Date: Thu, 25 Feb 93 07:01:04 +0200 From: Johan Helsingius <julf@penet.FI> Hmm... Could you briefly outline those "well-defined" occasions? How about this case: I send you a complaint about somebody who has repeatedly harrassed everybody soc.culture.india/tamil/srilanka with anonymous postings about faked reports about then indian army raping civilians in sri lanka? We haven't completely finished drafting those policies yet, so I can't give you a comprehensive answer. (If you have suggestions about where to draw the line, please send me email!) As far as your example goes: What I do now, when someone sends me a complaint like that, is I go to the Usenet newsgroup myself, and take a look at the flame war in progress. (Usually both sides are behaving like pre-schoolers fighting in a sandbox, but we'll let that pass.) Whether or not we would need to impose sanctions on someone because of their USENET postings is a very hard-to-define area, which ultimately comes down to a judgement call. Usually, we try not to censor people, although we do usually send them a note suggesting that the follow some basic Net Etiquette. So that might not be grounds for digging up the real email address. On the other hand, if someone posts a message threatening to kill the President, and the Secret Service shows up at your doorstep (and no, this is not a Hypothetical Example), I think we would very clearly have justification for trying to track down the identity of the person posting the message. Threats of violence in general would probably be grounds for tracking the person down and issuing sanctions of some kind. The basic idea is that there are certain uses of a psedonym remailer (I'm not using the word anonymous remailer because we wouldn't be offering true anonymity) which are obviously legitimate --- for example, an anonymous suggestion box, alt.personals, etc. On the other hand, there are certain activities which are clearly out of bounds --- threats of violence, harassment, etc. What to do in the middle ground will require some amount of judgement, so perhaps we won't be able to make the list completely well-defined. Although obviously, it would be best if that list were as well-defined as possible. - Ted