-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 04:56 AM 4/9/97 -0400, Sergey Goldgaber wrote:
The search warrant was not made public on the cpunks list. As you can see form the above excerpt, I was commenting on the "IRS Inspection" report, which was virtually the first description of Jim Bell's arrest, long before there were even requests for information on the procedures for obtaining the search warrants, etc...
I realize that we're talking about net-time, but "long before" seems like a poor way to describe the 2-2.5 days between the appearance of the "IRS Inspection" report (which was, in fact, the transcription of newspaper story) and the WWW publication of the warrant & accompanying material. Also, Declan was posting details from the warrant within 24 hours of the initial message.
After following the debate, I would definately agree that AP played an important part in sparking the paranoia of the govt. officials to arrest Jim, which in turn sparked off paranoia on the list, and rather reactionary comments towards AP, and reactionary flames towards the reactionaries. :) Hopefully this trend won't continue.
As far as I can tell, the events of last week haven't changed people's opinions of AP at all - people who thought it was interesting/useful still do, and people who thought it was uninteresting/stupid still do. I can't speak for other posters to the list, but I'm inclined to distance myself from AP not because I'm scared of a government raid, but because I think it's theoretically uninteresting/unremarkable, politically/tactically poorly considered, morally indefensible, and irresponsibly misleading to the extent it purports to discuss US law. I don't want my comments about Jim Bell's right to discuss his silly ideas to be confused with apologies or approval for the ideas themselves. I believe Jim has every right to write essays about AP, give speeches & seminars about AP, talk about "wonderful things" all that he likes, etc. But the "marketplace of ideas" model, whereby good speech is expected to negate bad speech, depends on the willingness of other people to provide "good speech", or at least call "bad speech" into question. I think AP is "bad speech" in the same way the "the earth is flat" is bad speech; it is (and ought to be) legal to say it, but it's also a non-useful idea, which I hope will be abandoned in favor of more useful ideas. I've been ignoring (pre-raid) discussions about AP because I think that an eternal recycling of arguments is uninteresting and unproductive. I think that the search of Jim's house, and its relationship to his free speech activities, is interesting - not because of the [lack of] quality of his ideas, but because I think this may be a case where law enforcement used its power to search & seize property in a punitive fashion. And that concerns me, because I think that isn't uncommon where the target is a "dissident", of one flavor or another; and I think that dissidents don't/shouldn't lose their civil rights as a consequence of their status. ("when they came for .." argument incorporated herein by reference.) (The search is also interesting for reasons unrelated to Jim and his ideas, because it provides insight into the level and type and timing of law enforcement access to the net, treatment of a "confidential informant", and protocol/procedure for search & seizure of computers and potentially encrypted data, etc.) But that doesn't mean that the dissidents get special respect or treatment for poor thinking. I think AP is poorly reasoned and poorly researched. (And I think that "dissident" + "poor analysis/research" + "obsessive focus" = "loon", hence my original comments.) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 4.5 iQEVAgUBM0twXP37pMWUJFlhAQFOgAf8DMhc37rtTZYbZ1pqLTD9r18GsKE56f5T egrme9gOvQ4uAES1E4LJ2EEbeN7KTZoOWZUHIBA7PitlRn5uXC/TAS3KNcJo5RJH uH07kH3g0LpeLlArxjTJ+QWt9WTxZ5ri3dNmG1mfuTGZPELZTTeYpLNJQuiO5xhl 0ua68YsHgj0L+e1FPZ0QPwzFDlHuUFuewn1K+hldpbK0GXSDOV9LwtAezzUR0oZw l5TI7LanD1amR0ii71eMzJx9XtWdjLT4OBMmMNjT4z+BJprW+Qnqm3C9Cq7py4r3 TzhBnRxkOZ58tzeKGn1SDTT/sIVQ5e6P/9QldM1uCR4K+pCXQDOi7A== =sN8V -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Greg Broiles | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell: gbroiles@netbox.com | http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto. |