So, what do we do about these problems and what could we have done to have made Usenet work better than it did? And what can we learn from these experiences?

We have mentioned the would-be censor, who sends one letter among many to the sysop of the one he wishes to censor and then denies that he is harassing anyone, because he has sent only ONE letter.

But that one person may be sending letters to many people. Which brings us to our first proposal, here, for how to deal with these problems. Instead of allowing people to mail directly to the sysop of somebody whose online behavior they find objectionable, institute a system that holds that a sysop will hear only the complaints of his own users, and other sysops. Under this system, if you wished to complain about a posting I made, you would write to your own sysop (explaining your complaint to him). If he thought it had merit, he would contact my sysop to relay your complaint. This way, if somebody decides to abuse the system and e-mail a complaint against everyone who writes something that he doesn't like, it won't be the sysops of his victims who will get tired of hearing about it, but, instead, his own.

As for the problem of mass phone calling, this problem is very far from being unique to Internet Providers, having plagued much of the corporate community under a variety of circumstances. Here's my suggestion ...

1. Set their phone systems to accept calls only from recognized residential, corporate, and institutional phone numbers (defined as being those that caller ID returns an individual name, when a call from the number comes in).



2. Enter into collaboration with the phone company (and a number of other affected businesses and institutions) to establish a system to record the names and numbers of crank callers, complete with a phone trap system. If some abusive calls it, the recipient hits a button, the call is recorded, and if a third party appointed for this purpose decides that it is, indeed, a harassing call. The caller's number is entered into a database, catalogued under social security number (properly encrypted (*)), and calls from any number registered in that person's name are blocked from all member phones permanently, or until it can be established that somebody other than the phone's owner made the call and is identified. (In which case, they are banned instead).



3. If the phone company will agree, keep an archive of all calls judged to be harassing, which can be searched or wandered through via a publicly accessible phone number, announced to the public. Make sure that the current phone number of the one who made the crank call is heard when the calls is played back to the listener. Sit back and enjoy as the general public shares its love with our would be censors. If they can give it, let them take it.



4. Announce all of this, publicly, being sure to mention the phone traps, so there are no grounds for legal action.

That might just do it. But let's pursue an analog of this idea. Much as ISPs can be overwhelmed by crank phone calls, the moderators of newsgroups (and online mailing lists) could easily be overwhelmed by crank e-mail or submissions. Let's consider the following, as a solution to this problem ...

1. Establish a consortium of moderators, who send copies of questionable e-mail (or posts) to a third party, appointed as a judge. If it is judged to a crackpot or crank submission, the e-mail address of the offending party is entered in to a killfile and a mailfilter, whose entries are automatically inserted into the killfiles and mailfilters of the participating moderators.



2. Establish a database under a second consortium of cooperating ISPs, to track those so banned as they go from one e-mail account to the next, by encrypted social security number. These numbers would not be made to anyone outside of the ISPs. Rather, if someone was banned, an annotation to that effect would be made by the encrypted social security number, in the database. If the offending party gets another account, and this annotation is found when his encrypted SSN is entered, a note is sent to the consortium that this new account is on the banned list, asking the consortium to enter this e-mail address in their global crank mailfilter.



3. Some ISPs will refuse to cooperate. Set the system to automatically reject all e-mail and submissions from them and set an autoresponder to reply to the first e-mail or submission from a given account with that ISP, with a letter explaining the situation.



4. Allow the general public to opt in (on using this crank filter) on an individual basis, but don't allow ISPs to use it. Allowing this creates a major problem if a given screening service abuses its discretion and starts banning people for legitimate submissions it simply doesn't like.



5. Don't merely have one service, but many. But have them share a bulletin board on which appear the submissions that caused them to ban those sending them, with any appropriate history and evidence supporting the account of that history, but without the name of the service doing the banning being available to anyone but the maintainer of the board. This is left off to reduce the temptation of one service rubber stamping the decisions of another for political reasons. Let each individual service look over the board and decide if it wishes to ban the individual as well, for itself.




However, set the board so that a moderator may see who was banned by which service and decide for himself which service(s) he wishes to enroll in. Make it clear that one may not be both a moderator and the judge at a screening service, as that would reflect a conflict of interest. Should a moderator be caught violating this rule, ban him from the use of the service for life. We don't want to see anything akin to Skirvin's global killfile arising. No one person should ever have the power to make another disappear.



6. Recognize that frivolous complaints from moderators can do as much to shut down the system as crank e-mail. If a moderator submits somebody for banning and the request is clearly unjust, at the discretion of the service he may lose the right to submit further people to the affected service for banning, and get an entry on the bulletin board of his own, explaining the situation. However, if he wishes, he can still make use of the filter/killfile. He merely can't contribute to it, any more.



7. Last, but not least, do one's part, and make it clear that any ISP that allows its users to issue third party cancels is automatically on the banned list, as long as it allows them to do so.

Click here to continue.

(*) Wide distribution of SSNs would create identity theft problems. Instead, take a relatively easily implemented algorithm whose inverse is almost impossible to find, apply it to the SSN, and distributed the processed number - the "encrypted SSN". Include the ESSN listing in caller ID.