On Sun, 14 Dec 1997 at 08:12:31 -0600 Human Gus-Peter wrote:
We should not let distaste/disgust for Jim's ideas and tactics blind us to the important legal and constitutional questions lurking beneath the surface of this investigation and prosecution - there's some possibility that the IRS used its investigation of Jim as a threat to other prolific authors on the Internet.
The government's armed assault on Ma and Pa Bell's residence took place within hours of an email being sent to him containing a rough draft of a chapter of an InterNet published manuscript describing and lauding Bell's AP system.
For example, copies of the press release announcing the raid on Jim's home were mailed, apparently from computer systems inside the IRS, to individuals active on the Cypherpunks list. The IRS has never before (or since) bothered to notify those individuals about criminal investigations which might otherwise be of interest.
It is interesting to note that the emails from treasury.gov constituted the same type of 'threat' that Bell was roundly accused of by government officials and the press.
I've seen brief mention of this before, but have never seen any details on the list. Aside from Jim Choate questioning my arithmetic or attention span, would anyone be kind enough to provide pointers to information about incidents of c-p list members having received unsolicited email from .gov? Declan, did you catch a whiff of this when it happened? I would think everyone's alarm bells would have gone off and people would have been intensely interested in the messages themselves, particularly the headers. StringPullMongerII