On Tuesday, September 4, 2001, at 10:59 AM, mmotyka@lsil.com wrote:

...

Declan McCullagh wrote:

...

On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 10:59:54AM -0700, mmotyka@lsil.com wrote:

...

Sure, I mention it because despite its being non-functional and unpunishable it seemed to have been brought into the courtroom with the purpose of spicing up the case.

Sure. If you commit unacceptable-to-the-gvt *actions* and also spend a lot of time talking about how government officials should be assassinated, you may reasonably expect those statements to be used against you during your trial.

I think the speech, irrelevant as it was, was used to increase the

Tim May <tcmay@got.net> wrote : perceived severity of the actions. Isn't this in effect being punished for speech+action?

...

...

But that is a far cry from your earlier government-has-this-power position, from which you're now backtracking.

-Declan

Not so much backtracking as thinking out loud. Just musing on how the letter of the law, its constitutionality, enforcement and even the reasoning behind its creation are not always lined up so well.

18 U.S.C. 23 1 contains the seeds of the speech+action idea.

Please explain. You made the first assertion of this, then "backslid" as people poked holes in your argument, now you appear to be swinging back in the other direction merely by asserting something about "seeds."

Really little to explain. Obviously laws cover speech + action. It's just a question of where the boundaries are in their application. I don't know too much about those finer points. [CITE: 18USC371] TITLE 18--CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE PART I--CRIMES CHAPTER 19--CONSPIRACY Sec. 371. Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud United States If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. <snip> Could this be applied to software development? I suppose that depends on whether the software in design is prohibited or not. Until the DMCA is altered or deleted there's already a class of SW that is illegal. It doesn't seem so far-fetched that a discussion of content piracy followed by an active coding project could be attacked. Why not a discussion of tax evasion methods followed by a development project? And don't forget that it's still possible to run afoul of the crypto export regulations. Are our visionary legislators capable of outlawing new classes of software? It's a sure bet. I'll leave it to the lawyers to argue over how specific the speech and actions need to be. Want to test it? Start a project with the stated goals of providing a neat open source project with the stated purpose of cracking and exchanging e-books and start posting code. If you were to start YAPPFSP ( yet another peer to peer file sharing project ) would you state its purpose as "to share pirated music data?"

Could you give a cite for any prosecutions, or are you just speculating that "Happy Fun Court" will not be "amused" by free speech?

I'm sure there are plenty of conspiracy cases involving the more blatant crimes like kidnapping etc... Are there any militia cases? Like you said, try and find one. The law as written does seem to outlaw speech. The anti-militia laws are interesting in that the least popular are likely to suffer first from "creative" legislation. If an approach is successful against the unpopular then it can always be expanded to include new groups. I offer the bomz and drug speech legislation as further attempts along the same lines. Successful, no, not yet, but they'll keep trying. If they are eventually successful it will cost somebody a bundle to get it overturned. That's a market problem : it's cheaper to make bad law than it is to unmake it. As for the fictional Happy Fun Court's inquisitorial wet dreams, it can go spoliate its head in a bucket.

Comment: It seems to me we are seeing way too many people hitting the panic button, speculating about some of us getting shot by agents of happy fun courts, claiming that merely using secrecy methods is spoliation, arguing that speech is being criminalized, and that, in essence, we'd all better just slink away from these free speech and crypto thoughtcrimes.

Speculating yes, panic button, no. It can be instructive to pursue an idea to an extreme.

Fuck that. Don't let the wuss ninnies scare you off.

--TIm May

Ah, the dreaded wuss-ninnies. I'm not losing any sleep over the Happy Fun Court or its cackling brigade of wuss-ninnies. I'm more concerned that all of the cat5 wires I pulled through the smurf tubes this past weekend are not damaged so I don't have to crawl around my fucking attic anymore. If there's anything I dislike more than wuss-ninnies it's blown-in fiberglass. Mike Question : is steganography code export restricted or is it not even described under the current set of rules?