Re: Abuse and Remailer Ethics

[jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind)]

At 9:21 PM 01/16/95, Homer Wilson Smith wrote:
[snip]
>     Does any single recipient have the right to demand that they be
>blocked from all anon messages.  I would say yes.
>
>     How about demanding blocking anon messages only from some
>senders?  That is harder to implement.  If you block the sender, you
>block ALL his postings, not just to that party.  So you would need to
>block specific From: and To: combinations.  This would not work with
>chaining at all, even if we did share blocking information.  So that
>is out.
>
>     Does a list owner have the right to demand blocking to his list,
>with or without a vote of the list readers?  I would say yes.
>
>     What about a newsgroup?  I would say it takes a vote.  Are anon voites
>allowed?  Touchy question that was important at one time on
>alt.r.scientology.

I agree  with all of that.  Somewhat conditionally with what you say about
newsgroups, because while it sounds nice, it would be hard to implement.
I'm tempted to say that a newsgroup, by it's nature, doesn't have any
mechanism for control/government, once created.  And as such, doesn't have
any way to "decide" not to accept anonymous posts, or posts from a specific
user or remailer.  So I'm tempted to say "tough luck" to newsgroups that
don't like receiving anonymous posts. The alternative is for people
interested to create a moderated newsgroup, where of course the moderator
could refuse to allow anonymosu posts with or without the remailer
operators cooperation.

>     Anyhow I would guess that the correct action here is to write the
>offender and let him know a complaint has been registered against him.
>I would also educate him as to why he was so easily traced and tell
>him that if he wants to avoid such in the future to start chaining.

Yes, I think that is an excellent course of action.

>     However if he is a determined abuser not prone to social
>embarassment, then the sharing of blocking among remailer operators
>might become a very good idea.

I'm not so sure about that.   It might become neccesary, but blocking
remailer delivery to a particular address is a _much_ more desirable
solution, in my opinion.  If a particular person doesn't want to receive
anonymous mail, fine.  And it might be good to have a mechanism by which he
could make those desires known to all remailers, so he doesn't have to do
it individually.  But if he does want to receive mail from the remailers, I
think he's got to receive all mail from the remailers, and not count on the
remailer operators to play Identity Detective and try to screen out people
he doesn't like.  Same with a listserv and the requests of the listserv
operator.  A newsgroup is, of course, more touchy, because there really
_isn't_ a way for "the newsgroup" to decide not to accept anonymous posts.
And I'm not really sure there should be.

Part of the answer relies on how "independent" your remailer is.  If you
_were_ to take no action at all to people who complain about "abuse", would
you get in trouble? (from school, company, service provider, country). If
you would, then you've got to decide if you are willing to take the heat.
And your probably not willing to take the heat for Cantor & Siegel to spam
the net.  So you've got to do what you've got to do.  But, personally, if I
ran a remailer on a machine that wasn't subject to political pressure (from
school, service provider, whatever), I would never make any effort to
cooperate with other operators to track down "offenders", and I'd never
exclude any newsgroups from delivery.   Because I wouldn't want to play
censor and decide what "offense" is worth tracking down, and what isn't.
And because even having the _capability_ to track down people is really
dangerous, when you get pressure to track down someone you _don't_ want to
track down.  Much better to say "Can't be done, don't have logs, can't
figure out who it was," then to have to admit "well, I've tracked down 5
people in the past month cause someone complained about them."  Kind of
ruins the point of anon remailers. Best would be to have tracking down be
impossible, and it would be close to, if not entirely, impossible if the
user took the proper precauations.  But even if it's possible, it's
probably best not to develop a mechanism to do it.