Jim Bell's fiber-optic patent application.

[Jim Bell]

From: CryptoFreak <cryptofreak at cpunk.us>



On 09/21/2013 06:46 PM, Jim Bell wrote:
> *From:* CryptoFreak <cryptofreak at cpunk.us>
> 
>>>I completely support the idea of disloyalty oaths. The only problem I
>>>see is that they simply wouldn't work. What we'd see is the government
>>>putting increased threat of criminal prosecution on the corporate chain
>>>and not enough corporate officers willing to risk going to jail in order
>>>to do the right thing. Marissa Mayer from Yahoo said as much in her
>>>Techcrunch interview last week.
> 
>> Consider:  Let's suppose there's a person in the Justice Department,
>> I'll call him "Ed Justice" (in honor of Ed Snowden) with access to that
>> order, who decides to leak a copy of the court order to Cryptome,
>> Wikileaks, etc, a couple of days after it is served on the target media
>> corporation.  (He may do so for reasons of malice, or perhaps
>> benevolence:  He WANTS the order to leak, because he doesn't agree with
>> the practice.)   The usual 9-by-12 brown envelope with no return
>> address, only stamps, careful to avoid fingerprints, etc.  The
>> leak-publisher(s) publishes the order.  How does the government prove
>> that the lead was done by the target media corporation, and not by
> >somebody else?  A criminal prosecution requires evidence, and none will
> >exist.
> >In addition, there is an excellent argument that any order of secrecy is
> >an obvious violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution.  I
>> don't recall reading any justification for such orders in any legal
>> cases, but I think that this would be on flimsy legal ground.

>Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic but I can't imagine this kind of
>thing happening on a routine basis. If anything, it looks like the
>government is closing ranks and increasing the indoctrination of their
>employees. I fear that we're going to see fewer and fewer people with
>the courage of Edward Snowden as we move forward.
>...CryptoFreak

I guess you did not get my point.  I'm not depending on, or even hoping,  that such a person as "Ed Justice" would exist.  (Although it would certainly be useful.)  Rather, I am observing that the government would not likely be able to prove that "Ed Justice" DOESN'T exist.  Any prosecution of somebody based on the charge that he leaked a court order would require that there be proof that the person charged leaked the document in question.  The defense would argue, 'The prosecution hasn't excluded the possibility that the actual leak was secretly accomplished by a government employee for his own reasons.  We can see that people like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden do indeed exist.   How do we know that the document in question wasn't leaked by yet another person?"
      Jim Bell
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