At 11:06 PM -0800 11/7/96, Peter Hendrickson wrote:
Somebody brought up the Catholic church's custom of confessionals a few weeks ago and suggested that it was a powerful political tool. (Sorry I can't remember who said this.) I am sure this
That was me, actually. The confessionals and the priests acted as an incredibly powerful means for the Church to know what the prole were up to, who was associating with whom, and so on. And the Church had their own communications systems. Truly a virtual community, regardless of the political region they found themselves in. (I would comment on the rest of Peter's points, but he has gone from near-silence over the past six months that I have known him (and he was presumably on the list before I met him at a CP meeting last spring....) to posting dozens of long messages in one day, so I can't keep up.) I don't believe it is as easy to differentiate between unencrypted and encrypted traffic as Peter believes, and I definitely don't believe the United States could stand--in the form it is in now, Consitutionally--if forms of language and speech were to be banned and violators of the ban were to receive harsh treatments. --Tim May "The government announcement is disastrous," said Jim Bidzos,.."We warned IBM that the National Security Agency would try to twist their technology." [NYT, 1996-10-02] We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."