Tim writes:
My comment is that this "Professor Rat," whose posts I have not seen for as long as lne.com has been my feed, is probably in some real difficulty. His posts are very direct threats, not veiled in any of the vague, political "politicians ought to be given a fair trial and then hanged" or even the "I hope Washington is nuked" sorts.
"Professor Rat" goes to his own folder in my Procmail script. I occasionally skim it, but mostly I just delete it when it expands to many megabytes. I hope this isn't going to be another one of those cases where some federal judge reads list messages completely out of context, and concludes that some plot is afoot to blow up the federal government. Perhaps Professor Rat is a federal agent hoping to bait some list member into publicly cheering when he criticizes high-ranking public officials. Or perhaps Professor Rat just made the mistake of playing Paintball on the weekends while subscribed to the Cypherpunks list.
(One rule of thumb I use is to never, ever use actual names of burrowcrats. Except for a few at the top, I don't even make any effort to remember the names. It's hard to be charged with making a direct, credible threat when no specific person is either named or alluded to.)
Allusions work, like "the coke-snorting C student who drove his car drunk into somebody's hedge." I wouldn't necessarily leap to the conclusion Professor Rat lives in Australia. Perhaps he just has has a shell there. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"