This article touches on several Cypherpunks themes and technologies, including: use of anonymous remailers, mandatory Web content filters, bans on encryption, and bomb-making instructions. True, the persons being affected here are prisoners and parolees, and prisoners obviously are lacking certain civil liberties. Parollees, too. (Whether those convicted of felonies or even lesser crimes should be denied civil liberties after their sentence has been completed is a troubling issue I won't get into right now.) But as more and more things are declared criminal, and as selective prosecution is becoming the norm, these increasing restrictions may affect a larger fraction of the population. And, I think, the attitude here toward paroled convicts gives us some hints about the application of the Four Horsemen arguments in general. --Tim May
From http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/8854.html
Twice Removed: Locked Up and Barred from Net by Steve Silberman 4:57am 3.Dec.97.PST
When US District Court Judge Sam Sparks sent Chris Lamprecht to the Federal Correctional Institution in Bastrop, Texas, in 1995, the 24-year-old hacker sobbed before the bench. A stint in the federal pen was terrifying enough, but the judge had tacked an unusual condition onto his 70-month sentence. Though Lamprecht was being sent to Bastrop for money laundering - not the hacking that earned him the handle "Minor Threat" - Judge Sparks stipulated that Lamprecht was forbidden to access the Internet until 2003.
"I told the judge computers were my life," Lamprecht recalled.
Any case that involves computers and a boyish, fair-skinned defendant is bound to get press, but things have changed since Swing magazine (http://www.paranoia.com/~mthreat/swing.html) billed Lamprecht as "the first person to be officially exiled from cyberspace." If the young hacker was the first to be exiled from the online world by law, he now has plenty of company, following the circulation of an internal memo at the Federal Bureau of Prisons last year, which set in stone a federal policy of keeping prisoners - and even many parolees - offline.
According to the federal view, logging on is simply incompatible with incarceration. As chief bureau spokesman Todd Craig states, in bureaucratese, "Access to the Internet is not a necessary tool for the correctional process" - which means that with more than 1.6 million people locked up in the United States alone, and thousands of parolees subject to similar restrictions even as they attempt to rejoin modern life, a significant population is being left behind by the network revolution.
What's at stake? As more and more jobs are wired into the Net and the Web, the possibility that former offenders will be able to find employment after incarceration becomes more and more remote - which undermines the very bedrock of the correctional process, asserts Jenni Gainsborough, spokeswoman for the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project (http://www.npp.org).
"The aim of our prisons should be to release people who are able to reintegrate themselves into society," she explains. "But no politician wants to appear soft on crime. Nobody thinks about what's actually useful to reduce the recidivism rate."
A poster boy for keeping prisons unwired
Mention the words prisoner and Internet in a sentence, and the same object-lesson will come up over and over again: the case of George Chamberlain, a sex offender incarcerated at Lino Lakes state prison in Minnesota, who used his position as manager of computer services for a venture called Insight Inc. to download child pornography from the Net while sitting in jail.
Chamberlain was a poster boy for keeping prisoners as far away from a modem as possible. He not only siphoned 287 erotic images off the Net and encrypted them on an optical drive behind the pass phrase "They cannot commit me," he also compiled lists of thousands of children's' names, and chitchatted with other pornographers through an anonymous remailer.
"The idea that a prisoner had this kind of access to the Internet and was able to collect explicit child pornography and communicate with others on how to hide it," US Attorney David Lillehaug declared last March, "is almost unbelievable."
The Chamberlain case seemed all too believable, however, given a statement issued by the US Parole Commission just three months earlier. The commission, "responding to increased criminal use of the Internet," approved "discretionary use of special conditions of parole that would impose tight restrictions on the use of computers by certain high-risk parolees."
A spokesperson for the Parole Commission declined to answer questions about the number of parolees currently subject to restrictions on computer use, which include a ban on encryption, screening of online activity by monitoring or blocking software, compulsory daily logging of all Web sites visited, and unannounced searches of drives and disks by parole officers.
Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesman Craig equates the ban on computer use by inmates to restrictions on use of the telephone. "They can make 15-minute calls to pre-approved numbers, like family and clergy," Craig says. It would be impossible, he says, to pre-approve forays into the online world in the same way.
In its press release, the commission said it acted "after noting the surge of 'how-to' information available on the Internet and other computer online services relating to such offenses as child molestation, hate crimes, and the illegal use of explosives."
"That's complete BS," charges Stanton McCandlish, program director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "There was no alarming increase in that kind of 'how-to' information on the Net. There was an increase in publicity about politicians like Dianne Feinstein (http://www.senate.gov/~feinstein/bombstmt.html), who used those fears as justification to limit use of the Internet."
McCandlish points out that last June's Reno v. ACLU decision (http://www.aclu.org/court/renovacludec.html) by the Supreme Court sent a message that the court considers the Net as much subject to First Amendment speech protections as the printed word. Comparing broad prohibitions on the use of computers by prisoners and parolees to banning the act of writing by those in prison, McCandlish predicts that "the issue is going to heat up" in the coming year. The EFF is "waiting for a good, solid legal challenge" to arise before getting involved in a case, McCandlish says.
The world's best-kept secrets
A small California businessman named John Danes runs an outfit called Inmate.com, charging prisoners US$70 to design and maintain a personal homepage (http://inmate.com/inmates.htm) and an email address for three months. Each week, Danes prints out the incoming mail, peruses it for forbidden content like pornography or communication from minors, and forwards it to the inmates via snail mail. At present, nearly 70 male prisoners and three women have homepages at Inmate.com. The majority of the inmates are black or Hispanic; several of the pages maintain the author's innocence; many are an invitation to romance.
Ironically, the ACLU's Gainsborough attributes some of the public's fear about convicted criminals having a gateway to the Net to the publicity given to Web sites like Inmate.com and Dead Man Talkin' (http://monkey.hooked.net/moneky/m/hut/deadman/deadman.html) - sites that are put up by friends of prisoners who do not themselves have access.
"Serial-killer homepages and prisoner sites contribute to the public perception that there's a huge use of the Net by these people to advertise their evil ideas," Gainsborough says, while affirming her support for the right of prisoners to express themselves.
One page on the Inmate.com site asks, "Have you ever wondered what it's like to live in another world right here on Earth? What would you do if you suddenly fell from grace? Prisons hold some of the world's best-kept secrets." Secrets are one thing, Gainsborough observes, that prisoners are not allowed to keep.
"In many prisons, even [typewriters with built-in memory] are forbidden," she says. "There's always this fear of prisoners hiding this stuff away - so the idea of computers where people could really keep stuff hidden is very frightening."
In July 1996, a promising computer-training program at the Washington State Reformatory was terminated when it appeared that the prisoners were learning too much about computers - that is, more than prison officials knew.
Mike Williams, associate superintendent at the reformatory, was head of security for the program, which was a pilot for a statewide effort that would have allowed prisoners to learn how to use business software like Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.
"The inmates learned a lot of good stuff," Williams acknowledges. "They were able to learn a trade while in prison, so that they might have been actually able to get a job in that area when they got out. This was like real-world vocational training."
So why was the innovative program scrapped, rather than ported to every jailhouse in the state?
"Our superintendent thought it was a manageable pilot program," Williams recalls, "but the key figures who needed to approve it up in Olympia decided to put an end to it. We had inmates learning more about computers than we had staff time to keep an eye on them. We couldn't keep up with them."
The fear that prisoners would use encryption or other electronic means to cloak escape plans was a chief concern. "It was a cat-and-mouse game. We had to load the software for them, and there was no money allocated to hire more officers to do that kind of thing," Williams says. Though at least one inmate claims that graduates of the program had landed good jobs upon release, state deputy director of prisons Jim Blodgett - one of the "key figures" in the state capital who decided to shut the gate on the pilot effort - told a reporter, "We couldn't see the value in keeping it. We had staff not knowing what was going on."
If the object of incarceration is to ensure that prisoners remain at least as ignorant of current technologies as untrained prison staff, the federal policy will be deemed a success. But as the Net touches every area of our experience - from our most intimate relationships to our responsibilities as participants in a democratic society - more and more of those on the outside of the bars are coming to feel, with Lamprecht, that "computers are our lives," or are inextricably linked with our lives.
And those on the inside are destined to be released into a life for which they are even more unprepared than former offenders were in the past.
------------------------------------------------------------------------- Minor Threat's Web Site http://www.paranoia.com/~mthreat/ Official Kevin Mitnick Web Site http://www.kevinmitnick.com
-- The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."