The Privacy/Untraceability Sweet Spot

mmotyka at lsil.com mmotyka at lsil.com
Thu Aug 30 12:42:24 PDT 2001


Declan McCullagh <declan at well.com> wrote :
>On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 05:28:24PM -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>> For Tim: 
>> Why are you attempting to provoke public discussion about things 
>> that could get people jailed or worse for discussing them?  It's 
>> interesting to see you post your "sweet spot" message and then call 
>> someone *else* an agent provocateur.
>
>I suspect Bear has good intentions and may even honestly believe this,
>but it is nevertheless misleading. 
>
>Talking about the political implications of technologies -- and taking
>no actions! -- is protected by the full force of the First Amendment.
>
>Johnson got in trouble for allegedly making direct threats of physical
>violence. Bell is in jail for most of the next decade because he
>crossed state lines and showing up at homes of current or former
>federal agents.
>
>It is true that the Feds are monitoring cypherpunks closely, and it is
>also probably true that without the stalking charges, they may have
>found other charges to levy against Bell. It is also true that if you
>embrace AP-type concepts, they may pay closer attention to you. But
>even given the tattered First Amendment, there is still a difference
>between speech and action.
>
>-Declan
>
Bear may not be as far off the mark as you think. Remember back when the
hot news of the day was militia groups how advocating the violent
overthrow of the government and playing soldier in the woods could
constitute intent? Can that twisted reasoning be applied to advocating
the use of code to obsolete the government and then actually creating
code? Should the political speech and coding action be separated? Is
participating in both risky? I consider code to be publishing and speech
but look at some of the recent GRUsa activity that addresses that issue.

Get ready for "to code is to act." Whoops, it's here. Just title your
application "Espionage Communications Suite with Government Overthrow
Features" and package the speech and the act up nice and neat for the
GRU. 

This can't really be the case, can it?

Mike

This little gizmo is not new but I like it and it's only $30 at an AT&T
Wireless store. It looks like it would be a nice companion ( assuming
one could make a very tiny uP-based adapter ) for an iPaq. I find those
folding kybs to be ugly.

http://www.ericsson.com/infocenter/news/The_Chatboard.html





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