Date: Sun, 20 Jul 1997 11:16:38 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave-AT-mundo.eco.utexas.edu>
Subject: AUT: Netwar: IGC censored by mailbombers (fwd)



---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 1997 01:12:19 -0700 (PDT)
From: Phil Agre <pagre-AT-weber.ucsd.edu>
Reply-To: rre-maintainers-AT-weber.ucsd.edu
To: rre-AT-weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: IGC censored by mailbombers
Resent-Date: Sun, 20 Jul 1997 01:15:25 -0700 (PDT)
Resent-From: rre-AT-weber.ucsd.edu

[CNET (www.news.com) has reported on this.  More recent news is that
IGC has taken down the Web site in question under protest.  Their
position is that they are happy to respond to civilized objections
by reviewing whether a site satisfies their policies, but they are
not happy to take down a site because of denial-of-service attacks
by people who don't like it.  That's obviously not a good precedent,
and I think their position is reasonable.  I also think there's a
larger unwritten story -- unwritten as far as I know -- about a much
broader range of attacks aimed at shutting down specific types of
political speech.  Many of these attacks are instances of a game
that I identified in TNO a while back -- posting large amounts of
inflammatory or irrelevant material and then crying censorship when
the moderator tries to do something about it.  The IGC case makes
for a cleaner story because the attack is more straightforward.]

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Date: Thu, 17 Jul 1997 15:34:17 -0700 (PDT)
From: Maureen Mason <mmason-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: IGC censored by mailbombers

Hi Phil,

[...]

We host a site (http://www.igc.org/ehj) for a US group supporting Basque
independence in Spain and France, and have gotten protest letters over the
past 4 months saying that the site "suppports terrorism" because a section
of it contains material on ETA, an armed group somewhat like the IRA in
Northern Ireland, at http://www.igc.org/ehj/html/eta.html (the rest of the
site includes material on human rights, politics, other Basque
independence groups and hyperlinks to site with opposing views). 

But now the protest--fueled by ETA's kidnapping and killing of a
Spanish politician this month--has turned into a serious
"mailbombing" campaign against that is threatening to bring our
servers to a halt.  We are also getting hundreds of legitimate
protest messages, which we can handle.  What is damaging us is
thousands of anonymous hits to our mail servers from hundreds of
different mail relays, with bogus return addresses; there's not
much we can do about these short of blocking access from hundreds
of mail servers as new sources of mailbombings appear. 

Our other email users (we have 13,000 members) are having their 
mail tied up or can't reach it, and our support lines are tied 
up with people who can't access their mail.

Other harassment includes spamming our staff accounts (apparently
scoured off our own Web page) and IGC member accounts (Usenet
postings from Spain have encouraged people to do AltaVista
searches for "-AT-igc.org" addresses); clogging our orders Web page
with bogus credit card orders; and threats to employ the same
tactics against organizations using IGC services. We do not want
to heavily advertise the particulars of this harassment in case
this would just encourage it to escalate. 

We've been struggling to keep up and running for a week but
cannot sustain the current situation.  Will you post our message
to your list, to publicize this attack on our system? 

We are also asking that anti-censorship organizations contact us
to make statements of support, not in defense of the EHJ site,
but against the attempt to censor *any* Internet provider's Web 
site with these vandalizing tactics: 

* You can contact Scott or Maureen (information below) at IGC
  and offer to include an anti-censorship statement in a press
  press release or on IGC's Web site; 

* We have archived a copy of the site (a 15Mb .tar file) for anyone 
  who wants to mirror the site on another server.

Thanks for your interest and support,

Maureen Mason <mmason-AT-igc.org>  	  Scott Weikart <scott-AT-igc.org>
Program Coordinator                       IGC Executive Director
Phone: 415-561-6100x109			  Phone: 415-561-6100x154
FAX: 415-561-6101			  FAX: 415-561-6101

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Maureen Mason                      Institute for Global Communications
WomensNet Coordinator                             415-561-6100 ext 109
 Box 29904 Presidio Bldg 1012 * San Francisco, California  94129-0904
       PeaceNet * EcoNet * ConflictNet * LaborNet * WomensNet
----------------------------------------------------------------------





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