Re: infosec and human rights

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Thu, 20 Apr 2006 11:09:39 +1000, Mark Carey-Smith said:
> > The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it
> >                                     - John Gilmore

> That is a good quote but I'm not sure it's relevant any more. Perhaps it
> would be more accurate to say that the Arpanet routed around censorship but the
> increasingly corporatised Internet embraces it? Not sure about that really. 

Nope, not what John was talking about.  For starters, it's a misquote...

> My feeling without too much analysis is that the quote refers to routing
> devices' ability to route around link failures, which is an inherent feature of
> the IP protocol and dynamic routing protocols. But when those IP packets are
> dropped cold by packet filtering at an aggregation point they can't avoid then
> that's game over. Anyone care to comment?

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/reagle/inet-quotations-19990709.html

Says:

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." John Gilmore
(EFF).  [source: Gilmore states: "I have never found where I first said this.
But everyone believes it was me, as do I. If you find an appearance of this
quote from before March '94, please let me know." Also in NYT 1/15/96, quoted
in CACM 39(7):13. Later, Russell Nelson comments (and is confirmed by Gilmore)
that on December 05 1993 Nelson sent Gilmore an email stating, "Great quote of
you in Time magazine: 'The net treats censorship as a defect and routes around
it.'"]

Also, note that he said 'The Net', not 'The Internet'.  In particular, The Big
Application at the time was Usenet/NetNews, which uses a "flood" algorithm to
distribute articles.  As a result, if you had NetNews feeds from two different
sites A and B, and A decided to get fascist and stomp on some articles due to
content, you'd *still* get them from B.  Which is what I think John was talking
about.

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