Has anybody local to Jim Bell's stir gone to visit our incarcerated, um, gaming enthusiast, lately, just to see if he needs anything? Oh. Besides *that* of course. :-).
I had thought that Jims court appearance was to be sometime about a week ago, what was he actually charged with? Has he appeared in court yet?
That's because Bell is, however rediculous the offense or his behavior the first cypherpunk political prisoner. He's ours, folks, like it or not. It's time we faced it, and dealt with the problem accordingly.
Indeed, Jim is without doubt under arrest not on whatever cooked-up charges they are holding him on, but because of AP and his "loon" type possesion of carbon fibers etc. Jim certainly deserves our support, who next otherwise? You?
Admittedly, this is a distraction from the most important thing, which is writing code, but I bet that there are in fact cypherpunks-who-don't-code in Bell's neighborhood, and not necessarily even Friends of Jim, who would be happy to personally go see how Bell is doing and come back and tell us what happened. Think of it as part of the feedback loop for net.freedom. A trip into the coal mine with a canary cage.
Not enough cypherpunks ever get round to writing significant code, myself included. I have lost count of the number of times I have sat down at a workstation overnight, got some way into starting a project, then just given up on it. I hope someone does go and see Jim, at the very least it would be a pleasant gesture and give Jim the message that the cypherpunks haven`t forgotten about him. Sure, It`s easy for me to talk, I can`t go and see him, I`m hardly in his neighbourhood, but if you shrug your shoulders and ignore his position it could be you next. Datacomms Technologies data security Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"