Re: free speech and the government

["James M. Cobb" <jcobb@ahcbsd1.ovnet.com>]

  Dmitri, 
 
 
  On 02 03 96 you say: 
 
    I believe that any exception to unlimited free speech, be it 
    libel, or copyright violation, or child pornography, or Nazi 
    propaganda, or Chinese dissident materials, just isn't com- 
    patible with the cpunk agenda. No censorship is acceptable. 
    That's an absolute. 
 

  Censorship is founded on prying; and pryers have THEIR absolute: 
 
    On 2 January 1992, it was decided by the German Federal govern- 
    ment to open these [East German police] files...at 15 offices 
    throughout the former East Germany.  It is worth pointing out 
    the extensive nature of these files.  It was discovered that 
    husbands spied on wives, girlfriends spied on boyfriends, Cath- 
    olic Church confessionals were bugged by the 'Stasi' both with 
    and without the knowledge of the parish priest, Lutheran parish- 
    ioners spied on their pastors, telephone calls of both East and 
    West Germans were heavily monitored and the most innocent event, 
    such as going shopping or visitng the library, was included in 
    the files. 
 
        --Wayne Madsen [co-author of the upcoming new Puzzle Palace]. 
          Handbook of Personal Data Protection.  Stockton Press. 1992. 
          Page 4. 
 
 
  Pryers agree!  No censorship is acceptable. 
 
 
                       A*N*Y*T*H*I*N*G goes. 
 
 
  But let's be scientific about it: 
 
    Some 30 miles from Boston is a radio telescope called Beta, run 
    by the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, that day and 
    night searches the northern sky for artificial radio signals as 
    it makes continuous swathes through the heavens.
   
    It must pick up all the naturally-caused radio sounds as well, 
    which engineers call "noise" as opposed to "signal". This means 
    that it collects an enormous quantity of information that can be 
    processed only by a specially-built supercomputer.  Every second 
    it captures enough data to fill a CD-Rom, which every day adds up 
    to 22 trillion bytes of data, the equivalent of 52 million novels. 
 
        --Adrian Berry.  "Watch This Space."  File: nspace04.html. 
          Home News.  02 05 96 The Electronic Telegraph. 
 
 
  A USEFUL gadget, isn't it?  Censorship of even 1 byte of the 22 tril- 
  lion is unacceptable. 
 
 
                     E*V*E*R*Y*T*H*I*N*G goes. 
 
 
  Between two absolutes, what decides?
 
 
  Cordially, 
 
  Jim 
 
 
 
  PS:  I can't help wondering whether "all the naturally-caused 
  radio sounds" are really all the artificially-caused microwave 
  signals within range. 
  
      Of all the intercept stations built during the 1950's boom, 
      the ultimate in both ambition and failure was in the remote 
      Allegheny hollow of Sugar Grove, West Virginia.... 
 
      Since its beginnings in the mid-1950s, the secrecy surrounding 
      Sugar Grove has been intense.  The cover story throughout the 
      entire life of the project was that the six-hundred-foot dish 
      was purely for research and radio astronomy, permitting scien- 
      tists "to tune in on radio signals as far as 38 billion light 
      years away".... 
 
          --James Bamford.  The Puzzle Palace.  Penguin Books. 1983. 
            Pages 217f, 220. 
 
 
 
      Supposedly, the only person allowed to look into each of the 
      East German police files was the "data subject," the person who 
      had been looked into.