Copyright 1994, Nathan Zook. All rights reserved. Intelectual copyrights pending. NYET-- Non-Youths Exhibit Temperance. Before I start, it may be informative to consider that I consider myself to be a hard-line member of the Christian Conservative movement, and a hard- line advocate of electronic privacy. I am a PhD candidate in mathematics at the University of Texas of Austin, and I got the Electronic Privacy language added to the 1994 Republican Party of Texas platform. I am a member of Trinty Evangelical Free Church, and am twenty-seven years old. As the Internet community continues to grow, the differences of conviction that exists generally in the world find their way into the community. Some demand that newcomers to the net adapt to the mores of this society. Some demand that the net, as a newcomer to the world, adapt to the outside. As recent events have demonstrated, the less reasonable, on both sides, may be endangering the integrity and availablity of the net. Calls for net censorship, it may be expected, will continue to grow unless the net can find some way to police itself. Yet "police itself" is a term that sends the net into fits. My solution, NYET, is for the appropriate users to directly censor the data that they might legitmately lay claim to censoring--data that flows to minors over which they have legal authority and responsibility. Specifically, this is a plan to create two sorts of accounts to the net-- adult and minor. Adult accounts may only be obtained by persons of age eighteen. Minor accounts may only be obtained as adjuncts to adult accounts, refered to as supervisor accounts. Adult accounts would have full access to anything on the net. News readers, telnet, ftp and like software being operated from a minor account would check a file in the adult account to allow access. Newsreaders, in particular, would censor any posts crossed from a non-allowed account. The control files in the supervisory accounts would default to allow-only mode, but could be selected to deny-only. The legal framework that I see important in aiding such a system is as follows: State Level: 1) Declare to hold harmless those BBS operators for charges of Contributing to the Delinquacy of a Minor that obtain and verify the age of account holders, and maintain a NYET system of access for minors. Certain acceptable verification methods specified, with authority to add methods delegated to a regulatory agency. Emphasis to be on ease and speed of verification. Special consideration for in-house systems. 2) Make it illegal to misrepresent age and name data to a BBS. Require BBS operators to maintain a record of age and name of account holders for thirty days after opening of account for hold harmless agreement, and allowing deletion of said data afterwards. 3) Declare aiding in tampering with NYET system to be "Contributing to the Delequency of a Minor". Federal Level: Pass paralell laws for BBSs operating with local numbers from two or more states, or for BBSs operating with 800 numbers. I believe that such a system would protect the full free expression currently enjoyed by the net, while reaffirming parental responsibility in the upbringing of their children. The burden of controlling access devolves all the way to the parents, making charges against BBS operators patently frivolous. Porno charges would then be MUCH more difficult to press, since a jury could be told that specific steps were being taken to prevent access to minors. If parents complained that they didn't want to go to the trouble of spelling out what their children could access, the response is clear: "Oh, so it's not worth the effort to you?" Despite slurs in this group to the contrary, I believe that the proposed us.* heirarchy may well be the first in a series of attempts to censor the net. Remember, we already have had a censor for TV, movies, and radio. It is not really a question of _if_ but _who_ and at _what level_ will this censoring take place. Nathan (Adjusting flame gear)