First, that was still the time when everyone was going to throw out these stupid TCP/IP protocols any day now in favor of the professional telecom people's OSI work. TCP was what, 3 or 4 years old then?
Second, the network was for official government approved use only, which mostly meant research and communication between researchers. Everything else was an open secret, but officially under the radar.
At the same time, USENET was running on UUCP over TCP, which meant that the majority of traffic was alt.binaries, and a big chunk of that was porn.
So, yes, having an overly entitled jackass publicly embarrass them was something most admins feared. (My brush with greatness was Cat Yronwode and the cs.utexas mail to news gateway. But that was a decade after this.)
Second, the network was for official government approved use only, which mostly meant research and communication between researchers. Everything else was an open secret, but officially under the radar.
At the same time, USENET was running on UUCP over TCP, which meant that the majority of traffic was alt.binaries, and a big chunk of that was porn.
So, yes, having an overly entitled jackass publicly embarrass them was something most admins feared. (My brush with greatness was Cat Yronwode and the cs.utexas mail to news gateway. But that was a decade after this.)