Re: Crypto Exports, Europe, and Conspiracy Theories

[shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green)]

At 23:12 1/24/96, Michael Froomkin wrote:

>If you are a government strategist, you might think, Why not make people
>strictly liable for, e.g., any crimes planned with their remailers?  And
>make ISPs strictly liable for crimes panned or executed on their systems?

No doubt in my mind that will happen within the next few years. Remember
from past posts that remailers already are technically illegal in a few
states, though the legislators probably didn't think of remailers, when
they wrote the laws. A law making remailer operators responsible for their
traffic will pass by a margin customary for similar bills in the past
(>90%).

Remailers in the US and most of Western Europe will be outlawed or shut
down on their own once a few of their owners are held liable for some Four
Horsemen traffic flowing through. It is precisely because remailers, and by
extension future encrypted TCP redirectors, are a much greater danger to
the statist than 128 bit Netscape will ever be.


-- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com>
   PGP encrypted mail preferred.