At 09:40 AM 9/5/2001 -0700, A. Melon wrote:
Here is an example of the principle put into practice, from the anonymous web proxy service at http://proxy.magusnet.com/proxy.html:
: If you are accessing this proxy from a *.mil or *.gov address : it will not work. As a taxpaying United States Citizen[TM], : Business Owner, and Desert Storm Veteran, I do not want my : tax dollars being used by agencies I pay for to gawk(1) : at WWW pages and hide your origination point at my expense. : Now, get back to work!
Sure, that's an understandable sentiment, but isn't this also isolating the good (or teachable) people inside government who might be open-minded about freedom or crypto or whatever, such that they can't learn from us, and such that (in the case of anonymizing tools) they can't leak information? I think there's an argument that it's useful to provide pipes into secretive organizations which allow insiders to release information with reduced fear of internal retaliation - sure, they may be used for provocation and disinformation, but they also may be used for and by decent people. (Like, for example, Fred Whitehurst, a supervisory special agent in the FBI's crime lab, who revealed systematic dishonesty, incompetence, perjury, and contamination in the agency's high-profile analytic & forensic operations - see <http://www.cnn.com/US/9703/22/okc.fbi.report/> or <http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/fbilab1/fbil1toc.htm>.) I don't think this question is as easy as it sounds at first. -- Greg Broiles gbroiles@well.com "We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." -- New Delhi street kids