Highlights of "My First Flame", an article by John Seabrook in the 6/6/94 _New Yorker_ which explains why we need a benevolent government to help regulate the internet (a very sophisticated piece of propaganda, IMHO): I got flamed for the first time a couple of months ago. [...] I had recently published a piece about Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, about whom this person has also written, and as I opened his E-mail to me it was with the pleasant expectation of getting feedback from a colleague. Instead, I got: Crave THIS, asshole: Listen, you toadying dipshit scumbag... remove your head from your rectum long enough to look around and notice that real reporters don't fawn over their subjects [...] One good worm deserves another. [...] My flame marked the end of my honeymoon with on-line communication. It made me see clearly that the lack of social barriers is also what is appalling about the net. The same anonymity that allows the twelve-year-old access to the professor allows a pedophile access to the twelve-year-old. [...] I sent E-mail to CompuServe, which was the network that carried my flame to me, to ask whether their subscribers were allowed to talk to each other this way. [...] ...[S]ince this person was a respected author, with a reputation to consider, I thought someone might be electronically impersonating him ... so I settled on a simple, somewhat lame acknowledgment of the flame [...] In a few days, I received a reply from the writer, asking when my new column, "Pudlicker to the Celebrated," was going to start. [...] And many of the [new internet] users are not the government officials, researchers, and academics for whom the net was designed; they're lawyers, journalists, teen-agers, scam artists, lonely hearts, people in the pornography business, and the faddists who were buying CB radios in 1975. [Lots of incoherent concerns that the vile e-mail might have infected his computer with a `worm'.] [...] The table of contents for alt.pagan FAQ reads: [...] 20 NIGGER JOKES [...] I suppose you could choose not to double-click on NIGGER JOKES, but it's harder than you think. This is the biggest drawback of the way newsgroups are set up: a really interesting post that enriches your understanding of a subject is next to a post that is appropriate only for the space above the urinal. [...] I considered posting a query about my worm in the newsgroup comp.virus, and I lurked around there for a while, but didn't post, because I was worried that my assailant might hear that I was posting queries about him in a public spaces - it's difficult to keep secrets on the net - and devise some even more elaborate torture to inflict on my computer, or begin spoofing me in some diabolical fashion. I had already seen how the net could be used to hurt someone's reputation. One day, as I was wandering around inside the Electronic Frontier Foundation discussion space, which is one of the most interesting news- groups on the net, I came upon a subject line that said, "Ralph Berkeley made homosexual advances toward me." Ralph Berkeley (I'm not using his real name) is a regular participant in discussions of net policy, who appears, on the evidence of his posts, to be an articulate and thoughtful man, and often takes the postition that completely unrestricted speech might not be such a good idea [...] [Discusses his pain with a net.friend and she replies: ] Imagine these geeks, suddenly afraid that their magic treehouse [the internet] was about to be boarded by American pop culture. [...] And you don't have to be responsible for what you say [on the internet]. The great question for the future of the net is: To what extent will this extraordinary freedom be allowed to remain in the hands of the people, and to what extent will it be limited and regulated? The Internet is not the information highway, but it might become part of the information highway. In order for this to happen, though, the Internet will have to be "civilized" - a word that gives many net users the willies. The net is, fundamentally, about free speech, while the I-way is about commercial and civic transactions: it's a route for delivering videos, newspapers, and catalogues into people's home computers, for filing taxes on-line, eventually for voting on-line. Completely unrestricted speech, which is desirable in a free exchange of ideas and data, is less vital when you're talking to a business competitor or to your congressman. The net poses a fundamental threat not only to the authority of the government, but to all authority, because it permits people to organize, think, and influence one another without any institutional supervision whatsoever. The government is responding to this threat with the Clipper Chip [...] [Discussion about why we need Clipper and why good encryption is bad.] The obvious danger in supplying people with encryption is that encryption makes it easier to keep secrets, which makes it easier for people to commit crimes. With powerful encryption, the net would become an ideal place for criminals to organize conspiracies. [...] Dr. Clinton C. Brooks, the N.S.A.'s lead scientist on the Clipper Chip project, told me, "You won't have a Waco in Texas, you'll have a Waco in cyberspace. You could have a cult, speaking to each other through encryption, that suddenly erupts in society - well programmed, well organized - and then suddenly disappears again." Therefore, in an effort to balance the good and bad sides of encryption, the United States government has proposed that people use a brand of encryption that the government has designed, which is powerful enough to take care of everybody's legitimate encryption needs but has an electronic "back door" that law-enforcement agencies could use, with a court order, to listen to the conversations of people they suspect of being criminals. This brand of encryption is inside the Clipper Chip. [...] In the future, somebody will develop encryption that the N.S.A. won't be able to crack, and smart criminals will be able to talk without being overheard. [...] [Author describes meeting he had with John Norstad of Northwestern University to ask about his "worm".] "Do I recognize the right of this person to flame me? Yes, I do. Do I celebrate his right to flame me? I'm not sure. Do I recognize the right of this person to send me a worm? Definitely not. But at what point does a flame become a worm? I mean, can a virus be a form of free speech? In other words, could a combination of words be so virulent and nasty that it could to property damage to your head?" [Norstad reassures author by telling him that most people on the net "don't have a life."] ----------- bdolan@well.sf.ca.us