At 01:53 PM 9/17/94 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:

(In this interpretation, the remailers that many of us have talked about, designed, written software, run on our systems, etc., could be considered to be part of a conspiracy, should Bidzos, Mykotronx, ClariNet, the Feds, etc., choose to focus on remailers as "a continuing criminal enterprise.")

But we designed and deployed the remailers not as part of a criminal enterprise but in an attempt to *generally* protect privacy. We may also have wanted to weaken some of the control measures inherent in the TCP/IP protocols. The TCP/IP protocols are *not* a government. It is legal to weaken them. Additionally, federal courts have explicitly held that anonymous communications (and anonymous associations) are protected by the First Amendment. No US Attorney is going to be interested in the sort of messy political case that would be involved in remailer prosecutions. What we are doing in any case is more like sedition than a normal criminal conspiracy. The Feds have only brought two sedition cases in this century (WWII isolationists and white supremicists in the 1980s) and didn't do too well. Sedition cases are real hard to win because in order to prove intent to overthrow the government you have to prove some realistic capabilities. Like Professor Crampton said when he saw my "Fuck the State" button in 1971 -- "That would be a rather large job, wouldn't it?" DCF