At 6:14 PM -0700 10/24/97, Declan McCullagh wrote:
Folks on f-c and cypherpunks have mirrored holocaust revisionist web pages, banned books, and censored newspapers. Now I understand that NAMBLA is in danger of losing its home on the web. Anyone up for mirroring the (text-only) publications of perhaps the world's most controversial organization?
This is one of several types of information too dangerous to mirror. Most mirrors have involved stuff those damned furriners have banned, like Holocaust denial info, the Mitterand book, the Homulka-Teale material, etc. It's pretty safe to mirror stuff banned in Germany, Israel, France, Canada, etc., but not so easy to mirror stuff banned in the U.S., or highly controversial material. Mirroring the NAMBLA stuff could be a severe career-limiter, for example. Even if not strictly illegal. (Recall that a student, who shall remain nameless here, mirrored some controversial stuff at his Ivy League school. He was almost kicked out of the graduate school program he is in, as I recall the story (but this was about 2 years ago, so my memory may be hazy). After withdrawing the material and promising to stay in line, the situation cooled down. Imagine his woes had he mirrored NAMBLA material!) Other too-dangerous material would be, for example, U.S. defense secrets, personal medical files, material ordered closed in court cases, etc. These are areas where untraceable data havens really shine. My own Blacknet, as an example. If the NAMBLA material were to be periodically sent out via remailers, to Usenet, censorship would be nearly impossible. And so would traceability and, hence, culpability. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."