Webpage picketing
Hi, I want to thank everyone for their copius sharing of knowledge on this issue. Where I was originaly going with this was comparing a supermarket and the picketers on a public sidewalk and how the police must protect the picketers from interference and interfering with customer access. The thought that has been going around in my head for a few days was consider a site whose traffic does over a publicly funded backbone (ie sidewalk & customers). Now on this site is a webpage to which another group objects to. Under what conditions akin to sidewalk use might a provider or network provider be forced to provide any user requesting a link to the objectionable page with the page of the objecting group. What I see is a simple single screen page that immediatly takes you to the desired page. Something conceptualy akin to a picket sign. _______________________________________________________________________ | | | Speak the truth, but leave immediately after. | | | | Slovenian Proverb | | | | Jim Choate ravage@ssz.com | | The Armadillo Group www.ssz.com | | Austin, Texas, USA 512-451-7087 | |_______________________________________________________________________|
At 07:21 PM 6/3/97 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
Under what conditions akin to sidewalk use might a provider or network provider be forced to provide any user requesting a link to the objectionable page with the page of the objecting group.
Let's abandon the meatspace metaphor, and just talk about what you're proposing - you want to insert third parties into a communication between two non-consenting parties. Why is this useful? I think it sounds like an awful idea.
What I see is a simple single screen page that immediatly takes you to the desired page. Something conceptualy akin to a picket sign.
I don't see any reason to, if we adopt your reasoning, limit this practice to web pages - shit, we ought to be able to attach things to each other's E-mail messages, hijack each other's IRC sessions, tack things onto the end of each other's files sent via FTP, add things to other people's NFS directory trees .. yeah. Who's going to keep track of all of this stuff? Are ISP's and backbone providers supposed to give other people free hard disk space/connectivity to do this? Or do you want the government to do it? What about blocking software, which erases the picketing notices? Will that be allowed? Conventional picketing works where private space is adjacent to public space, such that people in the public space can limit access to the private space, or do things in the public space which are visible to peole in the private space. Adjacency isn't really meaningful in "cyberspace", because it depends on arbitrary and changeable "locations" .. and there's very little "public space" in cyberspace, at least in the way that there's public space (like streets and roads and parks) in meatspace. Do you think we should adopt "bookspace picketing", whereby public libraries are obligated to include hostile rants with books in their collections, or even notations that "The Authoritarian League believes this book is harmful, read _Why I Need Someone to Run My Life_ by Joe Schmo to learn more"? Perhaps we should implement a program of "wordspace picketing", whereby we're obligated to, before we orally discuss our own opinions in a public place, mention the counterarguments made by critics. -- Greg Broiles | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell: gbroiles@netbox.com | http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto.
Pickets arise from a peculiar set of circumstances that arise in meatspace, including public streets. Sure, you can picket The Gap at the store up the block from my office on Connecticut Avenue. But try to wave those signs outside The Gap in the Pentagon City mall not far away, and you'll be chased off by the security guards. It's a private space; different rules apply. And I think that we should be very careful about calling the Net a public forum. Sure, places like Usenet resemble a public forum in some ways, but it's not the same. I think Greg has it right: you want to forcibly intervene in a communication between two consenting parties. What you want is similar to the right to come into my home and prevent me from speaking freely to my friend or lover. Now, perhaps a market will develop for virtual pickets. Businesses may flock to "online storefronts" that have certain rules including the right to create "Heineken out of Burma!" pages that appear before the beer company's web site if a number of the mall visitors demand it -- a virtual picket? Publications like The Nation might endorse businesses that have virtual storefronts in such "picket friendly" environments. But this is a stretch and more silly than not. -Declan On Tue, 3 Jun 1997, Greg Broiles wrote:
At 07:21 PM 6/3/97 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
Under what conditions akin to sidewalk use might a provider or network provider be forced to provide any user requesting a link to the objectionable page with the page of the objecting group.
Let's abandon the meatspace metaphor, and just talk about what you're proposing - you want to insert third parties into a communication between two non-consenting parties.
Why is this useful? I think it sounds like an awful idea.
What I see is a simple single screen page that immediatly takes you to the desired page. Something conceptualy akin to a picket sign.
I don't see any reason to, if we adopt your reasoning, limit this practice to web pages - shit, we ought to be able to attach things to each other's E-mail messages, hijack each other's IRC sessions, tack things onto the end of each other's files sent via FTP, add things to other people's NFS directory trees .. yeah.
Who's going to keep track of all of this stuff? Are ISP's and backbone providers supposed to give other people free hard disk space/connectivity to do this? Or do you want the government to do it? What about blocking software, which erases the picketing notices? Will that be allowed?
Conventional picketing works where private space is adjacent to public space, such that people in the public space can limit access to the private space, or do things in the public space which are visible to peole in the private space. Adjacency isn't really meaningful in "cyberspace", because it depends on arbitrary and changeable "locations" .. and there's very little "public space" in cyberspace, at least in the way that there's public space (like streets and roads and parks) in meatspace.
Do you think we should adopt "bookspace picketing", whereby public libraries are obligated to include hostile rants with books in their collections, or even notations that "The Authoritarian League believes this book is harmful, read _Why I Need Someone to Run My Life_ by Joe Schmo to learn more"? Perhaps we should implement a program of "wordspace picketing", whereby we're obligated to, before we orally discuss our own opinions in a public place, mention the counterarguments made by critics.
-- Greg Broiles | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell: gbroiles@netbox.com | http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Web page picketing is easy - there are a bunch of ways to do it, with varying degrees of coverage. Here are some examples: 0) Hijack DNS or routers - sorry, no points for this. 1) Convince people to use your system for web access - easy if you're AOL or Prodigy, trying to provide a family-oriented service, or <your company>'s firewall; you can replace URLs at playboy.com with the "You can't access that site from here" page. 2) Convince people to use your software - Censorware Inc can do the same kind of thing, as well as tell their mom. 3) Create a serious picket sign FAQ web page and put it out there for people to find. And post your FAQ to Usenet occasionally. 4) Create a picket sign web page that's more attractive to AltaVista as your target's page. That won't stop references to www.yourtarget.com, but it will jump out at news reporters and casual browsers looking for what yourtarget.com has on the web. You can do the usual comment lines or small print at the bottom of the page <title>Boycott Yourtarget.com , makers of Evil_Product</title> <body> lots of stuff about them and why they're Bad <font=-3 color=black> yourtarget.com is politically incorrect. yourtarget.com censored your mama and burned the flag. yourtarget.com yourtarget.com yourtarget.com yourtarget.com theirproduct theirotherproduct their_type_of_business keywords keywords more_stuff_from_their_pages </font> 5) Keep flaming them on Usenet, especially using lots of different pseudonyms discussing it with each other, to fill up DejaNews. Alice:"Did you hear that yourtarget.com exploits its workers?" Bob: "No, really, are those mothercensors doing that too?" You know the 666 in their logo is because the Illuminati own them?" Alice: "That's just a 'Help, I'm being held hostage' note snuck in by Vl.... D.tw..l.., who used to work for them. But they really do make their product from baby seal hides." Obviously you need good sub-flame picketing so people don't killfile you like they did with S..... Ar..., the Turkish flamebot. 6) Getting a newsgroup created just for criticizing them gets extra points. 7) Set up a Boycott Information Center web page or a Badder Business Bureau and make it easy for people to post the Bad Things done by lots of Bad People. In addition to your targets, you could prime it with other popular Bad People, or just advertise it well, and make it easy to use, serious-looking, and attractive to people of the political/economic persuasion you want to reach as well as to the press. Declan McCullagh wrote:
Now, perhaps a market will develop for virtual pickets. Businesses may flock to "online storefronts" that have certain rules including the right to create "Heineken out of Burma!" pages that appear
8) Set up a Web Page Parodies Home Page, and make it easy for people to post parodies of other web pages; add a zinging parody of your target. Usenet being a moving parody of itself, it's a good place to create a newsgroup that you can also use to parody the target. 9) Usenet signature lines are cheap and easy - use them, and point to your picket web pages from them. If you can get people to copy yours, even better. You can think of more..... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 5.0 beta Charset: noconv iQBVAwUBM5UY0/thU5e7emAFAQF5ZwH9FyIvhDihfBHU4IAxN3ItHE/QmUKFac+k Gw4xP9AVzLCz99/GvHGkO123P1kmz3svlQRE/pClwx5EYDqAaq2kEQ== =+KC+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)
participants (4)
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Bill Stewart -
Declan McCullagh -
Greg Broiles -
Jim Choate