Your analogy is wrong. You should compare the number of meatspace publishers and their political clout to the number of anonymous remailer operators and their political clout. -Declan On Wed, Sep 05, 2001 at 01:21:03PM -0500, Fisher Mark wrote:

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Killing remailers will be a by-product of regulating the net.

Regulating the net to this extent would be a huge undertaking. Trying to regulate dead-tree publishers to this level would be a large undertaking, a task not likely to be accomplished without a lot of debate in Congress -- and there are many fewer dead-tree publishers than net publishers.

The only way this could be done would be to attack at the large ISP level, which then brings up First Amendment issues along with common carrier issues. It could be done, but it would likely take a covert operation so large that: * It could only be funded by a government or other large body; and * Which would likely come to light relatively quickly ("three can keep a secret, if two are dead").

(Covert operation in the sense of staging many events that use the net in the process of harming people, as in using remailers for staging terrorist-like attacks for the express purpose of scaring the American public into abrogating their First Amendments rights unilaterally on the net.) =============================================== Mark Leighton Fisher fisherm@tce.com Thomson multimedia, Inc. Indianapolis IN The Illuminati are not dead -- they're just pining for the fnords...