From: pierre@shell.portal.com (Pierre Uszynski) From: owen@autodesk.com (D. Owen Rowley) There is another level of *menace* which I suppose many of you are unaware
I mean people who exploit insecure sites and networking skill to forge mail and articles as part of a concerted and ongoing campaign of ????????????????????? harrasement. Stuff that has resulted in very serious consequences. ????????????????????????? Theres no need to go into detail here about the array of tactics and the widening scope of the phenomenon, but I think it needs to be looked at as an example of how and why systems are abused.
On the contrary, let's hear the details.
There are three personas in particular, who stand out in the crowd, they are: The Dark Knight Obvious psuedonym, claims that he was disciplined or fired because the nasty queers on soc.motss complained to his management about his honestly stated opinions. during two periods of his unwanted attentions and homophobic ranting there were several serious sendsys bombing incidents. I know of one in which an SGI employee was mail bombed with enough garbage to clog their whole mail system for quite a while. Interuption of net connectivity to a whole company in order to amuse some creep who fancys himself as a fag-bashing super hero, fits my definition of sociopath, and I suspect that if it happened to any of us, filling up our disk real estate, delaying our business as usual, we would consider it a serious situation. I'm not sure how many there were, but during the worst phases, there could be two or three such incidents per day, involving gigabytes of data. RALF, or RLF bizarre and aggresively homophobic, tends to rant about how homos victimised him in some way or another. Claimed to be Church of RALF, has a numerological hangup over his birthdate , pretty much your basic testosterone poisoned megalomaniac. also present and gloating during or around periods of mail bombing. like dark Knight, the home site of the acct changes, or is forged. Dr Artimus Page Phoney acct claiming to have succesfull therapies to turn disgusting homos into natural men like him. Posts long and surreal accounts, projecting his anal fantasys onto the nasty homos and promising to cure them.. uh huh! Claimed that phoney name and acct were to protect him from the roving gangs of hetero-bashers who are out to get him. In another incident from that same period an individual was targetted who did not have a very understanding employer, he was fired as a result. A very serious matter for the guy, who's life got turned upside down because he was the target of these acts. Sendsys messages would be forged, ton_o_byte mail bombings would be forged in the name of other soc.motss regulars, usually those who posted uppity responses to these *honestly stated opinions*. Punitive repostings of months of back traffic Oh.. yes.. there were denials.. but the common factors between all three of these guys and the harrasement showed more than a casual relationship between the appearance of this character and patterns of e-harrasement. There were occasional other minor players who would come around, usually obvious forgerys from accts claiming to have been succesfully cured by the sagely Dr Page, and trying to date the Lesbians in order to help them too. Rarely would more than one be present at a time, they seemed to run in a patterned sequence that has consistently covered the last two years. A good deal of it starts as nuisance stuff, forged addresses, forged cancelations. And you can look at sendsys and mail_bombing as the functional equivelant of ordering pizzas or other deliveries to a third party, but I see it as a pattern borrowed from terrorists, purposeful and repeated , intent to wear down the spirit, and keep their prey on the defensive so recovery doesn't happen. I have no illusion that it takes a rocket scientist to pull off these stunts, nor that given the state of our net, anything can really be done to stop it now. However the real world effect was that the real people of soc.motss were subjected to severe psychological harrasement, of the type that wouldn't be tolerated for a minute in real-space. That we currently have no choice but to tolerate it in cyberspace is not an acceptable prospect. Having experienced the personal cost of this sort of thing on my own psyche, I can tell you that it is maddening while it is going on, and sobering afterwards when you realise how vulnerable you are. There are others of course, actually quite a few who are more than willing to display there ignorance from their real accts. Why I bet some of 'em probably are on this list. lets see.. heres just a partial list of proud defenders of heterosexuality who find it amusing to taunt the queers on soc.motss. Daniel J Karnes, Walter Smith, Gary Lang, Ted Kaldis, Clayton Cramer, and more.. many many more.
soc.motss and other newsgroups have seen a long list of pseudo-persons posting from non existent sites, and yes.. penet has been used to this effect.
ok, and anonymous remailers don't change that possibility one way or the other. I'll go hang out there for a while anyway...
I understand that, and for that matter I feel strongly enough about wanting my own freedom that I'll join you.
I think that the design of privacy systems needs to take these dark-side issues seriously and do their best to minimise the potential for abuse.
Sure, but consider that extremist systems will exist nonetheless.
oh .. of course, I'm only arguing for diligence and design criterea that will buy us optimum freedom, and minimise opportunity for abuse.
Perhaps a *zoning* concept is needed, in such that transactions would have qualifying conditions - or in such that *zones* exist as data-space with authentication qualifications for *entry* or transaction.
Who qualifies whom, based on what info, and to eliminate whom?
Well.. I suppose that in the case of commerce, the vendor will, and that market forces will ultimately detrmine the succesful strategys. Think of it in terms of reliability, and trustiness. Accountability optimises both, anonymity diminishes both - in fact can potentially dispense with accountability. when your transaction involves value don't you want reliability and accountability? I do. If providing my identity as collateral for reliability is required in some transactions, I think thats reasonable to offer as an option. I tend to think of cyberspace in terms of the UnReal Estate business. If I have some data space, then I think I should be able to determine who gets in and what they do there. regarding common data-space and whether there should be rules and accountability, would you move yourself or your family to a neighborhood where you couldn't determine who gets into your place or hold them accountable for what they do there? Perhaps you have a higher opinion regarding the negative aspects of human nature than I. LUX ./. owen