From: Jim Choate <ravage@EINSTEIN.ssz.com>
Date: Sat, 24 Oct 1998 23:44:44 +0800
To: cypherpunks@EINSTEIN.ssz.com (Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer)
Subject: Re: so, what did Toto *do*, exactly to get locked up? (Re: rules of en (fwd)
Message-ID: <199810241532.KAA15947@einstein.ssz.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text



Forwarded message:

> Date: Sat, 24 Oct 1998 12:40:02 +0200 (CEST)
> From: DOOM Anonymous Untraceable User <nobody@seclab.com>
> Subject: Re: so, what did Toto *do*, exactly to get locked up? (Re: rules of en

> We also have people who *have* kept their noses clean being harassed. It's an 
> excuse to put some pressure on CDRs. It even had the effect of shaking loose
> a lot of the Austin cypherpunks in a nice little divide and conquer action.

That's not exactly correct. The Austin Cypherpunks have always had a problem
with cohesion. There were issues that were leading me toward dropping my
personal support because of lack of committment from other parties in the
Austin Cypherpunks. This certainly hastened the event, it did not cause it.
We were already divided in our goals and interest and unable to agree on
agenda or purpose. We, as a group, couldn't even decide to spend the few
dollars to put the 3-line RSA in the local paper. The last effective action
we took was the speaking engagement at the last RoboFest here in Austin 3
years ago. That sort of "I want to participate, but won't do anything"
attitude raises the hackles on my neck. Life is way too short to be wasting
major effort on a lost cause. There wasn't much to divide and the spoils
going to the conquerer are/were nil.

> And it's likely they have subpoenaed more people than we've heard from.
> I just hope they don't subpoena Bill Payne, or we'll receive a copy of it 
> every week for years to come.

Yep, with those silly/strange capitalizations and sentence structures of his
which look suspicously like some form of stego. You'd think somebody who
claims to be that educated would have at least learned basic grammer (unless it
was intentional).

> The John Gilmore subpoena was focussed exclusively on cypherpunk email.
> Jim Choate confirmed his is much the same.

Other than dates and signatures it's identical. The focus was on any
archives that I kept of cpunks or personal traffic (part c) that involved
CJ in my interview.

> So the focus is on what we've
> all seen posted here. Personally, I found them a lot milder than Reeza!'s 
> projection of his suicide fantasies, for instance.

I would also agree that the Cypherpunks have garnered a notoriety with LEA's
such that it could/should be taken as a given that continous surviellance is
occurring. Random dumpster diving in our trash, etc. should not be
unexpected.

This does raise an interesting point about freedom of speech and the duties
of LEA's. In a democratic society what are the ethical implications of LEA's
archiving publicly available documents as a matter of course, not for
inclusion in ongoing investigations but rather as a base for future
investigations. In addition, while the remailer operators do seem to be
protected by ECPA (I was advised that I fell into this category via SSZ)
what about the public archive operators? Are they covered under this
umbrella?


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       To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice.

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