however, saying that USENET should be held liable for distributing . . . hmmm . . . what phrase? . . .illegal ideas? :> If eliminate moral censorship, we lessen these nit-picky arguments also.
alang@masscomp.UUCP (Alan Groupe) (06/19/86)
Of course, a number of computer bulletin boards have been shut down (and machines confiscated?) because of certain postings. Alan
franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) (06/19/86)
In article <482@ccird1.UUCP> rb@ccird1.UUCP (Rex Ballard) writes: >Of course, the country with a grevance against you would have to prove >that you, rather than someone using your login, actually posted the >article. Possible, but not easy. Depends on the country. Under some legal systems, the burden of proof is on the defendant. Frank Adams ihnp4!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka Multimate International 52 Oakland Ave North E. Hartford, CT 06108
sob@soma.UUCP (Stan Barber) (06/23/86)
Speaking as a long time BBS system operator (SOBBS Test Mode, since 1980),
I have followed the issue of Public BBS operations for some time. To my
knowledge the only BBS's that have been successfully shutdown are those
that the phone companys have had shut down due to "phreaking" information.
In every case that I am aware of, the BBS sysop did not discourage such
activity.
--
Stan uucp:{shell,rice,drillsys}!soma!sob Opinions expressed
Olan ARPA:sob@rice.arpa here are ONLY mine &
Barber CIS:71565,623 BBS:(713)660-9252 noone else's.