RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest Sunday 7 September 1991 Volume 12 : Issue 27 FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator Contents: . . . The REAL RISKS and REWARDS of E-Mail (Larry Press via Tom Lincoln) . . . The RISKS Forum is moderated. Contributions should be relevant, sound, in good taste, objective, coherent, concise, and nonrepetitious. Diversity is welcome. CONTRIBUTIONS to RISKS@CSL.SRI.COM, with relevant, substantive "Subject:" line. Others ignored! REQUESTS to RISKS-Request@CSL.SRI.COM. For vol i issue j, type "FTP CRVAX.SRI.COMlogin anonymousAnyNonNullPW CD RISKS:GET RISKS-i.j" (where i=1 to 12, j always TWO digits). Vol i summaries in j=00; "dir risks-*.*" gives directory; "bye" logs out. The COLON in "CD RISKS:" is essential. "CRVAX.SRI.COM" = "128.18.10.1". =CarriageReturn; FTPs may differ; UNIX prompts for username, password. ALL CONTRIBUTIONS CONSIDERED AS PERSONAL COMMENTS; USUAL DISCLAIMERS APPLY. Relevant contributions may appear in the RISKS section of regular issues of ACM SIGSOFT's SOFTWARE ENGINEERING NOTES, unless you state otherwise. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 06 Sep 91 21:19:16 PDT >From: Tom Lincoln Subject: The REAL RISKS and REWARDS of E-Mail (By Larry Press) The LA Times of Sept 6 ran an article on the DEMOS network in Moscow as it operated during the coup attempt. Larry Press, who played a major role, felt that this article did not do justice to the full set of facts. Here is his version: ------- Forwarded Message Date: Fri 6 Sep 91 11:46:51-PDT >From: Laurence I. Press To: lincoln%iris@rand.org Copyright, Larry Press, August 26, 1991, do not reproduce or quote without permission. This file may be forwarded around the net as long as this note is attached. A Computer Network for Democracy and Development Larry Press "Oh, do not say. I've seen the tanks with my own eyes. I hope we'll be able to communicate during the next few days. Communists cannot rape the Mother Russia once again!" This message was sent from Moscow at 5:01 AM on August 19. It was written by 26 year-old Vadim Antonov, a senior programmer at the Demos Cooperative in the Soviet Union. Demos operates a computer-based communication network which spans the Soviet Union, and within a few hours, Vadim's message had been relayed to computers in 70 Soviet cities from Leningrad in the West to Vladivostok in the East. The message had also been sent to a computer in Helsinki Finland, which is connected to the non-Soviet computer networks. From Finland, the message was relayed to networks such as The Internet, serving millions of users on all continents. Seconds after it reached Finland, I could read it at my computer in Los Angeles, California. The message was particularly important to me because the week before the coup attempt I had been in Moscow and spent several days with Vadim and his colleagues at Demos. We met professionally and as friends. Demos' RELCOM (RELiable COMmunication) network celebrated the first birthday of its link to Finland on August 22. During that first year, RELCOM spread to 70 Soviet cities, and over 400 organizations were using it -- universities, research institutes, stock and commodity exchanges, news services, high schools, politicians, and government agencies. As is typical with computer networks, noone knows how many users RELCOM actually reaches. During the Coup During the days of the coup, RELCOM was pressed into service in support of the constitutional government. The junta moved quickly to control mass media. When I learned of the coup, I immediately sent a worried message to Vadim's wife Polina Antonova, who also works at Demos. I did not receive her answer until August 20 at 12:17 AM Moscow time: "Dear Larry, Don't worry, we're OK, though frightened and angry. Moscow is full of tanks and military machines -- I hate them. They try to close all mass media, they stopped CNN an hour ago, and Soviet TV transmits opera and old movies. But, thank Heaven, they don't consider RELCOM mass media or they simply forgot about it. Now we transmit information enough to put us in prison for the rest of our life. Greetings from Natasha. Cheers, Polina." The Demos staff had learned of the coup around 6 AM on the 19th, and immediately began sending political information to the Soviet Union and the outside world. By 12:30 PM, Moscow time, I was reading news releases from the independent Soviet news agency Interfax. Although outlawed by the junta, news >from Interfax, the Radio Moscow World Service, the Russian Information Agency, Northwest Information Agency (Leningrad), and Baltfax was disseminated by RELCOM throughout the coup attempt. RELCOM also distributed news from official sources opposed to the coup. For example, a copy of the letter Boris Yeltsin read from a tank turret in front of the Russian Parliament building was brought to Demos headquarters (a short trip), entered into a computer, and forwarded across the network. By early evening, several people in the United States had also translated it, and an English-language version was broadcast to the non-Soviet networks. There were also many eye-witness reports. Pay phones were working in Moscow, and people in the streets could phone news in. At one point, Polina told me she was leaving for the Russian Parliament Building with a portable computer so she could report from there. Later I learned that she had not gone because the phone service to the building was unreliable. Of course all the news did not come from Moscow. The network was buzzing with reports and official notices from Leningrad, Kiev, the Baltic capitals, and many other Soviet cities. News also came in from the West. I wrote regular summaries of the news as broadcast on radio and television in the United States. Jonathan Grudin, a colleague in Denmark, did the same for BBC news. Regular reports were also posted from Finland, giving both Finnish and Baltic news summaries. These were translated into Russian by Polina and others, and transmitted throughout the Soviet Union. Western news was welcome, but the link to Finland became a bottleneck. Before the coup, 6,000 messages were passed between Finland and RELCOM on a typical day. After the coup began, traffic increased substantially, prompting Vadim to broadcast this message at 6:44 PM on the 19th: "Please stop flooding the only narrow channel with bogus messages with silly questions. Note that it's neither a toy nor a means to reach your relatives or friends. We need the bandwidth to help organize the resistance. Please, do not (even unintentionally) help these fascists!" This plea notwithstanding, traffic rose to a high of 13,159 messages on the 21st. While news of tank movements, demonstrations, and official political statements was of practical value, it also provided emotional support. When the coup was finished, and there was time to rest, I received a message from Polina that said in part "You can't even imagine how grateful we are for your help and support in this terrible time! The best thing is to know that we aren't alone." That message paid me 1,000 times for the hours spent at my computer keyboard. Danger At the beginning of the coup, memories of the Hungarian revolt, Kruschev's ouster, the Prague Spring, and Tiananmen Square did not give one much hope. Had the coup succeeded, the Demos staff and people using their network would have been in great danger. As Vadim noted in a message to Doug Jones, a professor at the University of Iowa: "If these dogs win, for certain they'll throw us in prison -- we distributed the proclamation from Yeltsin and the Moscow and Leningrad Soviets throughout the entire Soviet Union, together with the forbidden communiques from Interfax ... Greetings from the underground." Demos headquarters is in a small building near the Kremlin. The KGB knew of RELCOM, and had they decided to, they could have easily shut the network off early in the coup. When a friend asked why they didn't, Polina replied "Thank Heaven, these cretins don't consider us mass media!" After the coup, she and others speculated that the KGB was generally passive because they were not confident the coup would succeed. Sensing danger, the Demos staff arranged for backup computers to substitute for the vulnerable headquarters machine if necessary. On the 20th at 8:30 PM Moscow time, Vadim sent this message to Doug Jones: "Yes, we already prepared to shift to underground; you know -- reserve nodes, backup channel, hidden locations. They'll have a hard time catching us! Anyway, our main communication line is still open and it makes us more optomistic." They not only hid the computers, many people left Demos headquarters and communicated from their homes and other locations. Polina told me: "Don't worry; the only danger for us is if they catch and arrest us, as we are sitting at home (valera is at Demos) and distributing all the information we have." When the coup was finally defeated, George Tereshko, broadcast the following thanks for the risk taken by the Demos staff: "When the dark night fell upon Moscow, RELCOM was one source of light for us. Thanks to these brave people we could get information and hope." Of course, for now, the story appears to have had a happy ending. At 3:07 PM on the 21st, I received this from Polina: "Really good news. Right now we're listening to Radio Russia (without any jamming!); they told that the eight left Moscow, noone knows where ... Hard to believe ... Maybe, they've really run away?" And on the 22nd at 1:31 PM she wrote: "Now Vadim and I have to do our usual work (that's so nice!) and Valera and Mike Korotaev went to sleep. They were on duty the whole night. Now there is celebration in Moscow. We just watched president Gorbachev on TV." RELCOM in Peace Time In the past, a network like RELCOM would have been prohibited in the Soviet Union. Like any communication media, it is incompatible with repressive dictatorship. Gorbachev's Glasnost made RELCOM possible, and in one year, it became a significant segment of the Soviet communication infrastructure. Part of the reason for RELCOM's success is the fact that postal and telephone service in the Soviet Union are poor, making electronic mail very attractive. Another element of their success is that they use low-cost, appropriate technology. The primary technology used by RELCOM is the voice phone system, low cost modems, and standard personal computers. The final element in their success is the people at Demos. They are very skillful as technicians and as entrepreneurs (Demos is 100% free enterprise), yet they are different than their counterparts in the United States. They are more idealistic and less competitive. If they were in the US, my guess is they would either be graduate students in computer science or they would be driving BMWs and sipping Perrier. As such, RELCOM may be a good model for other countries with poor telephone and postal systems, little capital, and well educated, motivated young professionals. Networks like RELCOM, probably using satellite technology, may change the face of the earth in peace time as well as helping to keep the peace. [Larry Press is Professor of Computer Information Systems at California State University at Dominguez Hills. He has visited Chile several times, most recently as an organizer of the EIES held last July. The week before the coup, Press co-chaired a conference on human-computer interaction in Moscow. While there, he spent several days visiting the Demos Cooperative, which operates RELCOM, an important Soviet computer network. During the coup, he relayed news to his friends at Demos.] ------------------------------