Plan C from Cyberspace

[Tim May]

At 7:46 PM -0700 4/11/01, Publius Q. Citizen wrote:
>You're both correct, but you don't mention one point which you both
>surely know: the net spans all kinds of cultures.  Including those where
>


>........[examples of thoughtcrime elided]


>In my lil' noggin (not speaking for the Movement (tm)), one cypherpunk
>(tm)
>ethic is that sticks and stones (and the occasional govt informer) will
>break your bones,
>but bits will never hurt you.  A post-internet
>corollary is that somewhere someone will offend you, and you need
>to get used to it.  (Those of us who have allowed ourselves to
>review popular media are already used to the chronic offense.)
>
>Sorry to state the obvious, its for our federal observers.

Yep, all obvious stuff.

I hope, though, that our list does not degenerate to the point of 
attempting to convince the Feds who are monitoring us of our views. 
That's a hopeless task. For one thing, they're not even participating 
in the debate--they are merely looking for juicy one-off remarks they 
can introduce in court. For another, if they didn't absorb the 
message when they were young, by reading Orwell or Rand or Heinlein 
or whatever, and they chose to be come public persecutors of 
thoughtcrime, then a few essays here and there will not make any 
conceivable difference.

As Declan said, the list has now become a training ground for local 
prosecutors trying to get fools to tell them "how to make bombz" and 
for Feds looking to puff up their resumes by finding evidence of 
thoughtcrime.

And probably some of the Feds are busily notifying their chain of 
command that they have accomplished their Prime Objective: "We have 
squelched debate on a terrorist list. We have frightened people into 
not talking to the subversive so-called journalists like Declan 
McCullagh, Adam Chiralsky, and others. And we have infiltrated 
unacceptable political parties like the Libertarian Party. Long live 
the State, long live the Two Party System!"

In the form the list has been in for the past decade, they have won.

Time for Plan C.


--Tim May
-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns