I wrote:

Acknowledgement that a procedure is an exigency does not make that procedure desirable of itself. All differential carriage based on content is censorship. I acknowledge the exigency of certain forms of censorship in currently deployed anonymous systems.

A member of the list wrote back to me to say that this went over his head because he wasn't a lawyer. I am not a lawyer either. Since a compact statement has been too compact, allow me to be more verbose. An exigency is something you do because you have to in order to accomplish something else. It's not something you do because someone told you to or because you promised to do it. Exigencies, if you don't like them, are often called 'necessary evils,' with all the connotations of that phrase. In this case, restrictions on remailers are an exigency, something you might have to do to stay on the net. Now just because you have to do something doesn't mean that's a good thing. In California, you have to give out your thumbprint in order to get a driver's license. Giving the thumbprint is an exigency. I did not want to do that; I don't think it's a good thing; I did it anyway because I wanted a driver's license more than I wanted my thumbprint not to be digitized. Differential means that two things are not the same and has the connotation that one is preferable to the other. Carriage is the noun form of the verb 'to carry' and in this context refers to the act of carrying an electronic message. Thus differential carriage is carrying some messages preferentially, such as refusing to mail to or from a particular site, or to delay or alter some messages but not others. I claim that all differential carriage where the differences in how the messages are carried arise from the content (or expected content) of those messages is, in fact, censorship and should be called such. If am operate an anonymous service and I refuse to pass a message because someone has complained about it, I have exercised a preference and created a difference in the way I treat the message. I have exercised censorship over that message. I have presented my service as a public utility, and yet I have created a difference in how I treat messages. My domain of potential censorship is not large, but it is there. It is an unfortunate fact of the internet that there will be pressure brought to bear against the operators of anonymous remailers, and that in the interim such pressure might be strong enough to force such operators off the net. Some restrictions against content might be necessary to keep these services online. If so, then I believe that these restriction should be implemented. I'd rather have the services running. Nonetheless, I deplore any such restrictions. And if it not perfectly clear by now, let me finally state that I am in agreement with Lance Detweiler on this point, that some restriction may be necessary in order to keep anonymous services online. But that said, I still don't like it. I will continue to dislike it, and I will work to make the necessity for restrictions disappear. Eric