From: "Declan B. McCullagh" <declan+@CMU.EDU>
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 1996 00:44:12 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Petty Civil Disobedience
In-Reply-To: <199603091317.IAA12223@yakko.cs.wmich.edu>
Message-ID: <klEOFiW00YUuE3T4cr@andrew.cmu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Excerpts from internet.cypherpunks: 9-Mar-96 Petty Civil Disobedience by
Damaged Justice@yakko.cs 
> Not much crypto relevance, but the CDA has had much more effect than we may
> realize at first. I regularly read about 25 newsgroups with an extremely wide
> range of subject matter, and over the last few weeks I have seen literally
> hundreds of people with things in their .sigs like, "Please excuse this CDA-
> required obscenity: FUCK."
[...]
> Obviously, very few people feel truly threatened by CDA penalties.

That's because of a few possible reasons:

 a) Portions of the CDA are enjoined from being enforced and we have a
legally-binding agreement with the DoJ covering the rest. So the fear of
prosecution is not great.
 b) We expect to win court challenge, so fear of prosecution is not great.
 c) Nobody seriously believes the government will prosecute people using
word "FUCK," so fear of prosecution is not great.

The CDA is overbroad, and must be struck down. But at the same time, the
DoJ initially would use it to go after those who have otherwise
Constitutionally-protected porn publicly-available online. (Obscenity is
already illegal.) I'd be more interested in tracking the actions of
owners of adult web sites and those with explicit sexual images...
Perhaps we should put up our own protest web sites with one or two
explicit sexual images as real civil disobedience?

-Declan