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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.
Yes, particularly where threats of violence have been involved...
It would seem to be basically the same thing as any other order forbidding contact for some duration, regardless of reason.
Would the prevailing attitude be different if, say, the online vendettas were carried out through the mail? Or in Letters to the Editor for some major newspaper? If memory serves, making threats in either case is frowned upon, legally... and the solution that the courts turn to is not to tell the victims to move or cancel their subscription.
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.
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.
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.
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 --
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.