roundtable: Re: Congress Brokers Censorship Deal

roundtable: Re: Congress Brokers Censorship Deal

Re: Congress Brokers Censorship Deal

Michael Dillon (michael@memra.com)
Mon, 4 Dec 1995 19:11:01 -0800 (PST) 

Date: Mon, 4 Dec 1995 19:11:01 -0800 (PST)
From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>
To: Vadim Antonov <avg@sprint.net>
Subject: Re: Congress Brokers Censorship Deal
In-Reply-To: <199512042252.RAA10737@titan.sprintlink.net>
Message-Id: <Pine.LNX.3.91.951204190335.18630A-100000@okjunc.junction.net>


On Mon, 4 Dec 1995, Vadim Antonov wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 2 Dec 1995, Karl Denninger, MCSNet wrote:
> 
> > If the ISPs out there had taken steps to remove (1) the bestiality and 
> > (2) the child pornography that is in the erotic pictures groups *every 
> > day* these folks wouldn't have had enough ammunition to pass legislation 
> > dealing with the rest.
> 
> That is silly.  How do you control what your network carries in the bytes
> it receives from the outside world?  The only viable solution for that
> is to prohibit using your network by anyone under legal age.  I would
> suggest that ISPs should start doing that to show the idiots on the top
> what they're going to achieve.
> 
> Any massive attempt to ban alt.sex.pictures will only cause the pictures
> to go all over the place.  The Net is very much self-policing, you don't
> generally find objectionable material in rec.movies.disney (or whatever).

This is a good point. But we don't REALLY know if this will happen unless 
we try it. It seems that a reasonable ISP would cut the alt.sex groups 
given the current situation. Then if the pictures SPAM out all over other 
hierarchies and finally settle in a new alt.bin.sex hierarchy, a 
reasonable ISP could be justified in NOT cutting off those newsgroups 
because to do so would defeat many of the parental control programs.  In 
fact, even today, a reasonable ISP could point to the floating warez 
groups a evidence that it is NOT reasonable to cut off the sex newsgroups. 
But until there is legislation and court cases to support such a decision, 
the way is decidedly unclear.

To make things even murkier, I know that both Canada's RCMP and the US 
FBI have been monitoring warez newsgroups, sex newsgroups and warez IRC 
channels for at least the past three years. I suspect they are quite 
happy to be able to eavesdrop on these folks in a venue where many of 
them let down their guard. If they did not find this information useful 
I suspect they would have been loudly calling for legislation to shut 
down these venues.


Michael Dillon                                    Voice: +1-604-546-8022
Memra Software Inc.                                 Fax: +1-604-542-4130
http://www.memra.com                             E-mail: michael@memra.com

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