On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Ray Dillinger wrote:
http://www.jya.com/ap.htm. It seems to me that he has a not-very-realistic view of how laws are interpreted in courts, and no understanding at all that governments will make new laws or amend old ones as needed to cover new situations.
From what I gather from the document, the Jim's presentation seems only to chart the current situation, be based on the assumption that police state tactics aren't employed (of course they are, one very real use of AP as a theory is to highlight that it is impossible to both have civil rights *and* control people by force simultaneously after sufficiently strong and error resilient anonymity has arrived) and most of all, the wording suggests that Jim, very wisely, was trying to cover his butt. Not surprisingly, and precisely as you say, the Men with Guns do not seem to care.
Even if they couldn't find a specific law to charge the operator of an AP server with, or couldn't get a conviction on the laws they'd charged him/her with, they would doubtless issue a court order commanding the operators of the server to cease and desist.
Yep. That's probably one side of the whole argument: if you try to control people by force when they have strong anonymity available, they'll have very efficient means of resisting the control. Short of really dumping every civil right there is and putting up a Big Brother effort Orwell himself couldn't envision there is very little that can be done. Hence, the only way to reconsile anonymity with a fair state monopoly on violence is to minimize the state and the violence it exerts. This neatly sums up both AP and most cypherpunkish ideas on cryptoanarchy and libertarianism. Sampo Syreeni <decoy@iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university