From: Paul Bradley <paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 1997 19:18:34 +0800
To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Subject: Re: Canarypunk: Jim Bell in a coalmine
In-Reply-To: <v03020926afd30f8f70cc@[139.167.130.247]>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.91.970623000738.542A-100000@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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> Has anybody local to Jim Bell's stir gone to visit our incarcerated, um,
> gaming enthusiast, lately, just to see if he needs anything? Oh. Besides
> *that* of course. :-).

I had thought that Jims court appearance was to be sometime about a week 
ago, what was he actually charged with? Has he appeared in court yet?

> That's because Bell is, however rediculous the offense or his behavior the
> first cypherpunk political prisoner. He's ours, folks, like it or not. It's
> time we faced it, and dealt with the problem accordingly.

Indeed, Jim is without doubt under arrest not on whatever cooked-up 
charges they are holding him on, but because of AP and his "loon" type 
possesion of carbon fibers etc. Jim certainly deserves our support, who 
next otherwise? You?

> Admittedly, this is a distraction from the most important thing, which is
> writing code, but I bet that there are in fact cypherpunks-who-don't-code
> in Bell's neighborhood, and not necessarily even Friends of Jim, who would
> be happy to personally go see how Bell is doing and come back and tell us
> what happened. Think of it as part of the feedback loop for net.freedom. A
> trip into the coal mine with a canary cage.

Not enough cypherpunks ever get round to writing significant code, myself 
included. I have lost count of the number of times I have sat down at a 
workstation overnight, got some way into starting a project, then just 
given up on it. I hope someone does go and see Jim, at the very least it 
would be a pleasant gesture and give Jim the message that the cypherpunks 
haven`t forgotten about him. Sure, It`s easy for me to talk, I can`t go 
and see him, I`m hardly in his neighbourhood, but if you shrug your 
shoulders and ignore his position it could be you next.

        Datacomms Technologies data security
       Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
  Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org    
       Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
      Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85
     "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"