From: farbrent!ajr3@ms.uky.edu
Subject: Re: UPDATE: F*** You All UPDATE!
Reply-To: farbrent!ajr3@ms.uky.edu
Organization: The Internet
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 10:13:31 GMT


Your post is as inflammatory and silly as the racist crap and the  
flames that followed it. Unfortunately it's much more dangerous.

If you are, in fact, at Harvard, call across town to the EFF and ask  
them just what an investigation by the government would entail. A lot  
of people who find those racist posts as offensive as do you would  
find the wholesale confiscation of machines, drives and other  
hardware along with phone taps, intense monitoring (and, possibly,  
censorship) of net activity, and interrogations of sysadmins and  
others on the net at least as offensive.

You might also take the time to familiarize yourself with  the  
(nebulous) legal status of the net itself and some of the statutes  
and constitutional provisions you are so cavalierly throwing around.  
The situation isn't so cut and dried as you assume. I suggest that  
you start with the First Amendment. It protects all speech not just  
popular speech. If we decide that its ok to censor the speech of the  
KKK'ers and the Nazis, then nobody is safe. If its ok to do it to  
them, then who's next? The ADL? The NAACP?

The "Net" is about the free exchange of ideas and if putting up with  
some offensive garbage once in a while is the price we have to pay to  
avoid heavy handed regulation and censorship, we'd damn well better  
be willing to pay it. I, for one, would hate to see the net run like  
(name of commercial network that practices censorship deleted 'cause  
their legal department is bigger than mine) where all posts are  
submitted for approval and rejected or edited without explanation.

Spend an afternoon reading through Congressional Record or watching  
C-SPAN and then reconsider whether you want the Congress taking an  
active role in the day to day workings of the net. The net has  
effectively policed itself for years and can continue to do so  
without Congressional assistance.

You might also consider that, under a strict reading of a mandate  
"for educational and research purposes only", most, if not all,  
newsgroups would constitute a waste of resources and taxpayer funds.  
Do you really want to give some Senator the idea that he can be a  
budget cutting, civil rights and morality protecting hero by  
reforming the internet and doing away with all of these wasteful and  
frivolous newsgroups?

I can only hope that no one else here follows your example and that  
the LA that is assigned your ill advised and inaccurate letter  
recognizes you for the crank that you obviously are. Should anyone in  
Congress take your letter seriously, you will have begun a process  
that could result in a nightmare for us all.

I apologize to everyone for the lack of Phish content. I also  
apologize for posting a flame when all of our lives have been made so  
unpleasant by this F*** You All thing already. I've never flamed  
anyone before and I didn't enjoy it, but reading that post was like  
watching some awful car wreck in slow motion and I couldn't think of  
any other course of action than to oppose such ill conceived notions  
publicly.

j.