Re: Futplex makes the news!

["Declan B. McCullagh" <declan+@CMU.EDU>]

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