At 1:07 pm -0400 on 6/22/97, Tim May wrote on cypherpunks:
"Something _wonderful_ is about to happen."
"I have a solution."
--Tim "Channeling Bell" May
Speaking of the dead, or at least the departed... Has anybody local to Jim Bell's stir gone to visit our incarcerated, um, gaming enthusiast, lately, just to see if he needs anything? Oh. Besides *that* of course. :-). Is Bell *taking* visitors yet? Would anyone in Oregon *want* to go visit Bell, reprehensible opinions and all, if he was accepting visitors? The reason I ask is, given events of the past few days, it may be time to start standing up for our friends, no matter how unsavory their ideas. Slippery slopes, and all that. I'm beginning to think of this as the net.equivalent of neighborhood "policing", if you will, where the slightest infraction against freedom by the federal law "enforcement" "community" is met with the most determined (legal!) resistance possible. Maybe something like Helsinki Watch, or, god forbid, Amnesty International. Arresting Jim Bell and holding him with what seems to be an unreasonable bail (that is, he can't afford to pay it) by a small army of nomex-hooded kluxer-equivalents is the police-state version of drinking on a streetcorner. "Patting down" the officials responsible, legally and politically, might yield the functional equivalent of a concealed weapons violation. That, in turn, would tell people who are wont to surround people's houses with black nomex ninja-wannabes to think twice about ordering such shenanigans in the future. Tim was talking earlier here about how this kind of accountability should have been held, more stringently, for the people who burned children in Waco, and who shot them at Ruby Ridge. Maybe it's time to hold people who commit capital crimes on the state's behalf to understand that the legal sword cuts both ways. If so, I think the best way to start this is to do it in manageable increments, and ratchet up the pressure from there. To have zero tolerence for even the smallest offenses, starting with the jailing of Mr. Bell. That's because Bell is, however rediculous the offense or his behavior the first cypherpunk political prisoner. He's ours, folks, like it or not. It's time we faced it, and dealt with the problem accordingly. To my mind, turnabout is in fact fair play. If you start busting the constitutional public drinkers, like the interagency Boy's State delegation who hauled Jim off, maybe the rest of the erst-fascists out there in Uncle's employ will keep their nomex pyjamas in the closet, only taking their costumes out for the occasional midnight constitution-burning ceremony, instead of coming next for someone with more substantial freedoms to defend. And, frankly, if rejectionism is called for, now or later, we will know that much sooner based on how well efforts like springing our canary in that Oregon coal mine fares... Admittedly, this is a distraction from the most important thing, which is writing code, but I bet that there are in fact cypherpunks-who-don't-code in Bell's neighborhood, and not necessarily even Friends of Jim, who would be happy to personally go see how Bell is doing and come back and tell us what happened. Think of it as part of the feedback loop for net.freedom. A trip into the coal mine with a canary cage. Yeah, I know. It's me making work for someone else. Nonetheless: Anyone out there want to do this? Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/