>A suggestion:
> All sovereign governing bodies have cooperative agreements for policing
> each others laws. For example: If someone commits a crime in Iowa and
> escapes to Stanford, Stanford police will probably cooperate with
> investigation and extradition to Iowa is probable.
Consider the UK's Great Train Robbery, the perpatrator of which is
alive and well in Brazil, from which he may not be extradited due to
vagaries of Brazilian law (he married a Brazilian native, which
exempts him from the otherwise applicable extradition agreements).
I submit that the differences between Usenet, the Arpanet, and
BITNET are much more like those between the UK and Brazil than those
between Stanford and Iowa. Stanford and Iowa are both subject to a
higher authority, in the form of the U.S. Federal Government and
Supreme Court.
> Cooperative
> investigation and extradition are the result of common practice, common
> laws and cooperative agreements between administrative and legistive
> bodies. These agreements produce a uniform practice that we have grown to
> expect.
Cooperative agreements exist because two parties either
1) Share a common, revered, ancestry. Anglo-american
extradition is a breeze, since U.S. law is based on English
Common Law.
2) Share a common desire to address the specific problem. It is
currently very easy to extradite drug trafficers (well,
except from Panama ;-) ), but not as easy for mail fraud.
Most nations accept that drugs are very bad, while mail fraud
is much lower on their current priorities.
3) Have a decidedly one-sided relationship. NATO exists because
John Marshall convinced the Congress to send large sums of
money to Europe.
None of these, or any other commonalities which suggest
themselves, bear on the inter-network situation.
> The various networks ought to have cooperative agreements for policing
> each others policy. Postmasters already informally help each other when
> flagrant problems occur; why not formalize the process? Could there be a
> common law of networks that is written rather than acknowledged? A person
> ought to lose their userid for violating the worst of the common laws of
> networking and be warned for others. A common law of networks might be a
> step towards common practice in networking.
>
> Notice that cooperative agreements are not administered by a central
> authority but by the local entity; a policeman in one case and a system
> administrator in another. There is no need for central policing unless an
> entire site goes crazy.
So what constitutes a "heinous network crime", suitable to remove
access from the offender? On BITNET, it is supposedly a sin to post
prices in public mail. On Usenet, this is consdered de riguer. On
Usenet, there are whole newsgroups devoted to "marginal" activities:
"alt.drugs", "alt.sex", "rec.nude", "talk.bizarre", "rec.humor", etc.
The Arpanet, by virtue of its DOD sponsorship, eschews such things.
Ross Patterson
Rutgers University
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