Re: Piercing anonymitiy and censorship

[pmetzger@shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger)]

> From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@athena.mit.edu>
> 
>    Date: Mon, 1 Mar 93 10:45:32 PST
>    From: memexis!tribble@uunet.UU.NET (E. Dean Tribble)
> 
>    I would like to separate the issues of hollering anything at 4am in
>    residential areas from things like libel and slander.  Disturbing
>    people with your volume independent of its content is like blasting
>    white noise at damaging volume levels.  The remedies for it have
>    nothing to do with speech, they have to do with disturbing the peace;
>    your sound is crossing onto my property at intolerable levels.
> 
> And again, I repeat..... with anonymous remailers, you no longer have a
> way to enforce said grounds of disturbing the peace ---- unless you do
> things like approach the finnish authorities and ask that penet be
> disconnected from the network for disturbing the peace of various Usenet
> groups.....

Of course there are ways -- and they need not be so drastic. You could,
for instance, simply prevent non-subscribers from posting to your list,
and use public key to verify identities. This would allow you to swiftly
stop abuse. I've already noted this twice. You've claimed this is impractical,
but the tools to do this, AND WITHOUT PATENT PROBLEMS, already exist and
would be cheap to implement.

Perry