Newsgroups: alt.censorship,alt.comp.acad-freedom.talk From: kadie@hal.cs.uiuc.edu (Fwd:) Subject: [uw.general, et al.] Electronic Frontier Canada press release Message-ID: Followup-To: alt.censorship,alt.comp.acad-freedom.talk,uw.general,ont.general,tor.general,can.general,alt.censorship,alt.comp.acad-freedom.talk Sender: kadie@cs.uiuc.edu (Carl M Kadie) Organization: University of Illinois, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Urbana, IL Date: Mon, 7 Feb 1994 17:02:27 GMT Lines: 95 [A repost - Carl] [I'm reposting this to alt.censorship and alt.comp.acad-freedom.talk. If you reply, be sure that a newsgroup that you get (e.g. alt.censorship) is listed first in the newsgroup line. -cmk] Newsgroups: uw.general,ont.general,tor.general,can.general,alt.censorship,alt.comp.acad-freedom.talk From: shallit@graceland.uwaterloo.ca (Jeffrey Shallit) Subject: Electronic Frontier Canada press release Message-ID: Date: Sun, 6 Feb 1994 23:00:11 GMT 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 -- Carl Kadie -- I do not represent any organization; this is just me. = kadie@cs.uiuc.edu =