Declaring that the time has come for the online industry to "clean up its act," the former head of a Chicago-based Internet service provider has announced a controversial plan to create a cleaned-up version of Usenet.
The proposed news feed, Clean News, will offer the standard news groups, but will discourage posting of illegal pornographic images and pirated software (known as "warez") by requiring anyone who wishes to post a binary file on the system to register with a third party.
Binaries that are posted without a digital signature that can be verified and traced through a certificate authority, such as Verisign, would automatically be canceled by the system.
The proposal, by network consultant and former MCS president Karl Denninger, has provoked a storm of controversy among Internet service providers (ISPs) and online privacy advocates. Opponents say Denninger's scheme is technically misguided and unconstitutional.
David Banisar, policy director for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the Clean News strategy "makes a presumption that all speech is bad unless you show your identity."
The ability to express oneself anonymously, he says, "has been recognized by the Supreme Court as a constitutional right, an important right to free speech."
Denninger says he hopes to have Clean News up and running by the first quarter of 1999. The public criticism has inspired the outspoken Denninger to restructure his proposed service in a way that may anger his critics even more.
Now, Denninger says, ISPs who subscribe to the Clean News feed will be able to specify which kind of binaries they want canceled, according to newsgroup name. For example, some ISPs may choose to have all binaries stripped, and others may select binaries from the "warez" and "erotica.pre-teen" groups only.
A Christian ISP could choose to have newsgroup items canceled that have subject lines that indicate an "anti-Christian bias," says Denninger. A group that wanted to filter out anti-Semitic content could do that, too. In the wake of a series of headline-grabbing kiddie-porn crackdowns against ISPs by New York State Attorney Dennis Vacco, Denninger says his plan has been eagerly embraced by ISPs that do not want to be held responsible for the illegal content flowing through their servers.
Denninger already has more than two dozen potential ISP subscribers, he claims, and three offers of free server space and bandwidth to manage the new service.
Vacco's election eve confiscations of newsgroup servers should be "just the beginning," says Denninger, who accuses Usenet administrators of turning a blind eye to illegal activity, such as trading of pirated software and sound files, on their systems.
"Nobody in this business can say that they don't know what's in alt.binaries.mp3 or alt.binaries.erotica," Denninger said.
"When I was running an ISP, I'd have people call me and say they were canceling the service because I didn't have alt.binaries.erotica.preteen. I wanted to say, 'You're really telling me on the telephone that you want kiddie porn?' This was a daily occurrence."
Beyond the free speech issue, online critics of the plan point out that the "cancel" messages emitted by the Clean News software will inevitably leak out to the Usenet at large, which could result in binary files being canceled all across the Net.
Dennigner doesn't deny this. In fact, he expects certain subscribers with personal agendas to siphon Clean News's cancel messages into the general Usenet feed.
"Let's say that Reverend Falwell had an ISP," he says. Such a misuse of the cancel messages would, however, be "not my issue."
Usenet consultant Jeff Garzik objects to Denninger's plan because, he says, all the legal means to prosecute those who post illegal binaries are already in place.
By automatically obliterating messages, Garzik says, Clean News may even make it harder to catch Net criminals, by destroying evidence. He also points out that the torrent of cancel messages will make existing bandwidth congestion worse.
Denninger explains that he is creating Clean News as a "public service."
He says he intends to be working on philanthropic projects -- such as Clean News -- for the next two or three years.
"I've gotten an awful lot from this industry," he said. "It's time to give something back."
