While few countries are havens for child porn, and no one expected Canada to suddenly become one, it is clear from legislation happening in Canada that is about to become a very poor place to run an anonymity service from. Check the Reuters headlines, e.g., at Yahoo: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010314/wr/canada_porn_dc_1.html --begin excerpt of article-- Wednesday March 14 3:52 PM ET Canada to Criminalize Surfing for Child Porn By Randall Palmer OTTAWA (Reuters) - The Canadian government, apparently breaking new ground internationally, introduced a bill on Wednesday to make it a crime to surf for child pornography on the Internet, with penalties of up to 10 years in jail. Canadian officials said they were unaware of any other country with similar legislation designed to crack down on child porn in an age when it is just a mouse-click away. ... In Canada, as in the United States and many other jurisdictions, possession of child pornography downloaded from a computer is a crime. But the bill would go further to ban knowingly bringing it up on a computer screen. ... It would create a new criminal offense of transmitting child pornography, for example by e-mail, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Exporting it from Canada would also become criminal. Importing it is already illegal. --end excerpt of article-- Anonymity services like ZKS may be able to claim that they are not in violation of the new law, or any existing law, because the suspected child porn material was never visible to them or anyone in their company. A law holding ISPs or nym services responsible for the contents of material flowing through their system would of course be a slam dunk against ZKS and other such places. So far, this is not what the new Canadian legislation has. In Britain, the RIP bill which forces encryption keys to be turned over is likely to have effects as well. The Napster case, and others, show us that anonymity/piracy/porn services are likely to come under heavy legal assault if their nexus of operations is identifiable. This was foreseeable many years ago and was discussed on this list beginning in 1992-3. Any data haven or black market service with a giant target painted on it is, well, a _target_. I don't know what the current ZKS business model is...haven't followed it for a while...but I would expect them to get a lot of heat from this and similar laws. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns