DoJ and Cypherpunks...

[Bill Stewart]

At 05:49 PM 03/09/2001 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>I sent a message to the cypherpunks list that quoted from DOJ
>regulations. Robb, apparently a cypherpunk subscriber, replied
>to that message but removed the Subject: line.

Entertaining.....
(And I'd attribute the lack of Subject: line to incompetence with
mail user agents rather than to malice.)

>I wonder if John Young is a journalist, and needs to have his
>subponea approved by John Ashcroft too...

JYA is very definitely a Journalist, but in a newer
internet-related form that Fed procedures may not have caught up with.
Declan, on the other hand, works for one or more traditional press
companies, so he fits in the Journalist bureaucratic pigeonhole,
even though some of his press companies are mainly online.
While I mostly agree with Tim's views that the First Amendment
doesn't carve out special civil rights for journalists,
governments do generally distinguish between categories like
"works for a big enough press company that we might get flamed
in front of a large audience if we harass him, and they've got lawyers",
unlike journalists who work for small rantzines (no slack for them),
or freelancers like JYA.

Still, it might be fun to harass the Feds for not following their
own procedures in subpoenaing JYA, though that's pretty irrelevant
to the case itself since they're mostly Bureau CYA rather than due process.