So I've been reading "Freedom and the Court" by Henry Abraham, and a passage in it made me think of Tim May and the cypherpunks list: "//Actual, overt// incitement of the overthrow of the government of the United States by force and violence, accompanied by the language of direct and imminent incitement, is not freedom of expression but a violation of Court-upheld legislative proscriptions; yet the //theoretical// advocacy of such overthrow, on the other hand, has been a judicially recognized protected freedom since 1957." [See Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957), particularly Mr. Justice Harlan's opinion for the 6:1 court.] (Emphasis in the original. --DM) Some civil liberties lawyers, incidentally, have told me that Internet messages almost by definition are probably not "direct and imminent incitement." Some excerpts from Yates v. United States: http://caselaw.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=US&vol=354&page=2 9 The essential distinction [354 U.S. 298, 325] is that those to whom the advocacy is addressed must be urged to do something, now or in the future, rather than merely to believe in something. [...] Instances of speech that could be considered to amount to "advocacy of action" are so few and far between as to be almost completely overshadowed by the hundreds of instances in the record in which overthrow, if mentioned at all, occurs in the course of doctrinal disputation so remote from action as to be almost wholly lacking in probative value. Vague references to "revolutionary" or "militant" action of an unspecified character, which are found in the evidence, might in addition be given too great weight by the jury in the absence of more precise instructions. Particularly in light of this record, we must regard the trial court's charge in this respect as furnishing wholly inadequate guidance to the jury on this central point in the case. We cannot allow a conviction to stand on such "an equivocal direction to the jury on a basic issue." -Declan