speech + action

[mmotyka at lsil.com]

Tim May <tcmay at got.net>  wrote :
>On Tuesday, September 4, 2001, at 10:59 AM, mmotyka at lsil.com wrote:
>
>> Declan McCullagh wrote:
>>>
>>> On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 10:59:54AM -0700, mmotyka at lsil.com wrote:
>>>> Sure, I mention it because despite its being non-functional and
>>>> unpunishable it seemed to have been brought into the courtroom with 
>>>> the
>>>> purpose of spicing up the case.
>>>
>>> Sure. If you commit unacceptable-to-the-gvt *actions* and also spend a
>>> lot of time talking about how government officials should be
>>> assassinated, you may reasonably expect those statements to be used
>>> against you during your trial.
>>>
I think the speech, irrelevant as it was, was used to increase the
perceived severity of the actions. Isn't this in effect being punished
for speech+action?

>>> But that is a far cry from your earlier government-has-this-power
>>> position, from which you're now backtracking.
>>>
>>> -Declan
>>>
>> Not so much backtracking as thinking out loud. Just musing on how the
>> letter of the law, its constitutionality, enforcement and even the
>> reasoning behind its creation are not always lined up so well.
>>
>> 18 U.S.C. 23 1 contains the seeds of the speech+action idea.
>>
>
>Please explain. You made the first assertion of this, then "backslid" as 
>people poked holes in your argument, now you appear to be swinging back 
>in the other direction merely by asserting something about "seeds."
>
Really little to explain. Obviously laws cover speech + action. It's
just a question of where the boundaries are in their application. I
don't know too much about those finer points.

[CITE: 18USC371]
TITLE 18--CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE
PART I--CRIMES
CHAPTER 19--CONSPIRACY
 
Sec. 371. Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud United States
        
    If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against 
the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency 
thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such 
persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be 
fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
<snip>

Could this be applied to software development? I suppose that depends on
whether the software in design is prohibited or not. Until the DMCA is
altered or deleted there's already a class of SW that is illegal. It
doesn't seem so far-fetched that a discussion of content piracy followed
by an active coding project could be attacked. Why not a discussion of
tax evasion methods followed by a development project? And don't forget
that it's still possible to run afoul of the crypto export regulations.
Are our visionary legislators capable of outlawing new classes of
software? It's a sure bet. I'll leave it to the lawyers to argue over
how specific the speech and actions need to be.

Want to test it? Start a project with the stated goals of providing a
neat open source project with the stated purpose of cracking and
exchanging e-books and start posting code. If you were to start YAPPFSP
( yet another peer to peer file sharing project ) would you state its
purpose as "to share pirated music data?"

>Could you give a cite for any prosecutions, or are you just speculating 
>that "Happy Fun Court" will not be "amused" by free speech?
>
I'm sure there are plenty of conspiracy cases involving the more blatant
crimes like kidnapping etc...

Are there any militia cases? Like you said, try and find one. The law as
written does seem to outlaw speech. The anti-militia laws are
interesting in that the least popular are likely to suffer first from
"creative" legislation. If an approach is successful against the
unpopular then it can always be expanded to include new groups. I offer
the bomz and drug speech legislation as further attempts along the same
lines. Successful, no, not yet, but they'll keep trying.

If they are eventually successful it will cost somebody a bundle to get
it overturned. That's a market problem : it's cheaper to make bad law
than it is to unmake it.

As for the fictional Happy Fun Court's inquisitorial wet dreams, it can
go spoliate its head in a bucket.

>Comment: It seems to me we are seeing way too many people hitting the 
>panic button, speculating about some of us getting shot by agents of 
>happy fun courts, claiming that merely using secrecy methods is 
>spoliation, arguing that speech is being criminalized, and that, in 
>essence, we'd all better just slink away from these free speech and 
>crypto thoughtcrimes.
>
Speculating yes, panic button, no. It can be instructive to pursue an
idea to an extreme. 

>Fuck that. Don't let the wuss ninnies scare you off.
>
>--TIm May
>
Ah, the dreaded wuss-ninnies. I'm not losing any sleep over the Happy
Fun Court or its cackling brigade of wuss-ninnies. I'm more concerned
that all of the cat5 wires I pulled through the smurf tubes this past
weekend are not damaged so I don't have to crawl around my fucking attic
anymore. If there's anything I dislike more than wuss-ninnies it's
blown-in fiberglass.

Mike

Question : is steganography code export restricted or is it not even
described under the current set of rules?