ELECTRONIC FRONTIER CANADA

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

        ELECTRONIC FRONTIER CANADA --- PRESS RELEASE


For immediate release --- February 4, 1994


Electronic Frontier Canada (EFC) is concerned about the recent
censorship of five Usenet newsgroups at the University of Waterloo.


Usenet News is a distributed electronic bulletin board system available
to an estimated 15 million Internet users across Canada and around the
world.  Users can browse articles on any of the several thousand
available topics that may interest them.  The choice of what to read is
left to the reader.  Users may also contribute their own articles and
follow up on the articles of authors.  EFC believes the open exchange
of ideas and opinions on Usenet has become an important part of a
university education.


EFC was founded in January 1994 "to ensure that the principles embodied
in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are protected as new
computing, communications, and information technologies emerge".  EFC
is concerned that, although in Canada the right to free speech is not
an absolute right, the censorship recently imposed at the University of
Waterloo sets a dangerous precedent and has resulted in the banning of
some forms of expression that are protected.


"No Canadian court has ever decided that any message on any Usenet
newsgroup is illegal," the organization's co-founder, Professor Jeffrey
Shallit, said today.  "By this ban, the University is exercising `prior
restraint' on the rights of University of Waterloo faculty, students,
and staff to read and contribute freely to the discussions on the
banned newsgroups." Prof. Shallit noted there was a "conspicuous
absence of computer scientists and librarians" on the committee that
decides what people can read on computers.  He also said that the order
did not take into account the University's historical role as the
guardian of free intellectual inquiry.


Prof. Shallit noted that the University of Waterloo has been down the
path of censorship before.  Acting upon a complaint about a single joke
posted to the newsgroup in "rec.humor.funny", the entire newsgroup was
banned by the university administration in 1988.  Later, a dozen
newsgroups devoted to discussions about sex were banned.  The ban was
reversed in May 1991 after a public outcry.


In a Usenet news article, Professor David Jones of McGill University,
the other co-founder of EFC, commented that the UW Ethics Committee
seemed to "focus on the medium rather than the message".  He asked if
the sort of information now banned in electronic form would soon be
removed from the UW libraries.


Prof. Jones observed that the University of Waterloo Library carries
information that, at first blush, might seem controversial, including
_Playboy_ magazine (available on microfilm), and a book denying the
Holocaust, _The Hoax of the Twentieth Century_.  "If the University of
Waterloo administration chooses to place limits on what its students
and faculty are allowed to read, these limits should be consistently
applied across various media," Jones said.


                        -- 30 --


For further information, or to arrange interviews, please contact:


Dr. Jeffrey Shallit, University of Waterloo, Dept of Computer Science
Telephone: (908) 932-0585
Fax:       (908) 932-5932
E-mail: shallit () graceland uwaterloo ca


Dr. David Jones, McGill University, Dept of Electrical Engineering
Telephone:  (514) 398-8348 or -6319
Fax:        (514) 398-7348 or -4470
E-mail:     djones () cim mcgill ca


Electronic Frontier Canada can be reached electronically by sending
e-mail to:  efc () graceland uwaterloo ca


Reference documents collected by EFC are accessible using another
Internet tool called "gopher":


        gopher -p "1/community/efc" ee470.ee.mcgill.ca