I'm really not completely clued-in to all of the publishing options but my gut instinct says that the more rapid and widespread the dispersal the better. The originator of proscribed information needs to be anonymous but it seems that if the recipients are many and diverse then the level of guilt associated with reception can be ameliorated. A mixmaster chain firing the info off into a whole shitload of lists looks like a pretty good way to ensure that information is not made extinct. If a DeCSS source+bin zip had been anonymously mailed to 40 million people the terrain for the legal fight might have been different. I think JQPublic hasn't yet grasped the absurdity of "illegal information" and might react unpredictably if told that possessing or forwarding certain e-mails was a crime. Non-techie people I've spoken with about the state of affairs flat out didn't believe me. Eugene Leitl wrote:
On Fri, 27 Jul 2001 mmotyka@lsil.com wrote:
Unless I'm mistaken a node keeps a reference ( even if only temorarily ) to the originating node when data is added. So if I publish sooper-infringer.tar.gz and the neighboring node that gets it is a narc I'm screwed. Identify your dissidents and put in informants as
Aye, that's the rub. Even if you're acting as a relay, even if you're just serving out a sliver of the content, even if it's sitting there encrypted on your hard drive, even if it's ephemeral -- if you serve a packet (while not spoofing your IP), and legislation makes that prosecutable, yer goose is cooked ("Your Honour, he's a part of a global terrorist network!").
I'm not sure how you can prevent that, apart from the spoofing or legislation changing business. Oh, and only making links into legal compartments guaranteeing maximum persecution friction. So, if your traffic is unfilterable (it looks like a SSL session), and it comes from Cuba, the guilty party seems to be more or less immune.
neighbors. Admittedly I didn't read everything yet. What did I miss?