Moral Crypto

[Declan McCullagh]

Your analogy is wrong. You should compare the number of meatspace
publishers and their political clout to the number of anonymous
remailer operators and their political clout.

-Declan


On Wed, Sep 05, 2001 at 01:21:03PM -0500, Fisher Mark wrote:
> > Killing remailers will be a by-product of regulating the net.
> 
> Regulating the net to this extent would be a huge undertaking.  Trying to
> regulate dead-tree publishers to this level would be a large undertaking, a
> task not likely to be accomplished without a lot of debate in Congress --
> and there are many fewer dead-tree publishers than net publishers.
> 
> The only way this could be done would be to attack at the large ISP level,
> which then brings up First Amendment issues along with common carrier
> issues.  It could be done, but it would likely take a covert operation so
> large that:
> * It could only be funded by a government or other large body; and
> * Which would likely come to light relatively quickly ("three can keep a
> secret, if two are dead").
> 
> (Covert operation in the sense of staging many events that use the net in
> the process of harming people, as in using remailers for staging
> terrorist-like attacks for the express purpose of scaring the American
> public into abrogating their First Amendments rights unilaterally on the
> net.)
> ===============================================
> Mark Leighton Fisher            fisherm at tce.com
> Thomson multimedia, Inc.        Indianapolis IN
> The Illuminati are not dead --
> they're just pining for the fnords...