FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

[Bruce Baugh]

At 10:43 PM 6/5/96 -0400, Duncan Frissell wrote:

>Yeah and they busted Jack London for publishing "The Assassination Bureau,
Ltd".

Do I really have to point out that London was writing the better part of a
century ago, in a substantially different legal and cultural environment?
(Heck, his socialism made more trouble for him than anything else.)

>Advocating the general practice of killing one's opponents is as legal as
>church on a Sunday.  The War College (or is it the NDU these days) does it
>all the time.

And they, of course, are The Government, who Protect Us from the Evil
Terrorists. Ditto for the heroic BATF agents who only burn bad nasty
terrorists, honest. And all the rest.

The rest of us (in the US) live in a country where the government can now
pretty much declare anyone they like terrorists, and suspend habeus corpus
on the flimsiest of grounds, and use evidence against foreigners that
doesn't have to be presented to the accused, and all sorts of fun stuff.

Hence my concern.

I don't think that my direst claims _will_ come true. But I don't think I'm
speculating anything that _can't_ happen, and I see much of it as
increasingly likely in the light of the ongoing furor over crypto and
related matters.

--
Bruce Baugh
bruce at aracnet.com
http://www.aracnet.com/~bruce