Tim

Vince:

...

In a nut shell, taxbomber.com was on my system in Anguilla. He was selling "camoflauge passports". One David Evans of Bloomberg Business News wrote an article where he quoted taxbombers page saying something like "it is illegal to use these passports to open up bank accounts, but there is little chance of getting caught". I got a call from my lawyer who had seen the article (along with just about everyone else in Anguilla) and he told me that was illegal in Anguilla and I should cancle the account. I did and taxbomber moved to another provider in another country.

1) A number of cypherpunks are dissapointed that I did not fight to my death to defend this guy.

I think you're overstating the case made by some of us, or, at least, by me.

Your not dissapointed?

What I said was that your policies need to be spelled out, and that I saw little evidence of "fraud" in what the guy was doing.

Ok. I now have a link from my main page to a page with my policy. What I said (or meant to) was that MY LAWYER SAID IT WAS ILLEGAL IN ANGUILLA. In my first post I quoted the wrong part and said "this is fraud by taxbomber - he did sell fake passports". I meant to quote a part where he said something like "I never sold fake passports". It may be covered in the anti-fraud sections of the laws.

And that if you cut off accounts (without warning, it sounds like)

He got a little warning, then only web access was cut off. And I forwarded his email and was the nameserver for his domain name so that he could move right away to another site. Then he sent a message to the Internic to move the management of his domain to another site.

based on fairly flimsy (it seems to me, and to Duncan, and to others) advice, then certain reputational consequences are likely to follow.

Understood.

By the way, from what you quote this guy as saying ("it is illegal to use these passports to open up bank accounts, but there is little chance of getting caught"), I _still_ see no fraud.

Not saying that is fraud. The most I said was encouraging fraud. It has been pointed out that under common law using another name is not fraud. However, under certain countries laws using a fake passport to open a bank account may be defined as fraud.

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2) If the guy did not mention where his site was, the reporter probably would never have mentioned Anguilla and me in the article.

Is this the real issue, that what he was doing brought bad publicity to you and to Anguilla?

It is both a lesson to be learned, and part of the overall situation.

These issues need to be aired. Of course you have every right to run things as you wish, modulo contractual arrangements you may have entered into with your customers and your Internet providers. But we on this list have certain ideas about what an "offshore information provider" should provide.

Sure. And you can run your offshore services as you wish. I like mine better. :-)

Contrast this case with the well-publicized cases recently where Neo-Nazi material is being hosted on U.S. web sites.

If selling fake passports is illegal in Anguilla, and the US has freedom of speech, they are not comparable. -- Vince ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Vincent Cate vince@offshore.com.ai http://www.offshore.com.ai/vince/ Offshore Information Services http://www.offshore.com.ai/