Rich Graves <rcgraves@disposable.com> very correctly mentions:
1) Moderator liability and anonymous posting.
At 09:37 AM 1/7/97 -0800, Pierre Uszynski agreed:
I agree that this is actually a critical problem with a filtering moderation scheme. Such a scheme appears to provide the capability to filter out possible "copyright violations" posts. From what I remember of the Netcom/CoS case (without going back to the sources), that may mean more liability for the reviewers (and the operator of the machine). That's a major point against simple filtering moderation.
gbroiles@netbox.com (Greg Broiles) continues:
[...] I'm not sure it's a big problem. I see three broad categories of information which the moderation liability scheme may suppress:[...]
I think I went a bit in the wrong direction mentioning Netcom/CoS: 1) The problem is not so much what posts are "legal" or "illegal", as it is what posts *could* bring in lawsuits and what effect this has on the moderators. Not everyone evaluates that "Sword of Damocles" threat identically: Some argue it is statistically irrelevant, some argue that their pockets are not tempting targets anyway, some are in different countries (and have not noticed it does not matter anymore), etc... The point is that 2) The above "do I dare approve this post" equation is clearly not the one that determines whether a post is good cypherpunks material or not. I do not want this liability issue to matter in any way in the moderators ratings (no matter how Sandy and John would themselves resolve it) if we can help it. And we can. and 3) This equation would seriously affect how *I* would offer help in a filtering moderation scheme: I most likely would not (whether or not anyone would be interested in me participating, and my decision for reasons that are not relevant, etc...) Again, that's the wrong reason brought into the discussion: the right reasons would be "do I have the time now?" (hah! ;-), "do I currently read in sync with incoming traffic?", and "do I want to participate?".
Can you name a software package which runs under Windows or the Mac OS which automatically processes reviewers' opinions against a mailbox of incoming mail?[...]
I spend a ridiculous portion of my time fixing the damage caused by software that was used just because "it was there". Just because there is software to do^H^H, sorry, to botch something under Windows is not reason enough to use it, and even less of a reason to limit ourselves to these options. Yes, some people couldn't use the *option* initially, and others could (with ready software or by writing their own). Too bad. As someone else mentioned, that's an opportunity (and there must be a cross-platform java mail reader somewhere that can be modified or written to satisfy lots of platforms at once), and cypherpunks wouldn't be the only forum moving toward "after-the-fact cooperative filtering"...
[Greg Broiles US crypto export control policy in a nutshell: Export jobs, not crypto.]
Great summary, Pierre. pierre@rahul.net