Slashdot Mirror
Usenet Gag Order
An anonymous coward sent us this link, noting that a judge in Seattle has issued a restraining order barring the defendant from posting in a specific Usenet group, even non-harassing posts. Taking a look at the newsgroup, it looks like one of any number of Usenet flamewars, and the defendant might well meet the definition of Usenet kook (as do the petitioners, it seems). The question is whether anyone should have the ability to use the legal system to exclude another from posting in a public forum; unlike other forms of harassment, a Usenet post is not directed to any particular person.
I guess we know who was sleeping when they did all that talk about the "first amendment" and "freedom of speech" during law school.
No matter how offensive or stupid the speech, it's not up to the government to censor it.
Spam is unappreciated, but anything else in the ballpark is permissible.
The judge should have ordered that only moderated groups can be held to this kind of standard.
I don't think this sounds too different from a normal restraining order. If you've caused someone enough trouble, you're not allowed to get near them, even if you intend only to make polite conversation. I don't know the details of the case, but I think the idea makes sense.
This seems pretty absurd to me. Unlike many other forms of communication, Usenet doesn't force you to read it. If you get tired of a flame war, or fed up with a pesky user, just don't read it anymore! I don't think their is any legal authority for what the judge did. Clearly, (s)he doesn't understand the issue.
There's no reason for a sig here.
It's not so much targetted at USENET as at a single person, in much the same way that somebody making harrassing calls overseas could likely be targetted by his home jurisdiction depending on local legality.
If the defendant moves to a different jurisdiction, the order might not be valid anymore.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
*shrug*
In that case, then, would it be legal to simply hurl a few thousand unsolicited messages at every unmoderated USENET group every hour for a week, on the basis that nobody is *forced* to read them?
There's more ways to harrass than one. Casting aspersions on a fellow in USENET, for instance, can lead to those messages being not only visible to one's coworkers, but also archived through Deja and such.
And to drive somebody away who *was* a frequent patron of a group is also not exactly kosher. That's still denial of service.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
If you go through the whole article, the bit at the bottom says "help remove the gag order from our Assistant Webmaster"... I'm thinking that there's perhaps a bit of reporting bias here?
The judge's decision is ridiculous as reported in that article, but I'm pretty sure we haven't seen the entire story here. (Not that I'd care to ever see the courts interfere on USENET...)
Absolutely hilarious!
Leanne did not post the requested nudie pic.
It depends in each case on my behavior.
A grocery store owner could seek a restraining order nominally barring me from being within a certain distance, if I'd been harrassing it -- such as by attacking customers, or otherwise trying to ruin their business by destructive interference. For instance, protesters are sometimes barred from coming within a certain distance of businesses or clinics they are protesting, due to past behavior.
As for calling France, if I had a habit of calling up random French people at odd hours of the night (for them) and berating them about their cuisine, quite possibly. I don't doubt that stranger things have happened.
Posting, likewise. *shrug*
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Exactly. And if he is ordered by the court not to use the telephone network as a result of his actions, how does that affect anybody elses freedom of speech?
Actually, I wonder if the court order language was specific to newsgroups. Was he posting to news servers using NNTP or to Deja using HTTP? Would it matter? Could a lawyer have a field day? (IANAL)
======
"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
I can understand issuing restaining orders to prevent someone who is physically threatening someone from coming near or talking to an individual, but I don't think that public mass flaming/spamming falls under that. Unless a person is actually going out of his/her way to privatly harrass one person in a way that could cause them to fear for thier safety, I don't belive the government has a right to resrict one's right's. The Usenet is a public forum where free speech is fundamental, no matter how irritating or idiotic.
Stuff like this is a problem, but there are ways to deal with it. You can use spam filters and learn to ignore flames. If you still are unable to cope, take your conversation elsewhere. There are plenty of privately operated forums that moderate.
Personally, I think censorship is fine when used in private forums where the owner has the right to decide what can and cannot be said through his or her server, but the Usenet is not private. The govenment does not have the power to decide what can and cannot be siad in public communication mediums.
Life is pain. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
The restraining order is not for all of Usenet but for a specific newsgroup. The individual's freedom of speech is therefore not curtailed.
;)
Postings directed to a particular newsgroup may not be targetted at a specific individual, but they are targetted at a community of people formed by the newsgroup's ``regulars''. It's reasonable for these people to want some sort of remedy for someone who is an utter nuisance.
In recent years, groups of individuals have emerged on Usenet whose only intent is to harass. They crosspost on purpose between completely unrelated newsgroups. When someone trims followups, they put them back. They fill their postings with tons of garbage, ASCII graphic crud and whatnot. Clearly, when your only aim is to disturb rational conversation, you aren't expressing your freedom of speech, you are abusing your freedom to curtail that of others.
There are no adequate means of moderation in Usenet (as there is in slashdot), so turning to the courts may be the only way to get peace.
Someone mentioned that there are moderated newsgroups; how little this individual knows how Usenet really works!
First of all, the moderation can be bypassed; you can still post directly to a moderated newsgroup, even though this is obviously highly frowned upon. I have done it once or twice in the past when the moderator's address wouldn't work for me, due to broken software or whatever. Even though there was nothing wrong with my messages---they were the sort that would be passed by the moderator---I received a slap-on-the wrist e-mail not to do that again.
Secondly, newsgroup moderation works by filtering postings through the mailbox of some tireless, tolerant individual who has to sift through everything and decide what gets posted. Thus harassment and spam is simply hidden away from the public and suffered by the moderator.
Thirdly, moderated newsgroups tend to be not nearly as lively as their unmoderated counterparts. For example, comp.lang.c.moderated tends to be dead compared to comp.lang.c.
Ultimately, Usenet moderation (as we know it) is not the answer.
It is trivial to post anonymously to a newsgroup. In fact, he could continue posting with his same nickname, and even continue to be annoying and if he is half competent, it would be impossible to prove it's him.
Of course that would be an extremely loser-ish thing to do. He could also just assume a different alias and write productive, on-topic posts. This would make the original problem go away, but he would still be violating the order.
The point is, they don't seem to be considering the fact that it is inherently impossible to regulate usenet, and that this ruling is basically unenforceable.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
In August I was requested to come speak with the Dean of Students here about a post I had made on a local, university newsgroup (a repost of a parody of "On Top of the Schoolhouse," itself a parody of "On Top of Old Smokey," of course).
Secure in the knowledge that I had been simply enjoying my right to freedom of expression (as protected specifically by our computer resources user agreement), I walked confidently into the meeting, only to discover that the post had eventually come under scrutiny as potentially threatening.
Of course, the reason they thought it was threatening was because they didn't really understand quoting conventions, and thought I had written the whole thing, including the text I had quoted above the parody.
Still, these people--who do not understand Usenet, and who do not care to--had taken a complaint about my post and decided to act upon it. Had I not been able to convince them that part of the message was a quote, they might have acted on a perceived "threat" (doing what, I have no idea).
It's really scary to see this coming out in a court of law. It was bad enough when a Dean of Students (of a technologically oriented institution) was trying to interpret a medium that she did not really understand, and make a ruling based on that lack of knowledge.
From the DoJ FoF in the MS case, it's clear that at least someone in the Justice Dept can make the effort and learn to understand some of the computer industry. But the justice system is staffed with many individuals, most of whom really don't have to know all that much about computers/Usenet/the "Web"/such things, yet they can make rulings based on these things about which they know so little, and understand so much less.
I'm suddenly frightened. I was so secure in my First Amendment rights. What is a threat? What kind of speech deserves a restraining order? What kind of speech deserves more than that?
Words that I merely quoted in a followup were perceieved as threatening, in combination with words I did post [though I credited the original author of the parody]...
A completely unrealistic "threat" was percieved simply because people didn't understand the medium. Fortunately I was in an informal meeting with someone pre-disposed to believe me. Had I not been, I might be fighting this out in a court of law--with power to resolve resting in more people who don't understand the medium.
Louis Brandeis said, "Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means."
Clearly, this judge does not share either the intellectual capital or political leanings of Justice Brandeis. The notion that a flame war constitutes "fighting words" (which are not protected under the First Amendment) is nonsensical, and certainly unsupported by any empirical evidence that flame wars are likely to cause one of the participants to react with physical violence. In any event, the judges order appears to function as a very broad prior restraint. Statutes the prohibited speech that "stirs the public to anger or invites dispute" have been struck down as constitutionally overbroad. How constitutional can a judge's order that Usenet postings must be "on topic" be?
Clearly the judge's order is not a narrowly tailored, content-neutral, "time, place, and manner" restriction and do not serve a significan government interest. Usenet is basically a wide-open public forum, and the judge's attempt to moderate it is not a "legitimate public function."
Judges get away with this kind of unconstitutional crap because they exercise power in the form of an injunction. If this guy violates it and is held in contempt, he may not be able to raise the unconstitutionality of the judge's order as a defense (see Walker v. City of Birmingham, 388 U.S. 307 (1967) (dealing with contempt resulting from injunction under a facially invalid statute). Probably this guy doesn't have the means to appeal the injunction, so he's got no choice but to obey it. Once again, the law works to the advantage of those with power and money.
I should point out, as a moderator myself (rec.toys.transformers.moderated), that there are ways to moderate a group so that direct posts don't get passed. For instance, PGPMoose, which checks each post to make sure it was properly PGP-signed by the moderation software, and if not, cancels it immediately. We use this software for our newsgroup, and it works very, very well.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Another judge out somewhere has just issued an order restraining a highly malicious slashdot poster known only as "Anonymous Coward". Coward will be banned from slashdot for a year.
-- The Sheep --
I have actually gone to the trouble of reading the (unbelievably biased) article, and it clarified a few things for me. I would like to share them:
1) No member of the newsgroup went to the police for help. The police were informed by a member of the Australian government, who was concerned by the nature of the posts. The police, after reading the posts from both sides, decided whom they wanted to contact. It was not Mr. Abraham (the guy to whom the court order was issued).
2) The order did not only restrain Mr. Abraham from posting to one specific newsgroup. It also included a 1000 foot restaining order and an order not to contact one of the "petitioners," just as any other harrassment suit.
3) Mr. Abraham was not the only one censured, but he was the only one ordered not to post. All other parties were warned not to post to the newsgroup, or at least to keep all posts strictly on topic.
4) This was not an ordinary flame war; independent readers (particularly an Australian govt. employee) felt the posts were serious enough that they may have eventually led to actual physical violence. I believe it is safe to assume that these posts were no longer about skiing.
5) Nothing in this article gave any facts about the nature of the posts, except in the form of opinion of the detective involved. One might imagine that, given the extremely biased nature of this article (and I believe this bias is abundantly clear), the article would offer evidence defending the respondant, if such were available.
Personally, I would like to see more information about the specific posts for which Mr. Abraham was censured. I find it difficult to make a decision about a specific case when I do not know the whole story. So unless those posts are made available, I can only assume that the judge, who did have all of the information, made the correct decision.
I, as a reader and USENET contributor, care about my life. I don't want to miss potential, credible threats to my life and property with an improper setup of my killfile. I want to know what is happening around me. Heck, I even care about my reputation. I don't want to miss a smear because the smearer is in my killfile.
My rule-of-thumb summary: a killfile should be used only to remove the killjoys from your life, not the killers.
In my opinion, mailing-lists and www-boards suck donkey poo-poo compared to Usenet.
Slashdot proves that building a moderation system is easy within the confines of a single web site where everyone is authenticated, and the information isn't distributed across a wide area. You could do the same thing with a single private NNTP server with authenticated access, and kill files.
Usenet is a world-wide distributed system, with many points of entry and countless users who aren't tracked in any way. The problems to be solved there are entirely on a different plane.
IMHO, what Usenet needs is a protocol for sharing killfile information among like-minded individuals. Killfiles are far better than Slashdot-type moderation because they are content sensitive, and can be made quite specific, like ignoring a particuliar user, or even news server. Scoring newsreaders can assign a score to each article based on multiple filter criteria, similar to slashdot scores. Killfiles and scoring scale nicely, because they are processed at the client side. What you need is to be able to share ``kill packets'' with other users. Instead of having one huge moderation system, you have a disconnected model. There is no need for there to be one monolithic moderation database which appears identical to everyone, so it would be a waste of resources to try to construct one.
Slashdot doesn't compare to Usenet. I find that you can't have meaningful threads of conversation, and then sense of community just isn't here! Topics keep being thrown in, then some fast exchanges ensue and die out in favor of the next topic. Also, the graphically-intensive layout sucks, and you have little choice in how it's presented, since there is no protocol here other than HTML. Also, Slashdot can't even be viewed properly unless you use non-free software like Netscape or Internet explorer. Last time I tried Mozilla, it blew up on Slashdot. Maybe the latest milestone does a better job, who knows! On the other hand, Usenet participation requires only free software, like tin, trn or slrn.
Also I find that the Usenet technical forums tend to provide very good quality answers (if you are willing to sift through the rubbish a little bit). From time to time you see postings from people like Dennis Ritchie, Chris Torek, Torvalds, Bjarne Stroustrup, Andrew Koenig, Doug Smith (of ACE fame) and many others. Yes, these guys are on Usenet, not on some web bulletin board. And they use their real names, not some 3l33t pseudonyms.
If you try, you can find far higher calibre discussions on Usenet than in Slashdot. The most interesting aspect of Slashdot are the links to outside stories. I know people that don't even bother reading the replies to a story, and just follow the links from here on out.
However, if he continued to misbehave, and it was realized that it was him, he will no doubt be convicted of a felony. It sounds as though a flame-war (not police business) escalated into threats of physical violence. That IS the police's business.
This should serve as a lesson to everyone. Your free speach is limited from using fighting words. Physical threats over the computer CAN be criminal if they are believed to be real.
If you use USENET to harass others and threaten others, you are STILL subject to the extension of the law. This is not a regulation of cyberspace, this is the existing regime to protect victims being applied to the Internet. This is in no ways unreasonable.
If he hadn't made any physical threats, nothing would have come from this. This serves as a lesson: use free speach for rational discourse, or irrational insults, but when you cause fear in others, you have overstepped your bounds as an honest citizen using free speach to a potentially dangerous individual intent on harming otehrs.
And it's in Seattle, too. Wouldn't it be cute if anyone flaming Microsoft was prohibited from posting to usenet on trumped-up grounds of _slander_? ;) and it would be interesting and strange to see intentional attempts to _disrupt_ a functioning newsgroup as actionable. There's a point at which the frontier justice of Usenet fails to be helpful, and IMHO some of the meowers and spammers and such go over the line. You can get a spammer's account yanked (I've killed seven, which isn't even that much), but I don't think there's ever been much chance of getting someone's account pulled for trying to kill a newsgroup. That could be changing.
At the same time, I have to admit that usenet communities can be disrupted by 'speech'. For instance, see Russ Albery's Rant, which relates to disruption of newsgroups by spam and automated spewing by computer programs. There are also groups such as the meowers and alt.syntax.tactical which primarily intend to disrupt communication, and I've seen important useful groups rendered unusable by such attacks.
I would say that as long as the balance of the legal situation is even, it'll be OK. I could really _support_ legal banning of HTML newsposting on the grounds of MIME executables being attached
Lastly I would question the sense of considering 'death threats' (short of Secret Service involvement in Presidential ones, which is their job), considering that many Usenet kooks are mentally about 12 and certain that they bear no responsibility for their wild statements- and considering that there are entire groups, such as alt.flame, in which the _point_ is to cause as much verbal damage as possible. In this context, assuming 'public community' rules is absurd, and counterintuitive. Do you arrest a Bible Belt evangelist for intentionally trying to disrupt alt.satanism or alt.wiccan or alt.atheism? Maybe you'd better, if you're going to be imposing penalties for disrupting Usenet at all.
It's been ages since I touched Usenet at large with a ten-foot pole (that is, aside from a few on-campus groups) -- but isn't it rather easy for someone to spoof his or her From: line? This would defeat the purpose rather quickly.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
WSU's Information Technology department has on many occasions stiffled the speech of students... untill they make a noise. My freshman year here there was a "Holocaust Revisionist" site that recieved complaints. From chatting with a few people about it I heard that they were "temporarily restrained", as is in the power of IT officials, from further "harassing" anyone. After they caused a stink they got their website back and produced an official statement from IT.
Following a flamewar on alt.religion.universal-life in which I posted a link to a domain name's administrative contact information (through nsi.com's whois) the targeted party recieved numerous calls that resulted not from that post, but an anonymous post under false pretenses to another newsgroup containing that phone number.
I was found guilty of harassment for providing information on how to access that publicly accessable document. So I assumed the "administrative position" (duck and grab ankles) and gave up my @wsu.edu email for the summer.
My account reactivation was delayed for two weeks because one of the officials (cough**cough**cBoIuGgGhOT!**cough) tought that it was inappropriate use of my unix account to host this student group's site. There was no complaint ever associated with the page. Yet the administration felt that they had the right to restrict my speech in order to "protect" me from "inducing a liability" on to myself (i.e. I would be liable for anything that appeared on that page, any complaints on that page would be complaints against me).
I ran headlong at this one, contacting the Ombudsman and attending a moderated meeting with upper administration. They rolled over and gave me a verbal appology (no official statement). Part of the run-arround was that upper administration acted on "policy" that IT officials had no jurisdiction to invent. IT in fact had no said policy and I have yet to meet with said IT official's boss to discuss the event.
Once again the stink caused the administration to draft some more "policy". Now students are supposed to link to a copyright and a disclaimer off of their home pages. Want to bet noone's done that yet? The new "policy" also is rendered practically useless. It says "WSU does not restrict the contents of electronic mail of staff, faculty, and students or the contents of faculty, staff, and student individual World Wide Web (Web) pages linked to the official WSU Web pages beyond the restrictions inherent in complying with the law."
Interestingly it is a state law that no student of WSU may harass another individual in any way. Harassment, anything that is "anoying, disturbing or perturbing," is definedly quite broad! Here is a good site covering the legal theory surrounding such issues. Basically it supports restricting one-to-one speech to prevent harassment, but determines that one-to-many speech should be protected as free speech.
An importaint distinction should be made that I'm not sure the author covers. Newsgroup postings are a one-to-many medium, but the comments may be directed to (or at) an individual. In this way should criticizing an individual be considered harassment? What about warning others that you think this individual is bad news? "Harassment" says the WSU administration, and a violation of "student conduct."
So... don't like the postings of a WSU student? Complain to abuse@wsu.edu and they're screwed!
Too bad WSU's policy isn't like WWU's or UW's; even CWU's policy is more lenient! Looks like EWU is in the same boat that WSU is in.
I didn't mean specifically _Seattle_, so much as the notion that Microsoft basically owns the state government (bought and paid for) and would like to see state police going after people flaming MS on usenet- and that this would be an unreasonable action to take, but might seem acceptable to some. ;)
Unless you're one of the government representatives making excuses for what Microsoft has always done and will continue to do, it was _not_ a veiled insult at you. It was a rather unveiled insult at the integrity of Washington State legislators and representatives >;) really, I have a great deal of contempt for these ayn-rand-thumping maniacs. What is best for Microsoft IS NOT best for the people. I'm sorry you mistakenly were offended at a remark that was not directed at you- suppose I should have been blunter. I'm not sorry about hinting that MS would love to get a tame senator or cop to try arresting people for 'slander', because I am sure they'd love to do that if they had any chance of succeeding. Perhaps they'd like to start on me, by banning me from Slashdot for expressing my opinion of, not things they have done, but what I believe they'd like to do
A judge passing a ruling on a medium he certainly doesn't understand. How can anoyone support that?
Starting a precedent for the legal moderation of newsgroups because the collective AOL-lusers couldn't write a killfile to save their lives, you think is a good idea.
Not to mention its completely unenforcable, I think those who oppose this should create 'Two Buddha' accounts on free Usenet servers and start posting to prove that Usenet will always = anarchy.
Its pretty obvious they didn't want a kill file, and he just flamed the wrong guys. That flamees being clueless twits with a huge bruised egos and a lawyer.
"Buffy dearest, we're just not gonna stand for this abuse, get Judge Smith on the phone."
Don't treat the judiciary as independent and unbiased on this issue. The fact that a national judge tries to limit communication on a trans-national forum should give pause for thought.
The Internet is a new frontier (for them), one which is beyond their current jurisdiction, and since they are accustomed to power, one in which they will try to gain the same might as they have in the physical world. This was just an early shot. In due course, I expect that it'll get quite ugly.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I remember a time when it was common to use real names in Usenet. Funny how no one mentioned this so far.
To the extent of my memory, I have never posted anonymously to anything. Usenet, mailing lists, webboards, slashdot, whatever. I see other people doing so, and on a certain level it amuses me. I have never been burned for doing so, which may just mean I am lucky. Or maybe I have a higher built-in tolerance for hitting the delete key, and just ignore some stuff that might set other people off.
Brief aside: The only guy that has ever really bothered me was some joker that kept spamming everyone @osu.edu. Every last time I asked him to stop, following carefully the instructions in his mail, his account autoreplies another spam to me. I have had 4 of his isp accounts cancelled, he never learns. heh
Anyway, I do not intend to ever post anonymously, my opinions are mine and everyone should know they are mine. Everyone should be able to reply to me, personally or publically, the same as if I were standing face to face with that person. The fact that some others have a problem with that, or are scared of it for some reason, is amusing, and kind of sad.
Communication is only possible between equals
I followed a link on someone's post and started reading the thread. It seems one of the flamers took to meeting his UseNet opponents IRL and stalking them. Here's a link.
Bad Command Or File Name
Well, people can still be arrested for being disorderly in the street.
:) I can't see how this is in anyway a violation of any of his rights. The judge basicly said, you were being a nuisance, you were hassling people, we don't want you to do it. He's not banned from the Internet, he's not banned from Usenet, he's just not allowed to post to one little part of it where he was making an ass of himself. It's a reasonable, rational punnishment.
If the authorities wish, they can arrest him for the actual threats, etc. posted to the Usenet, but banning him from posting altogether is exercising their control to an unacceptable extent. The powers that be (politicians, judiciaries, etc.) are authoritarian by their very nature. Give them an inch (of our freedom) and they'll take a mile.
But anyway, what you said makes it sounds as though you would rather him arrested than not allowed to post to one newsgroup! If he's in jail, he probably won't get to post to any newsgroups at all
Dana
He wasn't anonymous. "Two Buddha" was just a nickname he used to sign the posts, his real name was always in the From: line. See Retiring the Buddha
Go down to Title 10, Chapter 14:
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is not a legal opinion.
Living under the threat of death