>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
 
>>> Item number 123, dated 88/05/27 14:25:32 -- ALL