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ROTFL...
----- Original Message -----
X-Loop: openpgp.net
From: "mh mirror"
To:
Sent: Monday, September 25, 2000 2:52 PM
Subject: [Freenet-chat] Others are protecting freedom of speech too.
........
INTERNET_ANONYMITY
Speech without Accountability
New software makes it nearly impossible to
remove illegal material from the Web--or to find out who put
it there
SAN FRANCISCO--In the centuries-long struggle to decide what people
may say without
fear of prosecution, almost all the big decisions have been made by
constitution writers,
judges and politicians. When things work properly, these players
balance one another out
and change the limits of free speech only slowly and after much
debate. Inventors have
played an occasional starring role, too, Gutenberg being the
archetype. But with the rise of
the Internet, a certain class of inventors--computer scientists--has
asserted its own
special power to determine the boundaries of permissible speech.
Unlike the leaders of
governments, programmers release the new methods that they devise
for sharing
information globally, quickly and often with little thought to the
consequences.
Consider Publius, a censor-resistant Web publishing system described
in mid-August at a
computer security conference in Denver. Engineers at the conference
greeted the
invention warmly, presenting to its creators--Marc E. Waldman, a
Ph.D. student at New
York University, and Aviel D. Rubin and Lorrie F. Cranor of AT&T
Labs-Research--the
award for best paper. Publius is indeed an impressive technical
achievement: a tiny little
program that, once widely installed, allows almost any computer user
to publish a
document on the Web in such a way that for all practical purposes it
cannot be altered or
removed without the author's consent, even by an incensed
government. In fact, authors
can post files to Publius that even they themselves cannot delete.
Yet it is quite simple
for any Web surfer anywhere to view files published this way.
The details of its design give Publius another important property.
If publishers use an
inexpensive anonymizing service (such as Anonymizer.com, Rewebber.de
or Freedom.net)
or a public Internet terminal to cover any tracks, then they can
upload computer
files--not just Web pages but also software and digital
recordings--irremovably and with
almost no risk of identification. The Federal Bureau of
Investigation would not comment
on how it might track down those who use Publius to put illegal
material on-line.
Publius thus appears to allow speech without accountability, and
that is something
fundamentally new. Deep Throat was anonymous, for example, but the
Washington Post
still had to defend its Watergate story in court. When
antiabortionists made up a list of
doctors who performed abortions and posted it on-line, striking
through the names of
those physicians who had been murdered, they were hauled before a
jury, which fined them
$109 million in civil damages.
Every nation outlaws some kinds of communications: libel, piracy,
conspiracy, treason.
Some nations go much further, of course. "Governments are working on
international moral
censorship schemes," observes Michael Sims of the Censorware
Project. "Companies are
working on international economic censorship schemes." Publius, Sims
says, is a response
to this trend. "Many, many people don't want the Internet to end up
looking like TV. When
the censorship crosses their individual moral thresholds, some of
them start to act in
response."
But is it an appropriate response for a small number of computer
scientists to create
software that subverts the efforts of governments, who must answer
to citizens, and of
companies, who must answer to both governments and customers?
Publius has many
obviously good uses, Rubin argues. "A whistle-blower could use it to
expose illegal
dumping by his employer. You could set up a Web site supporting a
political candidate
that your boss hates. Or companies may want to back up their
sensitive
data--encrypted--on Publius so that it isn't destroyed in a
disaster."
All true. But "there are much more direct ways to protect
whistle-blowers, using laws
instead of technology," says Joan E. Bertin, executive director of
the National Coalition
Against Censorship. The same is true for anonymous political Web
sites and sensitive
corporate data--and even for that list of abortion providers, which
the judge did not pull
from the Net. (The Supreme Court has ruled that threats are
protected speech unless they
are likely to cause "imminent lawless action.") If Publius is used
to commit crimes with
impunity, governments may try to ban the system. Indeed, encryption
laws in the U.K.
already appear to forbid its installation there. Courts may uphold a
ban, Bertin suggests,
unless Publius clearly enables legal speech that cannot be protected
in a more innocuous
way. In any case, so long as Publius servers are running anywhere on
the Internet and U.S.
citizens can surf anonymously, any ban would have little effect.
Appropriate or not, Publius is now a part of the Internet. Even
before he presented his
paper in Denver, Waldman posted the source code to the program on
his Web site, so that
other experts can check it for holes. Within a week almost 40
servers in five countries
(including the U.K.) were running the system. "But we haven't had
any responses yet from
countries under authoritarian regimes," Rubin says. Testing is
expected to continue
through October.
Ironically, Publius may be ineffective in the very places where
censorship is most
oppressive. Bennett Haselton of the Censorware Project points out
that "it only protects
against censorship on the publishing end. In a country like China,
where the main problem
is censorship on the receiving end (all inbound traffic is filtered
through the TGreat
Firewall of China'), it is trivial for the censors to detect when
someone is accessing a
Publius document." So Publius seems to work only for those who are
already guaranteed a
right to speak anonymously and read what they like. To them, it
extends the ability, if not
the right, to disregard what the politicians, judges and
constitution writers have decided is
out of bounds.
--W. Wayt Gibbs
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