Didn't think so. Immediately after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, an appeal to MAPS and the ORBS offsprings was made to lift the blocking of world-wide communications they control on humanitarian grounds.


The reasons for such a request were obvious. Anyone thinking rationally can understand that in a state of emergency, the need to keep vital communication channels open precludes whatever petty reasons that led to those organizations' blackholing.

That is if you expect Big Brother and the zealot minions to act rationally. Self-confessed censor Paul Vixie, the man who likened the collateral damage resulting from his BGP router blackholing method to the firebombing of Dresden, apparently didn't see the state of emergency as a compelling reason to suspend blackholing, or he would have done so.

As Gartner researchers pointed out: "Businesses should expect to provide relaying services and act as communication forwarding points for parties in need of assistance."

That was the very spirit of the Internet, destroyed by the invisible hand of Paul Vixie and his cyberterrorist gang of cronies when they started to blackmail thousands of ISPs into submission, by intentionally disrupting their communications for not adhering to their fabricated standards.

"Any content-based regulation of the Internet, no matter how benign the purpose, could burn the global village to roast the pig." (US Supreme Court majority decision, Reno v. ACLU, 1997)

There is strong evidence that in the aftermath, with jammed phone lines, millions of Americans communicated via email. How many of those messages never reached the intended recipient because of the MAPS blackholing?

It now became obvious that MAPS and their followers worry more that some spam message may get through than possibly blocking one of your urgent messages from wherever you may have found yourself stranded. In an emergency situation, when people have a compelling need to communicate, this is unacceptable.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." (Benjamin Franklin, 1759)

Many users are unaware that their providers practice stealth blocking. In a statement published in the aftermath, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) cautions:

[B]lacklisting is interfering with the delivery of a significant amount of non-spam email. Systems administrators who will not adopt the suggested anti-spam policies find themselves unable to deliver their non-spamming users' mail to recipients who are on systems that participate in blacklisting. This blocking is being done at too high a cost. Ultimately, civil rights and the ability of non-spammers to communicate cannot be sacrificed to serve the goal of blocking unsolicited bulk email.

NetSide advises users to ask about filtering and avoid providers that blacklist by blindly entrusting control of their communications to third-party extortionate vigilante censors such as MAPS, or employ filters from foreign entities.

NetSide calls for US government agencies to seriously evaluate the threat of organized private parties capable to block the free flow of information at will for arbitrary reasons. We believe enacting ad hoc legislation that regulates electronic communications, and the delivery of email in particular, is a pressing topic.

On October 16, 2001, President George W. Bush issued the Executive Order for Critical Infrastructure Protection in the Information Age under the following principles:

(b) It is the policy of the United States to protect against disruption of the operation of information systems for critical infrastructure and thereby help to protect the people, economy, essential human and government services, and national security of the United States, and to ensure that any disruptions that occur are infrequent, of minimal duration, and manageable, and cause the least damage possible. The implementation of this policy shall include a voluntary public-private partnership, involving corporate and nongovernmental organizations.

Perhaps the newly established Critical Infrastructure Protection Board will soon realize that the intentional disruption of other providers' communications, as practiced by Paul Vixie and his followers, is in direct conflict with and clearly violates these policies.

Furthermore, in light of the recent events, the topic of treating an ISP as a common carrier should be revisited.