Did you know this company is using your email address as part of an unlawful email bomb? I would advise you to write to them at cypherpunks@toad.com and owner-cypherpunks@toad.com and advise them to stop using your email address for this type of activity. It is illegal to use a invalid return email address. If this continues, I will be forced to prosecute the return email address - which they are making to look like you. Below is the letter that I received in my email box ================================================= In a message dated 96-09-25 14:05:23 EDT, you write:
Subj: Re: Hallam-Baker demands more repudiations or he'll write! Date: 96-09-25 14:05:23 EDT From: jimbell@pacifier.com (jim bell) Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com To: bdavis@thepoint.net (Brian Davis) CC: cypherpunks@toad.com, jf_avon@citenet.net
On Tue, 24 Sep 1996, Rich Burroughs wrote:
<AP stuff> Anyone who mistakes the lack of "repudiations" for AP on the list for some kind of tacit approval is not getting the whole picture, IMHO.
Is this how journalists do their research nowadays -- "give me some info or I'll write something really bad about you that you'll regret?" Cool. I guess I thought there might still be some kind of pursuit of the truth involved.
I personally don't have the time or energy to contribute to the AP
At 11:50 PM 9/24/96 -0400, Brian Davis wrote: threads.
That != approval for the idea.
I hope you include your above quote in your piece.
Amen to that. Add that at least one lawyer (and former prosecutor) on the list is confident that successful prosecutions will ensue is AP ever gets off the ground.
I don't doubt that there will be harassment. (you can't deny that charges would be brought even if it is tacitly agreed that no crime has been committed; "the harassment-value" of such a prosecution would be desired even if there is ultimately an acquittal.) AP will resemble, more than anything, gambling. While gambling is illegal in some areas, it is quite legal in others and there is no reason to believe that locales can't be found in which an AP system could operate legally.
Make American laws apply everywhere? That'll be hard to justify, unless you
want to unleash a world where an all people can be subject simultaneously to
the laws of EVERY country, should they choose to enforce them! Would you like to be arrested in Red China for something you said years earlier in America about their leadership?
And are you ignoring the fact that the intentional isolation of one participant from the knowledge of the actions and even the identity of the others makes opportunities for prosecution on "conspiracy" charges mighty slim. And since AP can operate across traditional jurisdictional boundaries, you're going to have to explain how you can prosecute Person A in Country B for giving a donation to an organization in Country C, to be paid to a person D in country E for correctly predicting the death of person
F in country G, particularly when none of the identities of these people or countries can be easily known given a well-crafted cryptographic and message-routing system.
Further, as you probably know as well as any, in order (at least, supposedly!) to get a conviction you need to prove "mens rea," or "guilty mind," and I suggest that none of the more passive participants in the AP system have that. (The ones who DON'T pick up a gun, knife, bomb, poison, etc.) Sure, they are aware that somewhere, sometime, somebody _may_ commit a crime in order to collect a lottery, but they don't know who, what, when, where, or how this will occur, if at all. (either before or after the fact!)
In fact, since it is possible for a target to collect the reward himself (to be directed toward his designee, obviously) by committing suicide and "predicting" it, it isn't certain to the other participants that there has even been any sort of crime committed!
Based on the mens rea requirement, I propose that there is plenty of room for most of the participants to reasonably claim that they are guilty of no crime. They have carefully shielded themselves and others from any guilty knowledge, and presumably they are entitled to protect themselves in this way. Morally, you could argue that these people are countenancing something
nasty, in the same sense that somebody could equally well argue that if you buy a cheap shirt in Walmart you're partly responsible for sweatshop labor in El Salvador. True, I suppose, but moral guilt does not always translate into legal guilt.
And yes, I've read Jim Bell's manifesto. The fact that no lawyer has dissected it from a legal standpoint has been used by Mr. Bell as support for the propostion that it is legal.
I suggest that there is a greater likelihood that the "powers that be" will just abandon all pretense of legality, and attempt to strike at the participants if they can find them without benefit of any sort of trial. This is a more plausible conclusion, because it cuts through all of the legal difficulties which would hinder prosecution. In effect, a low-level undeclared war.
Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com
----------------------- Headers -------------------------------- From cypherpunks-errors@toad.com Wed Sep 25 11:04:24 1996 Return-Path: cypherpunks-errors@toad.com Received: from mailhub.MyMail.Com (mailhub.mymail.com [206.247.118.1]) by emin14.mail.aol.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id LAA03061 for <phnecards@aol.com>; Wed, 25 Sep 1996 11:04:18 -0400 Received: from toad.com by mailhub.MyMail.Com (5.x/SMI-SVR4) id AA26654; Wed, 25 Sep 1996 09:04:05 -0600 Received: (from majordom@localhost) by toad.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) id AAA10103 for cypherpunks-outgoing; Wed, 25 Sep 1996 00:55:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail.pacifier.com (root@mail.pacifier.com [199.2.117.164]) by toad.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id AAA10098 for <cypherpunks@toad.com>; Wed, 25 Sep 1996 00:55:16 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ip20.van1.pacifier.com (ip20.van1.pacifier.com [206.163.4.20]) by mail.pacifier.com (8.7.6-pac/8.7.3) with SMTP id AAA14065; Wed, 25 Sep 1996 00:55:14 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: <199609250755.AAA14065@mail.pacifier.com> X-Sender: jimbell@mail.pacifier.com X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.2 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 00:55:21 -0800 To: Brian Davis <bdavis@thepoint.net> From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com> Subject: Re: Hallam-Baker demands more repudiations or he'll write! Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com, jf_avon@citenet.net Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Precedence: bulk