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Exchange With Ken Arromdee Computer underground Digest    Thu  Mar 27, 1997   Volume 9 : Issue 25                            ISSN  1004-042X Date: Wed, 26 Mar 97 10:26:51 MST From: Ken Arromdee < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Subject: File 3

... am I the only one to see in the sudden creation of <gov.* a slippery slope of globally massive dimensions whereby the U.S. and inferentially other governments just launched a info-war coup-d-etat on UseNet in particular and the Internet in general? What I'm seeing here is a fundamental lack of knowledge on how the creation of a new hierarchy has to work. There is a fundamental difference between creating a single newsgroup, and creating a new top level hierarchy. There is no formal RFD/CFV process for doing it. There can't be. It can't be forced into being, it has to be begged into existence. We are all familiar with the Big 8 hierarchies, The thing that makes this part of net-news special the formalized group creation process that unfolds in <URL:news:news.groups, with the RFD, CFV, RESULTs, and Dave Lawrence's PGP signed control messages. But there are other hierarchies. Such as alt, where the default rule is that almost anyone can create a newsgroup, but only a few people can rmgroup one. There is not a formal RFD/CFV/voting procedure for alt, just a continuing discussion in <URL:news:alt.config.  And neither was there a formal process for creating the entire hierarchy. People just were convinced that it was a good enough idea and modified their news server configuration files to permit it to exist. There are now many top level hierarchies beyond the Big 8 and alt, each with their own social mechanisms for group management and topic enforcement. You can grab the latest INN from the Internet Software Consortium <URL:http://www.isc.org/ and read the recommended control.ctl file to see a list of most of the better known ones. If you want to create your own top level hierarchy on your own machine, that's easy.  But getting that hierarchy to also appear on other machines is the trick. There is not a standard automated way to do that. Instead you have to convince other news admins to manually modify their own configurations. Since this process requires the cultivation of good will from the community of (overworked) news admins, the creation of the gov.* cannot possibly be interpreted as an invasion or an attempt at a info-war coup-d-etat in your words. I suspect instead that this is the pet project of a news admin inside the government somewhere, who truly believes that USENET would be a good way to distribute government information to the masses . I think he may be right. He seems to have done his legwork, and seems to have tale's blessing, which is good enough for me. I'm carrying it on my spools, and asking my main upstream feeder to carry it so I don't need a special feed to get it. RESPONSE TO MARK ATWOOD by tallpaul (Paul Kneisel) Contrary to Mark Atwood's suppositions, I am aware of a variety of differences between the Big 8 hierarchies on Usenet and other groups. That, I believe, negates the majority of what he wrote challenging my categorization of <gov.* as a slippery slope of globally massive dimensions whereby the U.S. and inferentially other governments just launched a info-war coup-d-etat on UseNet in particular and the Internet in general. It is, in any case, a minor point *relative* to the other issues involved. However, his two other points are far more substantive but were made, I infer, with little to no research into how <gov.* was created and by whom. If you want to create your own top level hierarchy on your own machine, that's easy, he wrote.   But getting that hierarchy to also appear on other machines is the trick. There is not a standard automated way to do that. Instead you have to convince other news admins to 'manually' modify their own configurations. Since this process requires the cultivation of 'good will' from the community of (overworked) news admins, the creation of the gov.* cannot possibly be interpreted as an 'invasion' or an attempt at a 'info-war coup-d-etat' in [tallpaul's] words. It does not require good will as much as economic and political force. The U.S. government is able to bring both to bear. Moreover, Lawrence's announcement of the group creation gives all 200+ groups at least a quasi-official status as part of the Internet. All ISPs who hope to succeed in today's competitive market for new users *must* provide full Internet access. That means that all must carry <gov.*. It has nothing to do with good will, nothing to do with persuading this or that news admin to modify a configuration, and nothing to do with sys ops voluntarily deciding to carry or not carry the group. It is simple economic competition: ISPs that carry the full Internet feed get new users and survive; those who voluntarily decide not to carry the feed are going to make another voluntary decision. It is called bankruptcy. I suspect instead that this is the pet project of a news admin inside the government somewhere, who truly believes that USENET would be a good way to distribute government information 'to the masses', he continued. I think he may be right. He seems to have done his legwork, and seems to have tale's blessing, which is good enough for me. I'm carrying it on my spools, and asking my main upstream feeder to carry it so I don't need a special feed to get it. The he to whom Atwood alludes that is really behind <gov.* has a name but it is far from singular. It is the U.S. Government's Chief Financial Officers Council.[1] It is not some sharp single news admin working out of a sub-_base_ment somewhere in Washington but the leading managers in their suites at the very top of the U.S. governmental bureaucracies. Members of the group who sponsored the National Science Foundation's creation of <gov.* include people from the top agencies, including Justice, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Department of Defense.[2] It includes Mr. Stephen R. Colgate, the Assistant Attorney General for Administration in the Department of Justice. As far as I can tell from his official biography, Colgate is the chief federal figure who makes sure that the money to investigate, arrest, try, and jail hackers is properly raised and paid. When the federal government was chasing Phil Zimmerman over PGP, Mr. Colgate was, _meta_phorically speaking, the man signing the checks. It includes Under Secretary of Defense Dr. John J. Hamre. Dr. Hamre, earlier spent ten years with the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee and six years with the Congressional Budget Office, ultimately becoming the CBO's Deputy Assistant Director for National Security and International Affairs. Today he also has additional tasks at the Pentagon according to his official biography. He is responsible for the assessment of weapons and related programs and their adequacy for fulfilling critical military requirements. It includes James L. Taylor Jr., the Deputy Chief Financial Officer at FEMA. There are also another 49 members of the Council, all of the same federal bureaucratic levels. These 54 people are not a single individual; nor are any a simple news admin inside the government somewhere.... as Atwood summized. They are, however, the people who *officially* sponsored the creation of <gov.*. It would, at this point, be easy to flame Atwood for writing about issues that he knew little or nothing about. I have not the heart to do this, for the real data resides six sub-levels down the Financenet web site. It is an unusually buried location for the sponsors of a sweeping proposal and Usenet reorganization like <gov.* that purports to make U.S. governmental data easily available to the citizenry. FOOTNOTES [1] GOVNEWS: What is the GovNews Project? <http://www.govnews.org/govnews/info/overview.htm. accessed 17 Mar 1997. [2] An Introduction to the U.S. Government Chief Financial Officers Council, <http://www.financenet.gov/financenet/fed/cfo/cfodocs/biobook.hml. accessed 18 Mar 1997.

THE POWER TO MODERATE IS THE POWER TO CENSOR by tallpaul (Paul Kneisel) Some 200+ new news groups have just been created on the UseNet part of the Internet. They are grouped under a new <gov.* hierarchy. <gov.* promises to take democracy into cyberspace, according to the press release from the National Science Foundation.[1] The U.S. government, said U.S. Vice President Al Gore of the GovNews project, is taking a leadership role in providing technology that could change the face of democracy around the world. [2] The GovNews project repeatedly stresses how it will support and promote feedback between governments and citizens. Millions of people will now be able to follow and comment on government activity in selected areas of interest..., the release stated, promising a wide, cost-effective electronic dissemination and discussion.... Preston Rich, the National Science Foundation's leader of the International GovNews Project, described GovNews as newsgroups logically organized by topic from privatization, procurements and emergency alerts to toxic waste and marine resources and include[s] the capability to discuss such information. [1] The vast majority of the new <gov.* groups are moderated. The idea of the moderated news group is increasingly accepted on UseNet. Off-topic posts, flames, and spam have made many non-moderated groups effectively unreadable by most users. Moderated groups are one effective way around these problems. New groups created in the non-<gov.* Big 8 UseNet hierarchy have formal charters defining the group. If the group is moderated then the powers, identity, and qualifications of the moderators are also listed. Unmoderated groups might be likened to informal free-for-all debates where there is no check on who can participate or on the form or content of what is said. Moderated groups are far closer to a specially-defined meeting of citizens with a formal Chair, empowered to declare certain topics off-limits for discussion, and to call unruly participants to order. An unmoderated UseNet group dedicated to baking cookies might be flooded with posts advertising bunion cures, reports of flying saucers sighted over Buckingham Palace, or articles denouncing Hillary Clinton as a Satanist. A moderator for the group has the power to block all of these posts, ensuring that they are not sent to the UseNet feed and do not appear among the on-topic discussion of cookies. Certainly some moderators on UseNet groups abuse their powers (as do some Chairs at non-Internet meetings.) But reports of such abuse are relatively rare given the number of moderated groups. And, of course, many complaints come from the proverbial net.kooks or those who oppose moderation in general. Moderators in the Big 8 UseNet hierarchy are civilians, not government employees moderating government-related groups while collecting government paychecks. The <gov.* hierarchy inferentially changes this. I write inferentially because the charters, names and qualifications of the moderators in the 200+ groups has not been formally announced. Nor do routine queries to members of the <gov.* leading Hierarchial Coordinating Committee result in such detailed information. UseNet is not the entire Internet. Net-_base_d technology like the World Wide Web and the File Transfer Protocol or FTP are designed for the one-way transmission of data. Few _object_ to the _Congressional Record_ on-line or crop reports posted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture available on the Web or via FTP. But the news groups of UseNet are designed for two-way discussions, not spam-like one-way info-floods of data carefully selected by government bureaucrats. That creates an enormous problem when government employees moderate the discussion, regardless of how well, appropriately, or fairly the moderation is conducted. For government moderation of any discussion is censorship and it is wrong. Initial reports also indicate that most of the <gov.* groups will be robo [t]-moderated. In other words, specialized software programs will handle the bulk of the moderator's tasks. Robo-moderation, however, alters nothing. A good robo program may catch and eliminate 99% of the spam sent to the group or identify notorious flame-artists. But the power to robo-moderate remains the power to censor; the power to select one robo-moderator is the power to select another; the power to automatically remove bunion ads is simultaneously the power to eliminate all posts from Iraq in a political discussion or any message containing the string Whitewater. In short, moderation on <gov.* groups by government employees remains censorship whether conducted by software or humans, whether posts are approriately banned or the moderation places severe limits on free political speech. *Any* limitation of posts from any citizen by any government employee is censorship. It is also forbidden by law. FOOTNOTES [1] GOVNEWS: N[ational] S[cience] F[oundation] Press Release for GovNews, 17 Mar 1997, <http://www.govnews.org/govnews/info/press.html, accessed 21 Mar 1997. [2] One wonders what technology Gore believes GovNews is providing. Certainly neither the Internet or UseNet is part of that technology for both existed long before GovNews.

WHAT'S PRESENT AND WHAT'S MISSING IN <gov.* by tallpaul (Paul Kneisel) The organizational structure of <gov.* provides for both specific governmental groups like <gov.us.*[1] and generic groups unrelated to existing governments under the <gov.topic.* heading. 33 groups were created under the <gov.topic.* subheading when <gov.* was first set up.[2] More than half of the 33 groups are under <gov.topic.admin.finance which, while important, is not something you'd think would be such a hot topic for the world's citizens to discuss. But the three fundamental human issues of food, clothing, and shelter are all absent from the first hierarchy created by twelve men with their (inferentially) European ancestry who comprise the first self-declared Hierarchy Coordinating Committee than administers <gov. *. Broad issues of heath care are absent, along with specific issues like AIDS, child care, pre-natal care, and reproductive rights. While the crisis in the global distribution of food surpluses continues to produce famine, no <gov.topic.* exists to address this problem. Elsewhere on the net, forces from academic think tanks and the Pentagon discuss the proliferation of WMDs to NGOs but this topic is also missing. For those not familiar with the latest military acronyms this means that Weapons of Mass Destruction (like Sarin nerve gas) are spreading to Non-Governmental Organizations (like the Japanese-_base_d AUM cult). The vast majority of the world's populace continues to earn its daily bread by the sweat of its brow, but there is no mention of labor under <gov. topic.*. Nor is there any sub-heading for labor rights (and wrongs), labor organizing, or discrimination in employment. Genocide and other crimes against humanity routinely hit today's headlines, but you would not know this for it is also another issue missing under <gov. topic.*. Don't look to <gov.topic.* for a chance to discuss non-genocidal issues of discrimination along ethnic, national, racial, or religious lines either. You won't find them there. Nor will you find any place to discuss gender-_base_d discrimination or issues related to affectional preference. You can discover <gov.topic.admin.privatization which is certainly a hot topic among the world's citizens whose last names are Gingrich or Clinton but probably does not play very well in sub-Saharan Africa. But you won't find <*.mixed-economy, <*.collectivization or <*.tribalization. Nor is there any place to discuss certain _sui generis_ issues of governmental administration like the joint public/private cooperation in Japanese culture or the economic/administrative structure in places like Singapore. With all of the libertarians and anarchists on the net you'd also think that the no government forces might want <gov.admin.die.die.die (to adopt a naming convention popular in the <alt. group in the UseNet Big 8 hierarchy.) There are numerous topics listed under <gov.us.* that the existing members of the HCC think are important enough for the departmental bureaucrats in the U.S. to present to the global UseNet community. But generic

SHOULD THE PENTAGON CONTROL ANY PART OF THE INTERNET? or d00d versus DOD in Cyberspace by tallpaul (Paul Kneisel) ... the teenage hacker is just as deadly an opponent as a Force XXI soldier assaulting a position.

DID THE CREATION OF <gov.* VIOLATE CIVIL SERVICE RULES? by tallpaul (Paul Kneisel) Most of the newly-created 200+ news groups in the <gov.* hierarchy are formally moderated. This raises several issues concerning Civil Service employment norms as well as broader issues of discrimination. The basic core of people behind <gov.* was chosen outside the normal established Civil Service procedures. A call for volunteers was issued on the email list < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , which was created to hash out the issues involved in creating a <gov.* hierarchy. Those who responded to this initial call recruited some additional members. [1] The formal notion that people volunteered for <gov.* does not alter anything concerning Civil Service requirements. Nor might the fact that the volunteers get no special financial rewards for their work moderating or administering <gov.* groups. Renumeration can occur in the area of special training or of improved working conditions, or both. In other words, two low -level clerks may normally sort mail for eight hours a day. Let one, however , be freed for four hours to moderate a group and that person's working condition can be far more pleasant than the other who is still limited to the boring job of sorting mail all day. A similar point holds for training. The <gov.* volunteer moderator gets a considerable amount of extra experience, all of which can look very good on a job resume; the other clerk does not. In this sense, volunteering becomes a lateral job transfer, even if there are no other salary increases or improvements in working conditions. But normal Civil Service regulations also require that such lateral transfer opportunities be officially posted. I do not believe that the official rules of the U.S. Civil Service recognize < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it as an official location for job postings. Nor does the private word-of-mouth recruitment of people satisfy any government regulation of open posting of job openings. The idea of a Civil Service functioning according to declared procedures was a great advance for democracy. No longer did one's opportunity for job advancement depend on Uncle William being a Cabinet Minister or mom the King's mistress. Nor, non-discriminatory Civil Service rules expanded, could one be formally denied government employment because of ethnic/racial/national or gender reasons. Civil Service regulations equalized job hiring and promotion opportunities for all. The issue of ethnic/national/racial and gender discrimination also appears in the <gov.* recruitment of volunteer moderators. The demographics of the existing Internet are severely twisted towards a race[2] (white) and a gender (male). It seems reasonable to infer that the composition of the list < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it reflects this bias. There is certainly nothing illegal with the demographic bias of the Internet, until that bias involves the promotion, training, or lateral transfer of government employees. Then the issue of bias is quite relevant and any actual bias exceedingly illegal. Of course anyone might have subscribed to < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and many would have had known that government jobs were