From: wcs@anchor.ho.att.com (Bill_Stewart(HOY002)1305)
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 93 12:36:31 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: toad.com mailing list postings from possible virus authors
Message-ID: <9302192035.AA03205@anchor.ho.att.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text


John - thanks for opposing censorship, having integrity, finding ways to set up a
	non-censorable system, and for letting us know about Keith's letter.
AlterNet folks - thanks for providing Internet access in a way that's not only 
	usable for commercial communications, but is outside government funding and control.
	If Al Gore's plans go through, I just can't *wait* to see what happens when
	Jesse Helms discovers that Congress controls the Next Generation Cable TV net....
Thug - never did like your psuedonym :-).  But thanks for writing a somewhat crypto-related
	note that lets us non-DOS followers know a bit more about what virus problems 
	may be hitting the machines around us - interesting stuff.
Geoff - thanks for posting Keith's mail with the ECPA excerpt.  It's nice to
	have confirmation that the ECPA explicitly permits originators, addressees,
	and intended recipients of electronic communication to divulge its contents,
	and interesting that it does not forbid service providers to divulge the contents
	of communication if they are otherwise authorized to see it, which John obviously was.
Keith - neither of us are lawyers, but if you wanted to complain about the legality of
	posting email by the recipient, you'll have to look at copyright laws,
	presuming that the ECPA language doesn't override copyright where the two conflict.
	But threatening people like that was in poor taste, just as requesting censorship was.
	John's posting of your request for censorship was appropriate - if you wanted to
	complain about Thug's public postings, an open letter to him would have been more appropriate.
	You've been a big help to the computing community, and we appreciate it,
	and I realize that viruses are a major problem to providing a site like Simtel.
	But lighten up, man!
Miss Manners, if you're reading this (:-)) - thanks for your recent comments on NPR's 
	Morning Edition about email ettiquette!  (She said that it was generally informal,
	and that expectations of it staying private are unrealistic, given the ease of 
	misrouting mail as well as people's tendencies to repeat things, and we might as 
	well get used to it.)  We're doing what we can to improve the technology for
	private communications, but technology isn't the whole problem, and it's
	going to take a while before we figure out the sociology of it....


				Bill Stewart, somewhere in New Jersey