From ghio@kaiwan.com Mon Sep 5 12:16:28 1994 Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Precedence: bulk
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 1994 11:09:40 -0600 From: Patrick Juola <juola@suod.cs.colorado.edu> To: cypherpunks@toad.com Subject: Needed for a computer ethics class
Does anyone have a concise, citeable statement about why anonymous remailers are a good thing? Some sort of position statment by Julf would be ideal. Similarly, if anyone has something for the *other* side of the coin, I'd love to see that.
I'm in the process of writing a course on computer ethics for the University of Colorado at Boulder and I think anonymous remailers would be a good subject for an essay assignment, but I need enough material (ideally, primary source material) to lay the groundwork first.
Patrick
No, but it's something that I often get asked. I would be interested to hear examples of good things that people are using my anonymous remailer for.
Well about the best example I can think of is Canadian related. In Ontario Canada there is a ban in effect on a trial of a young lady named Karla Homolka. Karla and her (ex) hubby (who is presently incarcerated awaiting trial) are likely guilty (certainly Karla was found guilty at her trial) of pretty heinous acts of murder, torture etc. So heinous, that the judge banned all publication of the details surrounding Karla's trial. However, when he did so, he apparantly hadn't heard about Internet, because now its quite likely alot of the details have slipped through the cracks. The remailers have been used to protect anonymous sources posting to the Internet in order to help the public circumvent the ban. If they didn't exist, then its quite likely that circulation of the info....even on Internet, would have been made more difficult. The remailers, with their chaining abilities have certainly helped the spread of the info. Other than that, it's likely the remailers are useful for certain politically sensitive operations (ie circumventing ITAR) or socially sensitive (ie in discussions that the politically correct go up in arms about (ie gay rights.. for or against). And then of course there is the old stand-by use of posting stories to alt.sex.stories, etc :>