4 November 2000.
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2000 16:20:17 -0500
From: Seth Finkelstein <sethf@MIT.EDU>
Subject: Michael Sims, Seth Finkelstein EFF validation
Comments: cc: fight-censorship@vorlon.MIT.EDU
To: CYBERIA-L@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
I can hear people's eyes rolling already, it's-just-a-flame-war. But what Michael Sims is not telling you, is that my decision to leave Censorware Project was prompted by legal advice, that the risk of <http://sethf.com/freespeech/censorware/legal/legalrisk.php> anticensorware work was increasing, and Michael Sims was the most vocal opponent of me having any defense (although granted he didn't know the details at the time, he has known for months). Why? Because Michael Sims wanted to use Censorware Project to only promote himself. He has now pulled a coup d'etat and declared himself the sole owner of Censorware Project, and I have opposed him on this. Again, the way you can distinguish the stories is that he *shut* *down* censorware.org for a week as terrorism, and I stayed up all night mirroring it from files I had archived.
More personal validation:
[posted with permission, though it was granted before]
<http://sethf.com/freespeech/censorware/legal/effapology.php>
Message-Id:
<4.3.2.7.0.20000823164703.00ad8b10@eff.org>
To: Seth Finkelstein <sethf@MIT.EDU>
From: Shari Steele <ssteele@eff.org>
Subject: Re: A request for a formal EFF apology
Cc: j.s.tyre@cyberpass.net, mech@eff.org
In-Reply-To: <200007111900.PAA09049@oobleck.mit.edu>
Hi Seth.
Let me start with a personal apology for not getting back to you sooner. My inbox is overwhelming, and notes requiring more than a cursory answer, like yours, too often get relegated to a back burner. That in combination with me changing computers helped me forget to get back to you until Stanton asked me about it this weekend.
Wow. There are so many things that seem to have been done so wrong here. EFF should have defended you and your work from the start. I'm very comfortable saying that publicly. Shedding a light on what these filtering programs actually do has been essential to fighting their widespread implementation. To the extent that anyone on staff here interfered with your efforts to provide the world with these blacklists, I offer a humble organizational apology.
I'm not sure where we go from here, though. You indicated that you're not doing this anymore. Why not? Is anyone doing it? You mentioned a DMCA lawsuit, but what about a lawsuit directly against the filtering companies for false advertising? I haven't researched this, but it seems to me that there's something sinister about what they represent to customers versus what they actually provide.
Anyway, my apologies. I consider what you did an heroic act, and EFF (and everyone else in the civlib community) should have always appreciated that.
Take care.
Shari
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2000 15:40:45 -0500
From: Seth Finkelstein <sethf@MIT.EDU>
Subject: Michael Sims
To: CYBERIA-L@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
--text follows this line--
Michael Sims *shut* *down* the censorware.org site for a week due to my wanting to post this message. I spend a whoile night mirroring the site on my own site, and I believe that is why he put it back. He has listened to no-one since that time, and declared himself the sole owner if the site. *I* WAS the one staying up all night mirroring the site, while he held the site hostage.
That's not opinion. That's a fact. And I discussed it with several list-members while it was happening. I think the shows who is in the right here.
Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2000 00:41:08 -0700
To: cwp <cwp@censorware.org>
From: "James S. Tyre" <jstyre@jstyre.com>
Subject: The CWP Unperson
"[Finkelstein], however, was already an unperson. He did not exist: he had never existed." -- 1984
Michael, the "why" does not matter, but I just happened to look at http://censorware.org/admin/, and was surprised and saddened to see that you have removed any reference to Seth. I hardly ever check that page, so I do not know how long ago this was, but I just saw it.
You and he have become enemies, and there is nothing which I can do about that, apparently. But you can not deny the contributions he made, that CWP likely never would have existed but for him.
He had been listed as a former member, though I do not recall the exact language. Unpersoning him is just wrong.
Please reconsider.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
James S.
Tyre
mailto:jstyre@jstyre.com
Bigelow, Moore & Tyre,
LLP
626-792-6806/626-792-1402(fax)
540 South Marengo
Avenue
Pasadena, California 91101
Co-founder, The Censorware
Project
http://censorware.org
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2000 16:49:46 -0500
From: Jonathan Wallace <jw@BWAY.NET>
Subject: The Censorware Project
Comments: To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu
To: CYBERIA-L@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
I've been trying hard to avoid washing dirty laundry in public, but a couple of recent posts have raised the issue and I'd like to give an account of what happened to the Censorware Project (the site at http://censorware.org is now offline). What we have here is the spectacle of a group member who volunteered to act as webmaster effectively closing a group which wants to continue, because the domain happened to be registered in his name.
The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time--around two years as I recall--we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other products.
Even though two of us were attorneys--Jim and myself--we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along.
Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight was to take the site down for a week, exactly as Seth says in his mail. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is over." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.
Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.
I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to delete my name from the site if he wasn't going to transfer the domain. Again, I received no reply.
Today, Sims took the Censorware Project site offline again, with a message which says "Due to demands from some of the people who contributed, in however minor a fashion, to this site, it has been taken down." Judging from some email I received from him today, this means me.
Its a sad thing, both because we got some good work done and because some of the other members of the group were eager to continue and in fact have continued working, while deprived of the Censorware Project site, name, email aliases and public recognition. These further efforts are appearing on Bennett Haselton's Peacefire site, www.peacefire.org. (I applaud the work but take no credit as I have not been involved in some time.)
On the page currently at www.censorware.org Sims makes the following request: "If you are interested in volunteering to fight censorware, please contact me." One of the reasons I made this post was so that anyone considering working with Mike can make an informed decision.
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2000 13:24:15 -0500
From: Michael Sims <jellicle@INCH.COM>
Subject: Seth
Comments: To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu
To: CYBERIA-L@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
FWIW, here's my take on Seth Finkelstein.
Finkelstein is the kind of nut case that you occasionally hear about with regard to the internet but never expect to actually meet. He's a deeply disturbed individual, a paranoid, unstable, obsessive, stalker. Society would be better off if he were institutionalized.
He's also a gifted programmer, and a strong supporter of free speech. These aren't exclusive with the above.
Declan McCullagh (once upon a time) had the misfortune to activate Seth's obsessive-stalker mode. Yes, Declan is an asshole. Yes, he publishes stories broken by other people as his own work. Etc. But Seth's been stalking him for many years now.
Mike Godwin (once upon a time) had the misfortune to activate Seth's obsessive-stalker mode. Yes, Godwin is an asshole. Yes, Godwin has done plenty of damage to free speech by supporting censorware, both in front of Congress and in the various press outlets available to him. Etc. But Seth's been stalking him for many years now.
I've got reason to dislike both McCullagh and Godwin. But Lord, I sure do empathize with them now.
Seth's grievance with me stems from the Salon article that Mike Godwin wrote so long ago in praise of censorware. Seth was deeply, deeply angered at Godwin's lying in that article, making up stories about his (Godwin's) actions on the cyberia-l list and presenting them as a truthful historical account. To help Seth - because he wasn't capable of writing a sane rebuttal at the time, and because I too was offended by Godwin's lies - I wrote a rebuttal and submitted it to Scott Rosenberg, Salon's editor, for publication. Seth harassed Rosenberg incessantly ("when will it be published? when will it be published?") until Rosenberg realized just how nutty Seth was, and declined to publish it at all. (Not that the article was a masterpiece or anything, but certainly getting eight or ten emails from an obsessive loon isn't going to increase the chances of publication.) In Seth's mind, this was my fault. I failed to support him. I let him down. I didn't defend him against his current most-hated-person, Mike Godwin.
Seth then proceeded to destroy the rest of our little group of six anti-censorware activists over his anger at me. I eventually stopped speaking to him at all, though he didn't stop writing to me - he wrote long, obsessive screeds on a nearly daily basis for well over a year after I had ceased writing to him. Imagine receiving nasty email from someone for a year continuously, and realizing that this person is spending on the order of a half-hour, every single day, doing nothing but hating you. Eventually, I threatened to get a restraining order against him, and he stopped. I should probably get the restraining order anyway.
It's clear to me now that anyone who attempts to interact with Seth will eventually do something which causes him to enter into stalker mode. It's a shame that I didn't recognize the pattern early enough to avoid it. Possibly one can blame the internet for this - I've never met him face-to-face, and he does a reasonable impersonation of sanity through email. Textual communication can make it quite difficult to judge someone's true character, or at least that's the excuse I make for myself for not catching on sooner. At least I can warn others not to make the same mistake I did.
Now, he's probably got a bullet in his basement with my name carved into it. Regardless of what I've done - regardless of what anyone has done - they don't deserve Seth.
Free speech activism could use a lot fewer people like Seth Finkelstein.
--
Michael Sims - slashdot.org editor - <michael@slashdot.org>
Your Rights Online - http://slashdot.org/yro
Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 19:49:44 -0500
From: Seth Finkelstein <sethf@MIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: What does the DMCA Exemption mean?
To: CYBERIA-L@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
>>At 4:17 PM -0500 11/3/00, Seth Finkelstein wrote:
>> As to John Noble's comment
that "But I have the impression
>> that the folks going after the filterware vendors wear it as a
badge.":
>> Hey, have you *read* any of my messages on this topic over the
YEARS
>> I've been writing about it on this list?
> John Noble <jnoble@DGSYS.COM>
> The comment was much too flip. I certainly wasn't thinking of you. But
you
> gotta admit -- there's a strong vein of 'so sue me' out there.
Actually, I still dissent. Don't confuse bar-room warriors with people who have had their fingers on the servers. There's a strong vein of big-talking. But only a handful of people have ever been sitting down and writing *decryption programs*. That's a rare skill, and people who can do it may find no-credit, no-support, negative-return, *high*-*legal*-*risk* activism to be very unattractive compared to other ways of spending their time. The reality of being sued can be quite different from the romanticism.
Matthew Skala, one the censorware reverse-engineering programmers who *has* been sued, has made these informative remarks:
"When we published the essay I didn't expect a lawsuit, but I had also thought, "Well, if there is a lawsuit it won't be a problem, because there are organizations that take care of things like that." I fondly imagined that in case of legal silliness, someone would just step in and say "We'll take it from here." What I found out was that those organizations, through no fault of their own, were able to give me a lot of sympathy and not enough of anything else, particularly money, to bring my personal risk of tragic consequences down to an acceptable level, despite, incredibly, the fact that what I had done was legal. Ultimately, I couldn't rely on anybody to deal with my problems but myself. Some people learn that lesson a bit less impressively than I had to."
<http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala/cpbfaq.html#afterboston>, and one of the quotes for my <http://sethf.com/freespeech/censorware/legal/legalrisk.php> [My joke about this is that I didn't even get sympathy, I got hostility]
Bennett Haselton of Peacefire is perhaps the most open and public person about being sued. But, that's him. It's one reason I think highly of him. However, by far, not everyone has his same risk tolerances and trade-offs. Some (but not all) of the programming work on Peacefire's site was, ahem, "donated" by more experienced programmers (though this is not meant to take away from Bennett's most high achievements and potentials).
Note that contrary to myth, Jon Johansen, the 15-year-old of DeCSS fame, never actually did any decryption code either. The person who wrote that portion didn't want to get sued.
<http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-2000-01/lw-01-dvd-interview.html>
Jon Johansen: I'm 16 now, I was 15 when it happened ... and the encryption code wasn't in fact written by me, but written by the German member. There seems to be a bit of confusion about that part.LinuxWorld: The other two people that you had worked with to make the player are remaining anonymous -- is that right?
Jon Johansen: Yes, that is correct.
...
LinuxWorld: Do you know why they want to remain anonymous?
Jon Johansen: They are both a lot older than me, and they are employed. So I guess they just didn't want the publicity, and they were perhaps afraid of getting fired.
I think, with the arguable exception of Bennett Haselton, you would be hard-pressed to find a programmer actually writing censorware or similar decryption code and who has a so-sue-me attitude (I-didn't-think-I'd-be-sued is not the same thing). It isn't easy stuff, and credit rip-offs and legal threats on top of that make it even less attractive.
> And don't misunderstand me -- I wasn't criticizing the exception
for
> filterware. I just thought that some of the other proposed
> exceptions were at least as compelling.
One reason that censorware stood out is because there were people, such as *M*E* making a very specific and referenced legal case for the exemption. This court victory (_Loudoun_), this injunction (CyberPatrol), this former chief programmer of Censorware Project writing to you and testifying that there is specific work which will be affected by the DMCA <http://sethf.com/freespeech/censorware/legal/dmcaloc.php>. Not policy arguments, excellent though many of those were. I think that made a difference.
(Note to the person who criticized me for plugging myself, look at how much PR I've gotten in the wake of this DMCA victory - 0. Better yet, go ask Michael Sims why there won't be any Censorware Project press releases, generating *legal* *support* for the former chief programmer who was mentioned in the DMCA/LOC ruling. And why my credit is in fact gone from the site, over every other member's objections. Or what's happened with the site. There's too much at stake here now to put up with this behavior.)
__
Seth Finkelstein Consulting Programmer sethf@sethf.com http://sethf.com