Re: Defacing / CDT

[Michael Clark <mclark@cdt.org>]

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Hello all,

Thanks for the comments about defacing. It has brought up a lot of 
interesting points that I am thinking about. Sorry about the delay in 
responding. I was out a couple days because of the snowstorm.

At 4:43 PM -0500 1/19/00, Chuck0 wrote:
>Yes. Defacing property is a form of free speech. It is not censoring,
>because it is not an ongoing attempt to restrict what the other party is
>saying. Posting a defaced page to a website is a temporary annoyance.
>The same thing goes for a tag applied to a building. Graffiti can always
>be washed off.

I am not a lawyer. Freedom of speech has been restricted in the 
United States. You can't yell "Fire" in a crowded theater. You can't 
vandalize someone's home, church, car, etc... Just because it is easy 
to hack someone's web site doesn't mean it is legal. This is where 
the rules, guidelines and laws get hazy. Are web sites located 
outside country A protected by the laws of country the site is 
actually hosted in? Or do the laws of the user apply? Very 
interesting thoughts here.

A temporary annoyance does not seem to be a strong argument to 
promote defacement. Should we burn down a building because it can be 
rebuilt? Or steal someone's tires from their car? After all, they can 
get replacements for their tires. The guidelines seem to be based on 
financial amounts. Damage under $x is not a crime. Damage between $x 
and $y is a misdemeanor; damage over $y is a felony. It would be 
quite simple for a webmaster to place a dollar value over $y to make 
the defacement of a web site a felony.

>I prefer parody websites over hacking into a server, but I recognize the
>political importance of defacing websites. It's the same thing as pieing
>somebody in a position of authority.

Parody websites really seem to be the way to go. Try to drive the 
point home that the group you're parodying is not making any sense. 
Or they are too extreme. Once they acknowledge you, you've gone a 
long ways towards winning the race. Pieing an unsuspecting person 
would probably be considered assault. They may choose not to pursue 
the matter, but it still wouldn't be considered a piece of speech.

>I see that Michael is posting from an account with the Center for
>Democracy and Technology. It looks like CDT does alot of great stuff,
>but I'm very disturbed by the prominent link to GetNetWise, which is an
>industry attempt to make censorware palatable to the masses. As a long
>time activist against library filtering, and as somebody with a website
>that has been banned by many schools, I find this ad placement to be
>pretty odd coming from an organization which has a graphic right above
>that purports to be about "protecting political speech online."
>
>Shit, if somebody defaced my website, there are millions of teenagers
>and library users who couldn't see the hack. In my view, the creeping
>acceptance of censorware is far more disturbing than a defaced website.

I do work for the Center for Democracy and Technology as the 
Grassroots Activism Coordinator and as one of the CDT's two 
webmasters. I also am the webmaster for GetNetWise, which is a 
project managed by the Internet Education Foundation. GetNetWise was 
created partially to prevent the US government from trying to censor 
the Internet, as it did with the Communications Decency Act (which 
CDT helped fight) and the Child Online Protection Act (which CDT is 
currently fighting). One of the members of the GetNetWise advisory 
board is the American Library Association, which has been quite vocal 
about opposing the use of filtering software in public places like 
libraries. The target "market" of GetNetwise is home usage. If anyone 
would like to discuss GetNetWise, censorware, or freedom of speech 
issues, feel free to email me offline. Thanks, Michael


- --
Michael Clark, Assistant Webmaster
Center for Democracy and Technology
1634 Eye Street NW, Suite 1100    Washington, DC 20006
voice: 202-637-9800    fax: 202-637-0968
mclark@cdt.org         http://www.cdt.org/
PGP Key available on keyservers

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