The Privacy/Untraceability Sweet Spot

[Tim May]

On Thursday, August 30, 2001, at 12:42 PM, mmotyka at lsil.com wrote:

> 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?

Before going further, let's examine your "could constitute intent" point.

Do you know of any prosecutions, successful or not, of groups who 
"played soldier in the woods"? Assuming, of course, that the 
prosecutions were not for weapons law violations, trespassing, hunting 
out of season, possession of illegal explosives, noise violations, etc.

If you know of any such cases, I would like to hear about them.

Note, by the way, that the Aryan Nation(s) routinely does as you say, 
i.e., they practice in the woods, but the only thing that they have been 
charged (as individuals or as an organization) were connected with 
actual crimes (the murder of radio talk show host Alan Berg in Denver, a 
couple of bank robberies) or political thoughtcrimes involving supposed 
harassment (a woman who claims she was "chased and terrorized" by AN 
thugs after driving past their compound several times.

Do you know of any actual cases where this confluence to "create intent" 
(not even clear what that means in this context, though) was claimed?


> 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.

Assuming your hypo, there is little protection in the "Alice talks, Bob 
codes" solution, if Alice and Bob associate. For a conspiracy charge, 
the fact that some talk and some build things is not important.

>
> 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?

No, it can't.


--Tim May