At 4:31 AM +0000 2/8/97, Against Moderation wrote:
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Well, folks, tonight I have witnessed the frightening dangers of moderation and censorship first-hand, and would like to tell you what has happened. I think there is an important lesson to be learned from these incidents.
(long account of getting legal threats for quoting a message about CENSORED elided) This is indeed an important incident. I hope we can discuss it. Many issues central to Cypherpunks are involved. To name a few: * the moderation/censorship issue itself (though we have probably beaten this one to death in the last few weeks). * the "libel" issue, especially as it involves Sandy, his company, and the machine the list is hosted from. The introduction of a censor has, as many of us predicted, raised serious libel and liability issues. (This is the best reason I can think of it to move to an "alt.cypherpunks" system, where bypassing of liability, libel, copyright violation, etc., laws is naturally handled by the globally decentralized and uncontrolled nature of Usenet.) * conflicts of interest issues. Apparently Sandy feels information deleterious to C2Net, having to do with a claimed CENSORED in the software product CENSORED, cannot be passed by him to _either_ of the two lists to which articles are supposed to be sent. (Sadly, he did not tell us of this meta-censorship when it happened. This made what he did deceptive as well as wrong.) * chilling of discussion. As "Against Moderation" notes, merely _quoting_ the article of another caused Sandy to not only reject his article, but also to contact him and raise the threat of legal action. (This even though Against Moderation added all sorts of "obviously false" comments to what Vulis had written.) * even more threats. At the request of CENSORED today, I called CENSORED and had a verbal communication with him (a nice guy, by the way) about this situation. He averred that "you don't want to be pulled into this," and suggested that if I post certain things, even quoting the reports that a CENSORED exists in CENSORED, I could well be sued by the lawyers of his company! These are issues which remailers, decentralized servers, anonymity, data havens, and other Cypherpunks technologies make important issues for us to discuss. When did Cypherpunks start thinking about libel? (Obvious answer: when _their_ companies were the targets of criticism, lies, libel, whatever.) It's not as if insulting or even "libelous" (I'm not a lawyer) comments have not been made routinely on the list. Insulting companies and other institutions has been standard Cypherpunks fare since the beginning. Mykotronx has been accused of high crimes, RSADSI has been declared to be placing backdoors in code, Phil Zimmermann has been declared to be an NSA plant ("only trust the versions of PGP before he cut the deal to get his freedom"), and so on. Think about it. Just about any company with any product related to crypto has at one time or another had their motives questioned, their products slammed, etc. Unfortunately, our Late Censor is an employee of one of the companies so slammed, and he has reacted by rejecting one or more of these slams without bothering to tell the list that he has to do so. (Were it me, I would have "recused" myself from the decision, or at least told the list in general terms what was going on, or, more likely, resigned as censor. But then I would never have been a list.censor in the first place.) I understand that Sandy is stepping down as our Moderator. The Censor is Dead, Long Live Sandy! I expect to harbor no continuing resentment toward Sandy (though I expect things will be strained for a while, as might be expected). The issues raised are ugly ones. Here's what scares me: the "precedent" may irretrievably be established that companies offended by words on the list will threaten legal action to recover their good name. I can imagine Mykotronx or even First Virtual citing the actions of C2Net as a precedent (a cultural precedent, to the extent there is such a thing) for their own legal letters. As with the terrible precedent set by the "even Cypherpunks had to censor themselves" experiment, these companies may be able to say "But even a Cypherpunk-oriented company realized that the antidote for damaging speech was not rebutting speech. No, these Cypherpunks realized that some threatening letters and pulling the plug on the speaker was a better approach." And we won't be able to easily argue that Mykotronx has no right to do this while C2Net does. Sandy, in his message a few hours ago to Against Moderation, even made the claim (and Sandy _is_ a lawyer, or at least once was) that John Gilmore could be held liable for speech on the Cypherpunks list. (I don't doubt the "could," but I hate like hell to see a Cypherpunkish company leading the charge.) Perhaps this is true. But the Censorship experiment, and the resulting threats of legal action by C2Net to stop mention of the alleged CENSORED in their product CENSORED, fuel the fire. Instead of denigrating such legal moves--as I'm sure most Cypherpunks would have done a few years ago if RSADSI were to try to sue people for making outrageous claims--we have a major company consisting of several leading Cypherpunks making just such threats. I'm not a legal scholar, but is it really the case that merely _alluding_ to the allegedly libelous comments of another is itself a libel? Is a reporter who writes that "Person X has alleged that Product Y has a Flaw Z" thus committing a libel? (I don't think so, as reporters frequently report such things. If merely quoting an alleged libel is also libel, then presumably a lot of reporters, and even court clerks reporting on cases, are libelers.) (ObLisp reference: quoting an expression ought to have a different return value than evaluating an expression! That's what quotes are for.) My comments this past week have not been motivated by animosity toward Sandy, and certainly my comments today are not motivated by any animosity about C2Net or any of its employees (including CENSORED, whom I spoke with today). My comments started out as being a summary of why I had left Cypherpunks when the Great Hijacking was announced. Since last Sunday, when I issued my "Moderation" post, I've only responded to messages I was CC:ed on, or to messages on the Flames list, which I subscribed to temporarily to better see what Sandy was calling flames. The discovery that certain posts were not appearing on either the Main list or the Flames list triggered today's comments about Sandy and the alleged CENSOREDCENSOREDCENSORED (blah blah blah). I hope we can declare this Censorship experiment a failure and move on. However, it is almost certain that as a result of attempts to suppress certain views, that the move back to an unfiltered state will mean that some will use anonymous remailers and nym servers to post even _more_ claims, however outrageous. This is a predictable effect. Cf. Psychology 101 for an explanation. Kicking Vulis off the list predictably produced a flood of Vulis workarounds, and a surge in insults via anonymous remailers. Instituting censorship of the list triggered a flood of comments critical of the experiment, and a predictable "testing" of the censorship limits. And, finally, now that C2Net is threatening legal action to stop discussion--even in quotes!!--of alleged CENSORED in CENSORED, expect a lot of repetition of these claims via remailers. And, I predict, claims about CENSORED will even be spread more widely, e.g., on the Usenet. (Sadly, I half expect a letter from some lawyers or lawyer larvae saying I am "suborning libel," or somesuch nonsense. As Sandy would say, "piffle." Lawyers, take your best shot.) Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside" We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."