GROUNDWORK BOOKS La Jolla, California E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Friday, 9 June 2000 - ----- ____________________________________________________________________ BURN! CENSORED: NOW UP AGAIN AT GROUNDWORK ____________________________________________________________________ see: http://groundwork.ucsd.edu/burn; http://www.sindominio.net/burn After seven years online, the UCSD Communication department chair Carol Padden has censored the project hosted at burn.ucsd.edu. She has made her decision against the wishes of the majority of department faculty and graduate students and without consulting or even informing any of the department faculty or students involved with the project, reportedly under pressures from the UC president Richard Atkinson. No explanation or justification for the shutdown was given, nor was any opportunity for a hearing or reconsideration of the decision. Host records were simultaneously removed from campus DNS servers, rendering burn.ucsd.edu nonexistent. Only a few hours advance warning was given to BURN! project representatives, leaving them no way to even contact most system users to inform them of what had happened or to arrange for moving to another address. When students retrieved the server hardware from the department chair's office, the CPU board no longer functioned and the Master Boot Record on the primary hard drive had been damaged. After ordering the machine offline, the department chair left on a trip to Finland for two weeks. The other faculty and graduate students have spent the last week debating what to do. =46rom informal communication with people in the department, and from statements by UCSD's campus spin doctors, we know that the University had received some complaints about BURN.UCSD.EDU from right-wing elements in Colombia, who objected to BURN's publication of information on the FARC-EP (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejercito del Pueblo), and found in this an excuse for censorship. The university also claims that they didn't know who was responsible for the server, and therefore had no place to direct these complaints. This is patently false. More than ten BURN! members attended a department course-group meeting late last year, where they formally designated one student to be their official liason with the department. Last fall, a memo was also sent to the current department chair reminding her of who this designated representative was, and providing contact information. Both paper and email copies of this memo were also given to each department faculty member. Also, the BURN! main homepage had a large disclaimer explaining that BURN is a student project and that the university and communication department are not responsible for its contents. E-mail addresses to contact the BURN! project appeared prominently in several places, as well as hyperlinks to a web-based "corkboard" for public comments. In addition, the standard e-mail addresses [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] have always functioned and were monitored. By making these claims, university administrators are trying to obscure their eager complicity with right-wing Colombian elites in censoring the views of the FARC-EP and denying everyone access to the many other unique and hard-to-find resources published on BURN! Because The Groundwork Collective opposes censorship, we have decided to publish the materials formerly hosted on burn.ucsd.edu when it had its home in the UCSD communication department. The Groundwork Collective does this for two reasons: first and foremost, we are opposed to censorship of any kind and it is dangerous to allow anyone get away with it for any reason; second, the Groundwork Collective has been a registered student organization at UCSD for over 25 years and has a binding legal contract with the university. As such, the university cannot possibly claim that it does not have a place of contact to direct complaints against the site. There should now be no reason for censorship of any kind as the Groundwork Collective has formally responded to all official concerns supposedly created by the previous publication of the site. If they now try to censor the Grounwork Collective, it will be interesting to see how the university's excuses change. In the event we are censored, there are webpages maintained at http://www.sindominio.net/burn http://groundwork.ucsd.edu/burn which will always contain current information on where BURN! can be found. Yours in struggle, Groundwork Collective [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
