Excerpts from internet.cypherpunks: 2-Feb-96 Re: Futplex makes the news! by Timothy C. May@got.net

If UMass has yielded, the prominently mentioned CMU and Stanford sites may be prompted to exactly the same thing. This will "prove" to the Germans that they did the right thing, and be a blow in _favor_ of suppression of speech.

I hope some other sites have the mirrored material and are not reeds in the wind as at least one university is.

If we're talking about Nazis, UMass is the place to look for the PC breed of 'em. Check out http://joc.mit.edu/roundup.html for info on their recent PC speech code censor attempts at UMass Amherst. I've decided to take the materials off my web pages -- but with no pressure from, and in fact no communication at all with CMU administrators. I've had nothing but support from the School of Computer Science folks at Carnegie Mellon. A CMU SCS faculty member even offered to host the pages if the administration got their panties in a snit. This after there was a front page above-the-fold article in today's Pittsburgh Tribune Review: "CMU in middle of Internet flap" It talked about the Simon Wiesenthal Center's efforts to, um, educate university administrators: The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the world's leading anti-Nazi organization, was fuming however -- faxing indignant messages to the presidents of CMU, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and University of Pennsylvania... Mark Weitzman, the director of the Wiesenthal Center's Task Force Against Hate, said he had heard nothing by late yesterday afternoon from CMU President Robert Mehrabian, whom he had urged by fax Wednesday "to address this issue as quickly as possible."... Linda Hurwitz, director of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, criticized the postings, saying while she didn't approve of censorship in general, some lies were so harmful that they were tantamount to yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. I don't often congratulate Carnegie Mellon for a job well done, but this is one of those occasions. (Though I'm not sure how the administration would have reacted if the Zundelstumphen was in my Andrew account instead of my SCS AFS directory...) -Declan

I originally sent Tim private mail saying "you're wrong." On the other hand, reading futplex's actual statement and the fact that Germany continues to "investigate" CompuServe and AOL, maybe he's right... This is not the end, but it may be the end of the beginning. I also think there's a place for premature ejaculations of victory, because they tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. If the press says that Germany is successfully censoring Zundel, then that sets a precedent; but if the press says that Germany's limp attempts to censor somebody on the Internet were a total failure, then they'll just look like a bunch of goofballs pursuing a lost cause. -rich