Mirror Site Removed at U Mass.

A graduate student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Lewis McCarthy, was among those who chose to protect freedom of speech on the internet by fighting the censorship levied against the web site of Ernst Zündel. Officials at U Mass requested that McCarthy remove the materials that he posted on the school's computer system.

McCarthy said he posted Zündel's materials to protest attempts by the German government to censor the Internet. McCarthy commented that he is not a neo-Nazi, just an advocate for absolute freedom of speech.

McCarthy's actions were a response to Deutsche Telekom's decision to prohibit its customers from viewing world-wide-web pages stored at Web Communications in California, the company that Ernst Zündel uses to post his materials.

The censorship of the Internet by Deutsche Telekom resulted in protests from computer-users world-wide. Free-speech advocates around the world began creating “mirror-sites,” sites which “mirror” or duplicate the material from another site. These free-speech supporters had hoped to put Zündel's material on so many web sites that Germany would have to cut itself off from the Internet entirely or give up their censorship efforts. McCarthy joined the cause by posting Zündel's materials to the computer at the University of Massachusetts.

David Stemple, chairman of the university's computer science department, explained that the university's policy prohibits use of public resources for political purposes.

According to Stemple it was not Zündel's page per se that was the political issue, “The issue was freedom of speech being denied by the German government … a political action in respect to a foreign government.”

Adapted from: The Associated Press 02/02/96