1. Your use of any of the American University National Security Law Brief (NSLB) websites or pages indicates your acceptance of this Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”). This AUP can be modified at any time, and your continued use of NSLB websites or pages indicates your acceptance of the modified terms.

2. NSLB intends to stimulate interest in national security law scholarship by presenting reviews of academic articles and a forum for commentary. Please make your comments constructive.

3. NSLB encourages readers to comment in any of its sections.

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Comments

1. NSLB does not allow anonymous or pseudonymous comments. Please use your real name. While we do not plan to make an aggressive effort to check on the bona fides of all commentators, we reserve the right to do so, and will delete any comment that we believe, in our best judgment, to be forged, fraudulent, spoofed, or for which we are unable to verify the authenticity of the signature.

2. No registration is required in order to read NSLB. At present, registration is not required to comment on NSLB, but we may institute a registration requirement if the site is subjected to spam or vandalism. In the event that we institute a registration requirement, each section will maintain its own registration system, and because they operate independently, you will need to register separately for each section in which you intend to participate as a commentator.

 

Moderation

1. NSLB employs automated spam-blocking technology, backed up by human intervention. If you believe that a comment of yours was improperly blocked, please do not hesitate to contact us.

2. Generally, commentators and contributors should police themselves. However, we reserve the right to edit (via “disemvowelling” – see below) or delete comments or other site content.

3. NSLB reserves the right to edit or remove content which violates this AUP without prior consultation.

4. A non-exclusive list of content potentially subject to editing or removal includes:

   • Excessive off-topic conversations

   • Comments posted merely to annoy or create inconvenience

   • Personal attacks, threats, slurs, or abusive language

   • Commercial or advertising material (however, mentioning a book or article relevant to the topic would not fall under this rubric)

   • Posting personal information relating to third parties without their consent or for malicious purposes

 

Disemvoweling

1. Disemvoweling (sometimes spelled “disemvowelling”) is the removal of vowels from text as a technique by forum moderators to censor unwanted posting, such as spam, internet trolling, rudeness or criticism, while maintaining some level of transparency.

2. Example (from Wikipedia):

    

   In the fields of Internet discussion and forum moderation, disemvoweling (also spelled disemvowelling) is the removal of vowels from text.

   would be disemvowelled to look like this:

    

   n th flds f ntrnt dscssn nd frm mdrtn, dsmvwlng (ls splld dsmvwllng) s th rmvl f vwls frm txt.

 

What to do If There is a Problem

1. Anyone should feel free to report abusive commentary or inappropriate use of NSLB. Please contact us. Please include a description of the offending comments or use and the relevant URL.

2. Penalties for violations of this AUP may include:

   • Emailed warnings

   • Removal of offensive content

   • Revoking NSLB access and privileges

 

Copyright Policy

By posting any content to any NSLB site, authors agree to make it generally available under a Creative Commons License as set out more fully in the NSLB Copyright Policy.

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