Jim Choate wrote:
I no more want to slap more spin doctor output in front of others than to have to look at it myself. I was mainly trying to make a prediction about the future and then seeing, if reasonable, how long it took.
It occurs to me that somebody with the right motivation might want to claim that they have a right to put a box on such a backbone (ie stand on the sidewalk in front of the store) and scrape for particular addresses (ie the business they want to picket).
This is precisely why we should fight all efforts of the government to get their foot in the door in regard to control of the internet. I have no doubt that the government will at some point bestow upon some element of the internet a "gift" of funding of some type that they will proclaim is for the public benefit. Their true purpose, naturally, will be to give Joe Grapepicker legal standing to apply to a judge to uphold his "right" to picket the Safeway website. The fact of the matter is, we are currently free to do much as we wish to on the internet. Some call this freedom. Unfortunately, it can also be called "freedom from government interference," which is an anathema to those in power. As long as cypherpunks Timothy McMay and Dimitri Nichols conspire only to promote electronic freedom on the list, then the rest of the decent, law-abiding cypherpunks are probably relatively safe. Should they choose to begin promoting abortion on the list, however, this could change rapidly. (It just occured to me that censorship promoters could be considered to be "Electronic Abortion Activists." Perhaps we need a new censorship ASSociation to be formed, called the EAA, with Jerry Falwell, et al, as its TITular HEADs, and with chapters throughout the CoUNTry.) TruthMonger