The Privacy/Untraceability Sweet Spot

[Declan McCullagh]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 12:42:24PM -0700, 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? 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.

Can you get put in jail for writing code? Sure. Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov.
Or read the old crypto regs. Or write a bot that posts child porn and
start it going. Lots of ways to run afoul of the law -- and that's in
the U.S., where we may even be a bit more liberal about such things,
and where some circuits even believe source code is free speech.

But it does not logically follow that just because you code something,
such as an anonymous mix or similar system, that you have broken the
law. In fact, you probably haven't.

-Declan