Re: Anonymous flooding

[Theodore Ts'o <tytso@Athena.MIT.EDU>]

   Date: Thu, 25 Feb 93 07:01:04 +0200
   From: Johan Helsingius <julf@penet.FI>

   Hmm... Could you briefly outline those "well-defined"
   occasions? How about this case: I send you a complaint about somebody
   who has repeatedly harrassed everybody soc.culture.india/tamil/srilanka
   with anonymous postings about faked reports about then indian army
   raping civilians in sri lanka?

We haven't completely finished drafting those policies yet, so I can't
give you a comprehensive answer.  (If you have suggestions about where
to draw the line, please send me email!)

As far as your example goes: What I do now, when someone sends me a
complaint like that, is I go to the Usenet newsgroup myself, and take a
look at the flame war in progress.  (Usually both sides are behaving
like pre-schoolers fighting in a sandbox, but we'll let that pass.)
Whether or not we would need to impose sanctions on someone because of
their USENET postings is a very hard-to-define area, which ultimately
comes down to a judgement call.  Usually, we try not to censor people,
although we do usually send them a note suggesting that the follow some
basic Net Etiquette.  So that might not be grounds for digging up the
real email address.

On the other hand, if someone posts a message threatening to kill the
President, and the Secret Service shows up at your doorstep (and no,
this is not a Hypothetical Example), I think we would very clearly have
justification for trying to track down the identity of the person
posting the message.  Threats of violence in general would probably be
grounds for tracking the person down and issuing sanctions of some kind.

The basic idea is that there are certain uses of a psedonym remailer
(I'm not using the word anonymous remailer because we wouldn't be
offering true anonymity) which are obviously legitimate --- for example,
an anonymous suggestion box, alt.personals, etc.  On the other hand,
there are certain activities which are clearly out of bounds --- threats
of violence, harassment, etc.  What to do in the middle ground will
require some amount of judgement, so perhaps we won't be able to make
the list completely well-defined.  Although obviously, it would be best
if that list were as well-defined as possible.

						- Ted