From: Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1996 22:15:47 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: China joins Singapore, Germany, ....
Message-ID: <2.2.32.19960910110046.00de3c78@panix.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 04:41 AM 9/9/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:

>Prison sentences in Germany for those who reveal forbidden information
>about "the Holocaust," 

In a country where you get 10 months for stabbing a famous tennis star in
the back, prison isn't much of a penalty. 

>prison terms (or worse) for dissidents in Burma,
>China, and, of course, various other nations and "democratic people's
>republics."
>
>Even here in the United States, connecting to an illegal site may mean
>imprisonment. (The charge: trafficking in child pornography, for example.)

The percentage of total hits that will end in jail terms or executions is
meaninglessly small as a percentage of total hits, though.  You must admit
that a ban on 100 sites out of all the sites in the world is pretty
insignificant.  The swamping effects of thousands and soon millions of sites
means the governments of the world won't even be able to evaluate a
significant percentage even if they want to.  And all this *before* we apply
any of our technical fixes.

DCF