These instructions were sent to Why War? from a "net.activist"; we encourage readers to use these methods in order to secure permanent access to the Diebold memos
Take it from a long time (15+ years) net.activist: If you want to get a word out where everyone can see it and nobody can touch it, your best bet is Usenet. Web mirrors are neat, but how many can you really expect? A Usenet message exists in over 100,000 places. For example, when UUNet was being a bad net.neighbor (letting subscribers abuse the net) some individuals used Usenet (and some judicious media coverage) to change their minds. UUNet = WorldCom; a dozen guys took five days to change a $4.5 billion corporation's behavior.
Collect the "best of" your material into some text files. Post these to appropriate Usenet newsgroups. Be aware that posting the same material 20 times in 45 days, or to 20 different newsgroups, is considered "spam". It could get blocked.
Having posted it, check the newsgroup(s) to make sure it's there. When it is, get the "Message-ID" from the header. This is a unique identifier, exactly the same way a web URL is. But this refers to the message, no matter which of the 100,000 Usenet servers world wide it's being read from. You know have an identifier just like a URL to spread to people. Anyone with a dedicated newsreader, a news-enabled browser/mailer, or anyone with a browser (via a Usenet access point or archive such as Google Groups) can use it to find the message.
Pack up your entire collection of material, zip it tight, and post it to a relevant binaries newsgroup (i.e. alt.binaries.[whatever]). Once again, it's all out there; you have an ID to give people.
Now, normal Usenet traffic gets replaced (first-in, first-out) in between one and four weeks depending upon the individual server. Binaries get replaced in two to five days. So you just repost it appropriately and use the new ID. A minor hassle, but no more of a problem than changing web sites regularly. Less of a problem, really, because people can always use the Google Usenet archive to search for stuff based on content. (So you can always give instructions: "Use Google's news search function to look for messages with content "[something unique only to your messages]". Unfortunately this doesn't extend to stuff in binaries such as a zip file, so you'll have to post some unique text message into the article you're attaching the binary to, and let people know what it is so they can search for that.
Can this be stopped? There are what's called "control.cancel" messsage that can erase anything on Usenet as long as the correct Message-ID is given. But 75% of Usenet systems have turned that off due to prior abuse. Besides, anyone caught sending out cancel messages for anything based on content will be immediately recognized and outted, and possibly have their access terminated
So you've got a bunch of people lined up ready to mirror the site? They'll get knocked down one by one — or at least threatened. If instead all their site says is "see Usenet article [Message-ID], they can't be accused of harboring forbidden files. Plus, it's real easy to update a single line of HTML when the Message-ID changes.
Best part: Google and other Usenet archives store all text-based messages ever sent. They're available forever. (Binaries, though, aren't archived.)
Be aware that some software allows you to post to Usenet while changing the apparent "From:" line. While you can hide most of the source information, the server that injects the article into the Usenet stream stamps it with a header called "NNTP-Posting-Host," which is very hard to mask or change. For this reason, changing who posts what when is a good idea. Getting free, throw-away Usenet accounts (i.e. Google, etc.) is a better one.
The very best part: Say someone "catches" your message, records it, and based on the NNTP-Posting-Host information finds out where it's coming from. Considering everything else about the headers can be fake, all they've got to go on is the Message-ID. Now, even if your name appears in the "From:" line, they can't prove it really came from you yet. To do so, they'd have to have a copy of the NNTP (outgoing Usenet posting) logs from the source machine, and match up your computer's IP number with that on the log, posting that exact Message-ID. These logs are rarely kept. When they are, they're kept for maybe two days before being overwritten (just way too much traffic to track; for instance AOL would require a couple thousand DVD burners running constantly to keep up with their traffic). By the time some party sees a message, figures out where it came from, and requests that the sending server's admin locate the relevant log entry, it's gone (not to mention that the admins enjoy this sort of request so much they tend to wait a few days before they try to find it).
Even more secure posting and reading of Usenet can be arranged. I suggest the site newzbot.com as a starting point. It can teach a fair amount about Usenet, and can offer suggestions for "open" Usenet servers (i.e. machines where messages can be injected by anyone, anywhere, without having an account on that particular system).
And if you still really want to spread your web site into a bunch of mirrors, you can always post the site itself onto a binaries newsgroup, all in one zipped file, and tell people to go there and grab it. That sure saves your home server from taking a hit when umpteen thousand people are trying to reach your site, and dozens are trying to simultaneously download your zipped pages. Again, just give them the Usenet Message-ID of your publically posted binary file, and they can get it off their local (or any reachable and open) Usenet server.
Finally, to make sure the viral nature of digital disobedience is used to its fullest, request along with your Usenet posting that others download it, and then re-upload it elsewhere (other newsgroups, etc.) and publicize the Message-ID of their posting, just as you have. Spreads the message, spreads the coverage, spreads the risk.
If you need to know the do's and don'ts for Usenet, locate the FAQs on the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.usenet
The safest way to do all this is to post through an open server found on newzbot.com
Keep the faith. Keep the net free.
The following question was sent to the author.
Is there a way to post all of the memos (about 13,000) to Usenet as text so that they can be archived by Google Groups? Or would such a large number of posts be considered spam?
Technically, it could not be considered spam as long as the messages were not "substantively identical". For the technical explanations, see the FAQs in news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, looking particularly for references to the "Briedbart Index". Practically, it could be considered a flood of traffic, and some users and/or admins may take offense at that. This is why I suggested pulling out the best/most damning and post those. If you compiled each 100 messages into 130 articles, and posted those over the course of a day or three, certainly nobody could complain (and get taken seriously). But then, at that traffic level, hardly anyone is going to read it all without good reason. Thus I suggest posting the best as text, and posting the compilation as a zip file in a binaries newsgroup. Put at the top of each of the text messages "The entire collection can be downloaded as a binary file in zip format as Message-ID#". If you also have URLs or FTP sites where the entire collection is in static storage, those addresses could go there too.