[86] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
NSF censoring sites around the Internet
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Gilmore)
Sun Nov 11 08:10:20 1990
Date: Sun, 11 Nov 90 02:25:02 PST
From: gnu@toad.com (John Gilmore)
To: com-priv@psi.com, gnu@toad.com
I found out this week that the NSF has been pressuring MIT to drop FTP
access to archives of sexually oriented GIF files. They already
succeeded in getting the alt.sex.bondage archives dropped from MIT some
months ago.
The pressure consists of insistence by Steve Wolff that this 'problem'
be dealt with -- in person, by telephone, and by email. I wasn't there
when it was discussed, but the person who received the pressure got the
impression that MIT's DS3 upgrade could be jeopardized, its bid for
International Coordinator of NSFnet scotched, and even possibly its
access to the NSFnet terminated.
It was even intimated that the NREN bill didn't make it out of
committee because of concerns that the network was being used for
unauthorized traffic, stemming from the old bogus Houston Chronicle
stories. Perhaps Congress is perfectly happy to be subsidizing
commercial companies, but they definitely turn green if somebody shows
a tit in a bitmap.
Now, what has MIT done wrong? The act of having files on a disk
accessible by FTP is nowhere prohibited by the NSFnet "interim" policy
or by any other. Any violation of policy occurs on the other end --
when someone connects over NSFnet (and other nets) and accesses these
files for non-scholarly purposes.
Check this again -- MIT has not violated any stated NSF policy, yet
they are being threatened. Thousands of others violate stated policy
every hour, but don't even get their wrists slapped.
The real story here seems to be that NSF has tied its own hands. They
wrote a fantasy "interim" policy to satisfy Congress, but also have
publicly stated that it will take a court order to get them to read the
traffic to see if the policy is followed. Since they won't read the
traffic, they can't punish the violators. So they have to punish the
innocents who have not violated any rule, but who piss off the prudes
in Congress.
THIS IS WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU HAVE THE GOVERNMENT RUNNING THE FUCKING NET!
