http://www.archives.gov/
Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
[http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.billofrights.html]
By design, all Internet users are (mostly) equal: any Internet address anywhere in the world should be able to talk to any other Internet address.
Supreme Court in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, 1995:
Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views ... Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority ... It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation ... at the hand of an intolerant society.
[http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Anonymity/]
Mrs. McIntyre had distributed anonymous leaflets prior to a school levy, opposing the
proposed levy. She was charged with violating elections regulations, and fined $100.
The Supreme Court later reversed the decision, upholding the late Mrs. McIntyre's right
to anonymous speech (even in the context of election leaflets).
[http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/93-986.ZO.html]
At Senator Strom Thurmond's retirement, minority leader Senator Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, said:
I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had of followed our lead we wouldn't of had all these problems over all these years, either.The problem was, Thurmond ran on the Dixiecrat ticket, supporting segregation. The story didn't really take off until some blogs picked up the story. Sen. Lott who was expected to become majority leader after the 2002 election, but under pressure was forced to resign his leadership.
Blogs also played a role in the 2004 presidential election: CBS' Dan Rather broadcast on "60 Minutes" a segment about
National Guard documents criticizing President Bush's service in the Guard. Bloggers on freerepublic.com
were credited with tossing the idea around that the documents were fake, and with getting the
attention of the national media. Later, the documents were indeed discovered to be faked.
[http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/1/28/172943.shtml,
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1210662/posts]
February 2005: A Polish journalist copies a list of Cold-War era Polish spies from the Polish national archives, then publishes the list to the Internet: http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?...
How important is the Internet to democracy?
Yahoo! is required to prevent Internet users in France from viewing auctions of
Nazi memorabilia. Such memorabilia are not illegal here in the US, but are in France.
This is then a technical challenge to identify French Internet users.
Yahoo! loses Nazi auction case,
France bans internet Nazi auctions
A sample page at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seminar/internet-client/iands/Sample_yahoo_Nazi.htm archived one such auction page: German postage stamps honoring Hitler's birthday.
What speech should be regulated? Who should regulate it?
In Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973), the Supreme Court set out a three-prong test for obscenity. It inquired whether:http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/decade.html
(1) "'the average person applying contemporary community standards' would find that the work, taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest";
(2) it "depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law"; and
(3) "the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."
[http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/ocp.htm]
ACLU vs. Reno: CDA [http://www.epic.org/free_speech/CDA/]
June, 1997 the Supreme Court ruled that the CDA violated the 1st Amendment's guarantee of freedom
of speech. The CDA was passed in 1996 to regulate Internet pornography. Basically, it imposed
broadcast communications type penalties on the transmission of obscenity over the Internet,
making it criminal to "initiate the transmission of any communication which is ... indecent,
knowing that the recipient of the communication is under 18 years of age." However, the Supreme
Court held that this was too great a burden on publishers of Internet material:
the law is vague as to what is obscene (are medical descriptions obscene?), and the architecture
of the Internet makes it difficult to determine who is underage.
ACLU vs. Ashcroft: COPA [http://www.epic.org/free_speech/CDA/]
COPA, the Child Online Protection Act, is basically a redraft of the CDA, with some
modifications as to how Internet publishers could restrict access to minors. It allows the
collection of some identification code (such as a credit card number) to serve as proof of age.
Like the CDA, COPA is also being challenged.
What speech should be regulated? Who should regulate it?
Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS)
The PICS specification enables labels (metadata) to be associated with Internet content. It was originally designed to help parents and teachers control what children access on the Internet, but it also facilitates other uses for labels, including code signing and privacy. The PICS platform is one on which other rating services and filtering software have been built.
[http://www.w3.org/PICS/]
Code fragment from http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~howell/:
<meta http-equiv="pics-label" content='(pics-1.1
"http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html"
l gen true for "http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~howell/"
r (cz 1 lz 1 nz 1 oz 1 vz 1)
"http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html"
l gen true for "http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~howell/"
r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))'>
How can technology/architecture regulate speech? How successful will it be?
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
quote attributed to John Gilmore, of the EFF. He says he doesn't ever remember saying it,
but says it sounds right!
[http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/reagle/inet-quotations-19990709.html]
Spam costs companies an average of $1934 per employee per year in lost productivity in 2004; an estimated 76% of inbound email (for a particular email security provider) was spam. [http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1608661,00.asp] Or consider IT requirements: a typical spam message in my KSU Junk folder is 4KB in size. There's currently 70 messages in my Junk folder; it will be cleared automatically but that's typically how many are held there. There are about 23,000 students at K-State. Now, maybe not all students get as much spam as I do; but let's multiply: 4KB * 50 messages * 23,000 = 4.6GB (very conservative estimate) of disk space that KSU must maintain just for spam.
Dissecting Spam:
Received: from moxmail14.wonking.com ([207.244.50.24])
by mc3-f42.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.211);
Sat, 5 Feb 2005 19:59:44 -0800
Received: from hiptrees.com (127.0.0.1)
by moxmail14.wonking.com id h0mb30075j0u;
Sat, 5 Feb 2005 19:57:30 -0800 (envelope-from )
Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 19:57:30 -0800
From: AccuQuote <acc@hiptrees.com>
Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 19:57:30 -0800
To: dustydeboer
hotmail.com
Return-Path: <acc@hiptrees.com>
Content-Type: text/html
Message-Id: <LULZ.2222q560789o.81025970.3758@hiptrees.com>
Subject: What Would Happen To UR Family If U Died
Resident Evil 4
ENERGY ENHANCEMENT - Yellow Herb Locations FAQ
Authored by VampireHorde ...
ARIN Whois Search for 207.244.50.24: OrgName: Chattanooga Data Connection, Inc. OrgID: CHAT Address: PO Box 5269, 2003 Amnicola Hwy. City: Chattanooga StateProv: TN PostalCode: 37406 Country: US NetRange: 207.244.0.0 - 207.244.63.255 CIDR: 207.244.0.0/18 NetName: CHATDATA NetHandle: NET-207-244-0-0-1 Parent: NET-207-0-0-0-0 NetType: Direct Allocation NameServer: DNS1.CHATTANOOGA.CDC.NET NameServer: DNS2.CHATTANOOGA.CDC.NET Comment: ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE RegDate: 1996-11-06 Updated: 2002-02-08 TechHandle: CNO2-ARIN TechName: Network Operations Center TechPhone: +1-423-266-3369 TechEmail: noc@cdc.net # ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2005-02-06 19:10 # Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.
tracert 207.244.50.24 Tracing route to 207.244.50.24 over a maximum of 30 hops 1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1 2 15 ms * 13 ms ip68-102-192-1.ks.ok.cox.net [68.102.192.1] 3 19 ms 17 ms * ip68-103-127-25.ks.ok.cox.net [68.103.127.25] 4 17 ms 17 ms * wichdsrc01gex0305.rd.ks.cox.net [70.183.71.7] 5 17 ms * 16 ms 68.1.1.180 6 22 ms * 25 ms 68.1.1.175 7 27 ms 25 ms * dllsbbrc02-pos0002.rd.dl.cox.net [68.1.0.114] 8 26 ms 23 ms * 68.1.0.157 9 27 ms 25 ms * 68.105.30.2 10 72 ms 76 ms 74 ms so-3-0-0.mpr4.sjc2.us.above.net [64.125.29.45] 11 72 ms 72 ms 71 ms so-4-0-0.mpr2.sfo3.us.above.net [64.125.31.214] 12 70 ms 72 ms 70 ms 64.124.184.117.available.above.net [64.124.184.117] 13 75 ms 81 ms 72 ms 207.244.51.2 14 72 ms 71 ms 71 ms 207.244.48.1 ...
The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act requires unsolicited commercial e-mail messages to be labeled (though not by a standard method) and to include opt-out instructions and the sender's physical address. It prohibits the use of deceptive subject lines and false headers in such messages. The FTC is authorized (but not required) to establish a "do-not-email" registry. State laws that require labels on unsolicited commercial e-mail or prohibit such messages entirely are pre-empted, although provisions merely addressing falsity and deception would remain in place. The CAN-SPAM Act takes effect on January 1, 2004.
[http://www.spamlaws.com/federal/108s877.html]
Filters: It is my opinion - please feel free to argue with me, if you wish - that spam filters are fighting a losing battle. Because email is constrained to communicating only something similar to human language - that is, not just English, and not just valid human words because strings like w0rds or W|0|R|D|5 are both recognizable to humans - it is very difficult for computers to attempt to discern what messages humans might find valuable, and which messages are spam. In fact, formal language theory tells us that Turing machines - computers - can only recognize recursively enumerable languages - that is, languages much more restricted that what humans can recognize. So filters must be conservative, leading to ways for spammers to get around filters. Nevertheless, spam filters can be a big help.
The Penny Black Project:
The Penny Black project is a research project by Microsoft, proposing that senders of e-mail should have to
"pay" for each email sent. (This name comes from the British Postal System's Penny Black stamp, that started the
tradition of senders, not recipients, paying for the cost of sending postal mail.) The "payment" would not necessarily
be money, it could be in the form of CPU cycles - for example, the receiving mail server could require that the
sending server factor a large integer before email would be accepted. or, it could be some sort of Turing test.
[http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack/]
SMTP over SSL/TLS:
SMTP does have a new extension that allows SMTP (email) traffic to be encrypted over SSL (the newest
version of SSL is called TLS). This would allow an SMTP server (a server accepting incoming email) to
check the SSL/TLS certificate of the sending server, just as browsers do for encrypted (https://...) HTTP
transactions. The SMTP server could then refuse email from a server without a certicate, or refuse email
from certain servers/domains. This would provide a level of authentication: your SMTP server could prove
that email was actually from, say, hotmail.com if the sending certificate really was from hotmail.com.
[http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2487.html]
