On Wed, 13 Sep 1995, Duncan Frissell wrote:
At 06:03 PM 9/12/95 -0400, Brian Davis wrote:
Unbelievable!!! To add to this distressing truth, I have learned that the White House also subscribes to a number of newspapers and periodicals which are reviewed for things of interest to the Administration and to the President. I I I I I I ammmmmmmmmm shocked!
The government, as you no doubt know, sometimes operates under different rules. Thus when the "Red Squad" (Intelligence Division) of the New York City Police (located in that big building on the North side of Vandam between Greenwich and Houston BTW) was sued for maintaining files on "lawful protest groups" they entered into a consent agreement to refrain from this sort of thing. Later, the courts said that this agreement meant that the cops couldn't even listen to WLIB radio (NYC's favorite radical African-American station) to find out in advance where rallies were going to be.
I am not familiar with this incident, but I note that state authorities, not federal, were involved according to your post. Was the consent decree also filed in state court? And even if it was in federal court, was the legal theory on which the plaintiffs proceeded based on NY state law or federal law??
Since the White House is doing this reading of sites with public funds and since that institution is the most powerful in the world --- it can nuke its enemies, for example --- people are naturally interested to discover if they are the subject of an investigation.
The White House also reads publicly available newspapers and magazines (I assume). How is accessing a Web site different from that?
This is a demonstration of the unintended effect of electronic surveillance technology. The fact is that it can do more harm to the authorities than to
Is the World Wide Web your idea of "electronic surveillance technology"?? I would agree that packet sniffing is a different problem, but accessing an open Web site seems reasonable to me. Would you prefer that the staffers use home computers to do this (in an attempt to hide their tracks)? As far as I know, this was all done openly and the Web site chose, right or wrong, to reveal the contents of their log files to someone. Again, what about the complaints heard in this forum recently about law enforcement's obtaining similar log files from the Web site set up regarding the child's kidnapping?
the public. The Nixon Tapes/The Thompson Square Park Riot Video/The Rodney King Video. Since those in power are more interesting than ordinary people, they represent a more "target-rich environment." Information about their activities has greater commercial value and is thus more likely to see the light of day.
Not only "those in power" but those in the public eye/public figures. On that rationale, Phil Zimmermann is probably a public figure with respect to encryption ...
DCF
"There are more of us than there are of you." ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ That, of course, depends on what you mean by "us" and "you."
EBD Not a lawyer on the Net, although I play one in real life. ********************************************************** Flame away! I get treated worse in person every day!!