Chronicle of Higher Education, August 8, 1997
When a loose coalition of anti-spamming activists erected a virtual blockade against newsgroup messages from one Internet-service provider last week, they had some explaining to do. Officials of the company, UUNet Technologies, one of the largest Internet-service providers in the world, called the blockade a "terrorist" action, and some Internet users said it violated free speech.
But the activists kept a low profile and managed to stay out of the press. Instead, they let a Radford University graduate student named Dennis McClain-Furmanski do the talking.
And so, earlier this week, Mr. McClain-Furmanski was the anti-spamming advocate quoted in coverage of the blockade by The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Jose Mercury News. He described himself as a spokesman for the activists and defended the blockade as necessary to rid newsgroups of unsolicited advertisements and other commercial postings -- better known as spam.
"We need to make the public aware of how bad things are," he said in an interview.
By Tuesday, the company had relented, saying that it would crack down on its spam-generating customers. Satisfied, the newsgroup activists opened their doors to UUNet traffic once again.
But Mr. McClain-Furmanski is more than just a spokesman for the activists involved in shutting out UUNet customers this week. He is also a co-founder of a group called the "SubGenius Police" in a newsgroup known as alt.binaries.slack -- a message board far from the mainstream of today's Internet users. Among other causes related to keeping the Internet running and widely accessible, the newsgroup's members are committed to ridding cyberspace of unwanted advertisements. Their "police" force uses computer programs to keep their newsgroup free of undesirables -- a technique similar to that used by the activists from other newsgroups during the UUNet blockade.
In his dual roles, Mr. McClain-Furmanski represents an entrenched subculture of newsgroup participants who believe that their way of communicating is in danger of being overrun by junk mail. What's more, they say, the Internet as a whole could grind to a halt under the weight of excessive traffic on newsgroups. But newsgroups are little understood by people who don't use them. As Mr. McClain-Furmanski speaks out about the action against UUNet, about the anti-spam movement, and about the newsgroups to which he belongs, this psychology student and long-time Internet user tries to explain his subculture's mindset to the network's newest participants.
When a group of activists staged a blockade last week of newsgroup postings from the UUNet service, they used some of the same tactics as a self-appointed policing unit called SPUTUM. Within days, the activists appeared to have gained their objective.
To understand Mr. McClain-Furmanski's views, however, it helps to understand what exactly happened during the blockade, which its instigators called the "Death Penalty."
Last Friday, a dozen newsgroup administrators from around the world collectively decided to reset their software so that it would reject any posting to their newsgroups that had originated from accounts at UUNet. For the last few years, those administrators had set their software to reject postings that appeared to be commercial and irrelevant to their newsgroups -- and lately, nearly 98 per cent of postings from UUNet servers met those criteria, said Mr. McClain-Furmanski. To the newsgroup administrators, UUNet appeared to be doing nothing to prevent its clients from producing such spam. So the newsgroup administrators altered their software so that it would cancel every message originating from a UUNet account.
It worked. UUNet decried the blockade, said that its instigators had been misinformed, and called the action illegal. In a statement released on Tuesday, UUNet officials said they had a "zero-tolerance policy" for spamming and would toughen their enforcement of the policy. That same day, the newsgroup activists lifted the so-called "Death Penalty."
But Mr. McClain-Furmanski regards the victory over UUNet as only one battle in an ongoing campaign against spam. His work as a member of the SubGenius Police, Usenet Tactical Unit (Mobile) -- better known as SPUTUM -- will go forward as well. The group is in the vanguard of efforts to stifle the producers of spam. To some Internet observers, groups like SPUTUM are "vigilantes" or "Internet terrorists." But Mr. McClain-Furmanski disputes such characterizations.
"These people have been doing the job for years," he said. "They are deputized by now."
In fact, SPUTUM's members and many of the people involved in the blockade against UUNet have been participating in newsgroups for years, since well before the Internet became a medium of commerce, according to Mr. McClain-Furmanski, who said he has been posting messages for a dozen years. Through the use of violent language and guerrilla tactics like the UUNet blockade, they aim to preserve that original, purer vision of the Internet's purpose.
But at Radford, a medium-size university in southwestern Virginia, Mr. McClain-Furmanski has managed to keep his identity as a student separate from his role as a spokesman for the self-appointed Internet "police." He said he does not conduct any SPUTUM work from Radford computers or use the university's e-mail system for his public-relations correspondence.
And although he spent time this week fielding calls from the press, his main focus has been his master's thesis in experimental psychology. "I'm days away from finishing." he said. Once done, he will start a doctoral program in psychological science at Virginia Tech.
"Unless they've changed their minds," he said. He is aware that his on-line work might look odd to outsiders. But that "will be okay," he concluded. "Virginia Tech, it seems, is pretty open about things like this."