From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 21:36:00 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: PRIVACY: Private traces in public places
Message-ID: <199601101328.IAA01966@pipe4.nyc.pipeline.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Responding to msg by nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous) on Wed, 10 
Jan  1:43 PM

>   Last summer the first case in Britain of a libel on the 
Internet was
>   settled out of court when Laurence Godfrey accepted 
undisclosed
>   damages from another nuclear physicist, Philip 
Hallam-Baker, over
>   remarks made in 1993 on Usenet, an electronic conference 
with 16
>   million users. And Peter Lilley, the Social Security 
Secretary, sent a
>   stiff letter to the vice-chancellor of Leeds University 
after one of
>   its students used a faculty computer to make defamatory 
allegations
>   about him.

----------

The NYT reports that by 2000 there will be over 1 million 
lawyers in the US.


These fine-minders, supported by the burgeoning private 
investigative and security fields, will surely mine electronic 
archives as thoroughly as they research paper -- and thanks to 
wondrous Altavistas maybe more thoroughly.


And backed by these highly skilled lobbyists, laws will change 
to make remunerative rain of -- and by -- archiving and search 
technology as they have to capitalize on the technology of 
doing the same in the worlds of printing, telegraph, telephone 
and television.


Promotion of these privacy-invasive services on the Net 
parallels the defensive measures explored on cypherpunks.


Perhaps all c'punks should subscribe to cyberia-l and vice 
versa; they are hand in hand, or fist to fist, on this.