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Many of you will get new ISPs this time of year so be sure to let us know of your change of address. __________________________________________________________________________ The Internet Anti-Fascist: Friday, 22 December 2000 Vol. 4, Number 103 (#499) __________________________________________________________________________ Action Alerts: Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, "Urgent Action for Peltier," 22 Dec 00 Anti-Fascist Activism On the 'Net Paul Kneisel, "Some Ethical Issues On the Use of 'Bots In Inforwar," Draft 10 Dec 00 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ACTION ALERTS: Urgent Action for Peltier Association of Legal Aid Attorneys 22 Dec 00 Recent news reports indicate that Bill Clinton is unlikely to grant clemency to American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier, who has spent 24 years in prison on false charges. The FBI has conducted an unprecedented public campaign against clemency <http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20001221/t000121649.html>. Clinton, meanwhile, is considering clemency for convicted junk-bonder Michael Milken, a major Democratic Party contributor. For all practical purposes, positive action now is Peltier's last chance for freedom. Supporters can join 17,698 signers of the petition below by visiting <http://www.petitiononline.com/Clemency/petition-sign.html>. * * * * * Mr. President: We the undersigned come together before you to request the immediate and unconditional release of Mr. Leonard Peltier from Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. Mr. Peltier was convicted for the June 26, 1975 murders of 2 FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. There were 4 defendants originally charged before the Grand Jury. Two of the defendants were tried before the court and found Not Guilty by reason of self-defense. Charges were dropped on the 3rd defendant. Mr. Peltier was tried after a change of venue to North Dakota. In this trial Mr. Peltier wasn't able to put up a self-defense argument. Any evidence that could have proven Mr. Peltier's innocence was not allowed in his trial or if it was allowed it was not allowed in front of the jury. Witness testimony wildly diverged between Grand Jury testimony and trial testimony; further, several of the witnesses recanted their testimony after the trial, claiming perjured testimony because of threats from the FBI. Despite testimony, prosecuting attorneys have stated on several occasions that they don't know who shot the agents that day. The FBI coerced Myrtle Poor Bear into signing three mutually exclusive affidavits in order to extradite Mr. Peltier from Canada. In Mr. Peltier's trial Ms. Poor Bear testified that she never knew Mr. Peltier, that she had never seen Mr. Peltier prior to the trial. She testified that she signed the affidavits as a result of intimidation by agents interviewing her. The jury never heard her testimony, despite the fact she had originally been scheduled as a government witness, her testimony was excluded on the basis of her "incompetence". A few FBI officials and/or agents have launched campaigns to publicly proclaim the guilt of Mr. Peltier. Thus perpetuating the original cover up through dissemination of misinformation in editorials, web sites and full page newspaper ads in what is seen as an effort to discredit the common sense and creditability of many national leaders and their organizations. These leaders have studied the case in-depth for over twenty-three years since the reign of terror on the Pine Ridge reservation and areas supposedly under the protection of this county. Mr. President and elected officials of all people, we ask that you no longer ignore the voices of the tens of millions of signatures and letters of the last twenty three years, and the results of the most recent polls in favor of his immediate release. We ask all politicians and officials to support true justice. Honor the voices of your constituents. Call for immediate unconditional executive clemency for Mr. Peltier. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ANTI-FASCIST ACTIVISM ON THE 'NET Some Ethical Issues On the Use of 'Bots In Inforwar by Paul Kneisel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> DRAFT 10 Dec 00 Unchallenged spam would ultimately destroy the 'net. Unchallenged spam on usenet would rapidly destroy the world's village green. For this reason an informal group of volunteers has formed to track down spam and to immediately cancel the repetitive messages.[1] We may instinctively recoil away from their actions. Hearing that messages are cancelled almost immediately causes us to think of "free speech," regardless of how inappropriate we may discover that concept to be after we have had time to reflect on the technical issues involved. The issue of spam conjures up the nature of two rights: the right of spammers to publish as they will and the right of the non-spammers to have a 'net that has not collapsed under the impact of the spam. These rights are very much in conflict: unchallenged spam would destroy the 'net. When two rights are in conflict, the dispute is resolved against the person producing the conflict. People have the right to swing their arms; they also have the right not to be punched in the nose. When arm and nose collide the conflict is resolved against the swinger. So is it with the net. Spammers have created a conflict: the existence of the net with non-spamming users but without spam OR the non-existence of the net (i.e. a collapsed net that by definition has neither spamming or non-spamming users.) The conflict is resolved against the spammers. For this, the anti-spam forces on the net[2] deserve our support, not condemnation. This is not to say that the issue of canceling spam is without conflict.[3] People who conduct daily defensive actions against spam on the net use two key terms to define, explain, and justify their anti-spamming actions. These terms are "Excessive Cross Postings" (ECP) and "Excessive Multiple Postings" (EMP). ECP involves posting an essentially identical message to many different news groups. EMP involves posting multiple copies of essentially identical messages to a single news group. ECP and EMP are not mutually exclusive. The key aspect of defining ECP and EMP is that they are subject to arithmetically exact definitions of "multiple" and any given usenet post can be rigidly quantified. "A formula has been invented by Seth Breidbart which attempts to quantify the degree of 'badness' of a spam (whether EMP or ECP) as a single number."[4] It is crucially important to note that the conclusions of this formula -- called the Breidbart Index -- are content neutral. An ad for "XXX Byker Girls" that is less than the Breidbart limit is not considered to be spam; a posting of the U.S. Constitution that exceeds the Breidbart limit is so considered. The Breidbart formulas are not used to calculate numerical values for many other types of posts, even though the categories might be quantifiable and the posting-style objectionable. One can imagine three additional quantifiable values: EOP, ESP, and ETP. "Excessive Obsessive Postings" (EOP) are those repetitive posts originating from people whose observed actions lead us reasonably to believe that they suffer from some form of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The posts tend to be "original" in that the exact words are written afresh for each post and usually differ in some small amount. Nonetheless, for all practical purposes the following communications all have the same content: "you're a fool," "you're an idiot," "you're stupid." "Excessive .Sig Postings" (ESP) consist of posts where the size of the signature file appended to every message is far longer than the original material to which it is appended. We see this among usenet posters with 50+ line signature files who post them in message after message, day after day, below material whose contribution to some discussion is minimal at best. Thus a message containing only the unique line "you're a fool" above a 50 line signature file would have an ESP of 1/50. "Excessive Thread Postings" (ETP) occur when two or more people hold a contest to see how long they can keep a single thread going or who act in concert to create a thread ever-growing in size. People familiar with usenet history will remember the "meow-chatters" and similar groups. ETP occurs when someone posts what might be a single line message that, with signature files and carriage returns becomes a five line message. The friend hits the Reply key and appends a single line response and then sends out the "new" ten-line message. This becomes a 15-line message when the original poster responds, which becomes 20 lines, and so forth. We need not fault the anti-spam activists on the net for their failure to adopt EOP, ESP, and ETP values. The mere fact that something *may* be quantified does not mean that it *must* be quantified as performed via the Breidbart formulas; the fact that we *can* measure a value does not mean that we *must* issue a judgment on that value as is done with the Breidbart limit. Ethical issues of 'bots and responses must deal with the practical issue of personal abuse, particularly defamation. But it is crucial that we remember that concept of spam-based "net-abuse" is used "'for abuse *of* the net, NOT abuse *on* the net.' Just because somebody does something vile doesn't mean we can do anything about it on n.a.n-a. To qualify as true panic- inspiring net-abuse, an act must interfere with the net-use of a large number of people. Examples of this: newsgroup flooding, widespread or organized forgery campaigns, widespread or organized account hackery, widespread or organized censorship attempts, etcetera."[2] Let us consider now ethical issues with a particular hypothetical example. Mary Smith, a student in a small college town, earns some money babysitting. Unfortunately, she has run afoul of Biff, another student in the town. Biff goes onto usenet with a repetitive series of posts falsely claiming "Mary Jones sexually molests the children for whom she babysits!" Biff's libelous statements are clearly abusive. They are certainly abuse "on the net." But are they abuse "of the net?" Maybe so; maybe not. Writing in the most formal way, they are abuse "of the net" if they trigger the Breidbart limit for ECP and EMP (excessive cross- and multiple-postings.) If their Breidbart value is less than the limit than they do not constitute abuse "of the net" regardless of their other abusive categories. Here we can see one difficulty with the Breidbart limit as a practical and ethical calculation, even though the limit was not established for the purpose of quantifying ethics. The anti-spam forces have identified commercial spam as a far greater problem than political spam.[5] Chances are that Biff's political postings would not be quantified by any of the Breidbart engines because the software would be searching almost exclusively for commercial spam. This is particularly true if each of Biff's libels is separately composed with a formally different content, whereby Biff first posts that Mary molests "little boys," then "little girls," then "children." Now Biff calls Mary a "convicted child-molester," whereas yesterday he wrote of her as a "convicted pedophile," and tomorrow he will warn of "her conviction for molestation." One can easily imagine an individual less obsessed with pedophilia than Biff. Instead, this individual targets Mary with multiple attacks, first as "thief," then "drunk," then "burger," then "junkie," and finally as "nark." What is Mary to do? More accurately -- for we cannot ethically dictate to Mary what she *must* do -- what is Mary ethically entitled to do under these circumstances? The first, most obvious answer, is that Mary has a right to respond to the libels. Assuming Mary prefers to babysit rather than spend hours at her keyboard, Mary may first write an accurate, detailed account of what is happening, who is doing it, and why they are libeling her in this usenet campaign. Then Mary might store this response at her campus web site. Then Mary merely posts the URL <http://www.mishkatonic.edu/msmith/libel- response.html> as a response to the libels against her. She may also run into a problem. For her one-line reply is always the same while the libels against her are trivially-different. This is to say that Mary's one-line response might trigger Breidbart calculations and may be judged to exceed the Breidbart limit. In other words, Mary's one-line response may be cancelled as spam while the libels against her continue to be posted. Here the problem conjures up images of violating the content-neutrality of the Breidbart calculations. Content-neutrality is a key concept of both anti-spam and broader actions. It is at the heart of U.S. legal concepts involving "equal protection." One may have a law that seeks to limit the spread of tuberculous by making it illegal to spit on the sidewalk. It may be a good law. But it becomes a bad law at the hands of a Sheriff who uses it to arrest only black men or only white women who are seen outside saloons. The Sheriff no longer enforces the law in a neutral way and, regardless of the justice of the original law, injustice results. One instinctively recoils from such actions that limit Mary's ability to defend herself against defamation in similar circumstances. Moreover, we can now begin to judge her actions from the broader non- quantified standard of "abuse of the net" instead of the more narrow Breidbart calculations. In short, do Mary's actions involve *more* "abuse of the net" than her critics, or are her responses less abusive. If Mary is less abusive, and the messages to which she responds are not considered formally abusive, then clearly Mary's actions are not abusive. If the abusive messages do not trigger Brie dart cancellations then Mary's responses should not trigger them either. We can measure issues of abuse in quantified form, albeit via a thought experiment. Biff posts the defamations to X groups; Mary responds to < X groups; Biff's posts average Y lines; Mary's responses average < Y lines; Biff posts an average of Z defamatory messages a day; Mary posts < Z responses. Presented another way: Biff[ECP] > Mary[ECP]; Biff[EMP] > Mary[ECP] ... In each case it is intuitively clear that Mary engages in less "abuse of the net" than Biff. From this it also follows that what Mary may do directly she is also entitled to do via a 'bot. The decisions Mary can make about her actions directly at the keyboard are also decisions she can code to have made under her direction. * * * * * There are a variety of dangers inherent in the use of 'bots in this fashion. One is the "runaway 'bot." Mary might code her 'bot to respond to "'Mary' AND 'molest'" only to discover she has bombarded the users in <alt.limerick.dirty> who wrote various ditties on what Mary ostensibly did to her little lamb. She might also code the 'bot to mechanically hit the Reply key, thus accidentally engaging in Excessive Thread Posting (ETP). One can easily imagine a number of other inherent difficulties. But all of these have nothing to do with the broader ethical issues involved; they are all covered by other thinking concerning spam. Mary's constant posts to the limerick group can be condemned without an universal generic attack on 'bots. FOOTNOTES [1] homepage for the usenet news groups <news.admin.net-abuse.*> at <http://www.killfile.org/~tskirvin/nana/> [2] J.D. Falk <([EMAIL PROTECTED]> "The Net Abuse FAQ" at <http://www.cybernothing.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq.html> [3] Scott Hazen Mueller, "Fight Spam on the Internet!" <http://spam.abuse.net/dontdo.html> [4] Tim Skirvin, "Spam Thresholds FAQ: Current Usenet Spam Thresholds and Guidelines," <http://www.killfile.org/~tskirvin/faqs/spam.html> [5] one tends here to define "commercial" and "political" along the lines used by U.S. Courts, where "commercial speech" is rather obvious and "political speech" is defined via the Boolean descriptor "NOT (commercial speech)". Let us also note that the Breidbart index and limit were never meant to deal with broad ethical issues nor can we fault them for this. * * * * * In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. __________________________________________________________________________ FASCISM: We have no ethical right to forgive, no historical right to forget. (No permission required for noncommercial reproduction) - - - - - back issues archived via: <ftp://ftp.nyct.net/pub/users/tallpaul/publish/tinaf/> --- Support our Sponsor ------------------------------------ eTour is your personal web tour guide, matching the best sites with your interests. eTour is free and easy, and you can earn rewards discovering great new sites. 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