From: David Honig <honig@otc.net>
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 1997 03:40:01 +0800
To: 6ualdv8@sk.sympatico.ca
Subject: Re: [RePol] Janet Reno kills babies
In-Reply-To: <v03102802b0a801cade82@[206.170.115.5]>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19971202111153.007cda70@otc.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>  I was responding to Bill and Lance's comments in regard to forgery
>victims being set up as targets of retribution. I think references to
>"deplorable content" indicate some measure of judgement in regard to
>defining what is considered 'abuse' of a remailer.

This excerpt made clear for me the distinction: 

1. There is a temporary problem with forgery & retribution, but this goes
away when the populace gets a clue about authentication.  In this case,
technology and a little cultural learning solve a social problem.

In practice, this cultural awareness could be encouraged by spamming the
masses with letters from various interesting forged parties, e.g., irs.gov.
 Or spoofing a  public news streams and messing with the stock market.  

I wonder if the recent classified government report
on infohacking the infrastructure included these pranks?

But enough gedankenpranking. Getting a copy of PGP integrated into
everyone's grandmother's GUI email clients, so that this is widely used and
understood by the masses, is the positive way to do this.

2. There is an everpresent truly social problem with people who want to
control the configuration of other people's bits.

This problem is solvable by a set of strongly-enforced rules (e.g.,
"Freedom of speech" -more generally, freedom of information storage and
manipulation in any form) which would have priority over the behavior of
the  mobs (e.g., in the voting booth).

In the US we're supposed to have this but there is some question ---perhaps
we need to hold lawmakers personally criminally liable when they pass
unconstitutional laws--- however the architecture is sound if implemented
correctly.

So in the future we'll not trust anything without a public key, censors
will be laughed at instead of getting congressional time, and anonymity
will be commonplace and as understood as digital signatures.

I guess this list is pretty much an ill-tempered
view of the future..





David Honig 			honig@alum.mit.edu
---------------------------------------------------
If we can prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people
under the pretense of
 caring for them, they will be happy.  -TJ