In regards to all this, I thought that people might be interested in knowing about an interview on Fresh Aire, a radio program I heard via WNYC. The individual being interviewed was the American Jewish Committee's person on Hate Groups, Kenneth Stern. He was being interviewed due to a book he'd written before the Oklahoma City bombing, in which he (mis-)called all militia groups hate groups. In the interview, he was asked about the Simon Weisenthal Center's letter in regards to the Internet. He spoke in opposition to it, and mentioned later that he tends to advise people that the best solution for hate speech is speech against it- a definitely good message. He mentioned the Internet as being a popular place for militia and similar groups to form. The two reasons he gave were that it was an easy means to spread information, and that the information was hard to verify (the urban/computer legend phenomenon, helping give rise to the various conspiracy theories circulating on the Net). He also mentioned that "hate" groups, including militias are using encryption, but didn't say anything further. Unfortunately, he also had some problems, which I'll go into here because of the analogies between guns and cryptography. While having respect for the First Amendment's protections of speech and press, and (to some degree) even the Second Amendment's protections of the right to keep & bear arms, he forgot completely about freedom of association- he called for a federal law making it a felony to have "private armies." There are some such laws on the books on various states, but they are (fortunately) not enforced, and thus have not yet been constitutionally challenged. The second group of his problems were in defining all militia groups as "hate" groups. His basic analysis for this was threefold: A. They have members in common with some definite hate groups, such as the Aryan Nations. B. Some militias have made racist, etcetera statements that qualify them as hate groups. C. They hate somebody, namely the federal government. The first argument falls apart once one points out that this is a classic conspiracy theorist untrue argument- one can use it to argue that the Trilateral Commission runs the US government, for instance. The second argument is obviously false. It's a variety of stereotyping, something that I would have thought he'd be more sensitive to. The third argument would classify the Simon Weisenthal Center as a hate group... he might actually have the guts to do this, since he also named the Nation of Islam as a hate group (due to their antisemitism, though, not due to their anti-white racism). All in all, though, he gave a much better impression for his group than I've gathered for the Simon Weisenthal Center. IIRC, the latter was essentially put together to pursue Nazis, as opposed to Neo-Nazis. My guess is that they're feeling useless and wanting to pursue somebody- sort of like the Secret Service and Steve Jackson Games. -Allen