Webpage picketing

Hi,

I want to thank everyone for their copius sharing of knowledge on this
issue. Where I was originaly going with this was comparing a supermarket and
the picketers on a public sidewalk and how the police must protect the
picketers from interference and interfering with customer access. The
thought that has been going around in my head for a few days was consider a
site whose traffic does over a publicly funded backbone (ie sidewalk &
customers). Now on this site is a webpage to which another group objects to.
Under what conditions akin to sidewalk use might a provider or network
provider be forced to provide any user requesting a link to the
objectionable page with the page of the objecting group.

What I see is a simple single screen page that immediatly takes you to the
desired page. Something conceptualy akin to a picket sign.

   _______________________________________________________________________
  |                                                                       |
  |            Speak the truth, but leave immediately after.              |
  |                                                                       |
  |                                     Slovenian Proverb                 |
  |                                                                       |
  |     Jim Choate                                 ravage@ssz.com         |
  |     The Armadillo Group                        www.ssz.com            |
  |     Austin, Texas, USA                         512-451-7087           |
  |_______________________________________________________________________|

At 07:21 PM 6/3/97 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:

>Under what conditions akin to sidewalk use might a provider or network
>provider be forced to provide any user requesting a link to the
>objectionable page with the page of the objecting group.

Let's abandon the meatspace metaphor, and just talk about what you're
proposing - you want to insert third parties into a communication between
two non-consenting parties. 

Why is this useful? I think it sounds like an awful idea.

>What I see is a simple single screen page that immediatly takes you to the
>desired page. Something conceptualy akin to a picket sign.

I don't see any reason to, if we adopt your reasoning, limit this practice
to web pages - shit, we ought to be able to attach things to each other's
E-mail messages, hijack each other's IRC sessions, tack things onto the end
of each other's files sent via FTP, add things to other people's NFS
directory trees .. yeah. 

Who's going to keep track of all of this stuff? Are ISP's and backbone
providers supposed to give other people free hard disk space/connectivity
to do this? Or do you want the government to do it? What about blocking
software, which erases the picketing notices? Will that be allowed?

Conventional picketing works where private space is adjacent to public
space, such that people in the public space can limit access to the private
space, or do things in the public space which are visible to peole in the
private space. Adjacency isn't really meaningful in "cyberspace", because
it depends on arbitrary and changeable "locations" .. and there's very
little "public space" in cyberspace, at least in the way that there's
public space (like streets and roads and parks) in meatspace. 

Do you think we should adopt "bookspace picketing", whereby public
libraries are obligated to include hostile rants with books in their
collections, or even notations that "The Authoritarian League believes this
book is harmful, read _Why I Need Someone to Run My Life_ by Joe Schmo to
learn more"? Perhaps we should implement a program of "wordspace
picketing", whereby we're obligated to, before we orally discuss our own
opinions in a public place, mention the counterarguments made by critics.


--
Greg Broiles                | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell:
gbroiles@netbox.com         | 
http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto.

Pickets arise from a peculiar set of circumstances that arise in
meatspace, including public streets. Sure, you can picket The Gap at the
store up the block from my office on Connecticut Avenue. But try to wave
those signs outside The Gap in the Pentagon City mall not far away, and
you'll be chased off by the security guards. It's a private space;
different rules apply.

And I think that we should be very careful about calling the Net a public
forum. Sure, places like Usenet resemble a public forum in some ways, but
it's not the same.

I think Greg has it right: you want to forcibly intervene in a
communication between two consenting parties. What you want is similar to
the right to come into my home and prevent me from speaking freely to my
friend or lover. 

Now, perhaps a market will develop for virtual pickets. Businesses may
flock to "online storefronts" that have certain rules including the right
to create "Heineken out of Burma!" pages that appear before the beer
company's web site if a number of the mall visitors demand it -- a virtual
picket? Publications like The Nation might endorse businesses that have
virtual storefronts in such "picket friendly" environments. But this is a
stretch and more silly than not.

-Declan



On Tue, 3 Jun 1997, Greg Broiles wrote:

> At 07:21 PM 6/3/97 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
> 
> >Under what conditions akin to sidewalk use might a provider or network
> >provider be forced to provide any user requesting a link to the
> >objectionable page with the page of the objecting group.
> 
> Let's abandon the meatspace metaphor, and just talk about what you're
> proposing - you want to insert third parties into a communication between
> two non-consenting parties. 
> 
> Why is this useful? I think it sounds like an awful idea.
> 
> >What I see is a simple single screen page that immediatly takes you to the
> >desired page. Something conceptualy akin to a picket sign.
> 
> I don't see any reason to, if we adopt your reasoning, limit this practice
> to web pages - shit, we ought to be able to attach things to each other's
> E-mail messages, hijack each other's IRC sessions, tack things onto the end
> of each other's files sent via FTP, add things to other people's NFS
> directory trees .. yeah. 
> 
> Who's going to keep track of all of this stuff? Are ISP's and backbone
> providers supposed to give other people free hard disk space/connectivity
> to do this? Or do you want the government to do it? What about blocking
> software, which erases the picketing notices? Will that be allowed?
> 
> Conventional picketing works where private space is adjacent to public
> space, such that people in the public space can limit access to the private
> space, or do things in the public space which are visible to peole in the
> private space. Adjacency isn't really meaningful in "cyberspace", because
> it depends on arbitrary and changeable "locations" .. and there's very
> little "public space" in cyberspace, at least in the way that there's
> public space (like streets and roads and parks) in meatspace. 
> 
> Do you think we should adopt "bookspace picketing", whereby public
> libraries are obligated to include hostile rants with books in their
> collections, or even notations that "The Authoritarian League believes this
> book is harmful, read _Why I Need Someone to Run My Life_ by Joe Schmo to
> learn more"? Perhaps we should implement a program of "wordspace
> picketing", whereby we're obligated to, before we orally discuss our own
> opinions in a public place, mention the counterarguments made by critics.
> 
> 
> --
> Greg Broiles                | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell:
> gbroiles@netbox.com         | 
> http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto.
> 
>

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Web page picketing is easy - there are a bunch of ways to do it,
with varying degrees of coverage.  Here are some examples:

0) Hijack DNS or routers - sorry, no points for this.

1) Convince people to use your system for web access -
easy if you're AOL or Prodigy, trying to provide a family-oriented service,
or <your company>'s firewall; you can replace URLs at playboy.com
with the "You can't access that site from here" page.

2) Convince people to use your software - Censorware Inc
can do the same kind of thing, as well as tell their mom.

3) Create a serious picket sign FAQ web page and put it out there
for people to find.  And post your FAQ to Usenet occasionally.

4) Create a picket sign web page that's more attractive to AltaVista
as your target's page.  That won't stop references to www.yourtarget.com,
but it will jump out at news reporters and casual browsers looking
for what yourtarget.com has on the web. You can do the usual comment lines
or small print at the bottom of the page
	<title>Boycott Yourtarget.com , makers of Evil_Product</title>
	<body> lots of stuff about them and why they're Bad
	<font=-3 color=black> yourtarget.com is politically incorrect.
		yourtarget.com censored your mama and burned the flag.
		yourtarget.com yourtarget.com yourtarget.com yourtarget.com
		theirproduct theirotherproduct their_type_of_business
		keywords keywords more_stuff_from_their_pages </font>

5) Keep flaming them on Usenet, especially using lots of different
pseudonyms discussing it with each other, to fill up DejaNews.
	Alice:"Did you hear that yourtarget.com exploits its workers?"
	Bob:  "No, really, are those mothercensors doing that too?"
		You know the 666 in their logo is because the Illuminati own them?"
	Alice: "That's just a 'Help, I'm being held hostage' note
		snuck in by Vl.... D.tw..l.., who used to work for them.
		But they really do make their product from baby seal hides."
Obviously you need good sub-flame picketing so people don't killfile you
like they did with S..... Ar..., the Turkish flamebot.

6) Getting a newsgroup created just for criticizing them gets extra points.

7) Set up a Boycott Information Center web page or a Badder Business Bureau
and make it easy for people to post the Bad Things done by lots of Bad People.
In addition to your targets, you could prime it with other popular Bad People,
or just advertise it well, and make it easy to use, serious-looking,
and attractive to people of the political/economic persuasion you want
to reach as well as to the press.  Declan McCullagh wrote:
> 	Now, perhaps a market will develop for virtual pickets. 
>	Businesses may flock to "online storefronts" that have certain rules 
>	including the right to create "Heineken out of Burma!" pages that appear 

8) Set up a Web Page Parodies Home Page, and make it easy for people to post
parodies of other web pages; add a zinging parody of your target.
Usenet being a moving parody of itself, it's a good place to create a 
newsgroup
that you can also use to parody the target.

9) Usenet signature lines are cheap and easy - use them, and point to
your picket web pages from them.  If you can get people to copy yours, 
even better.  

You can think of more.....


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#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
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