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Re: An alternative to remailer shutdowns
At 03:02 PM 5/20/96 -0700, Hal wrote:
>I was contacted by the FBI on Friday due to some threatening mail which
>was apparently sent through my remailer. According to 18 USC 875(c),
>"Whoever transmits in interstate commerce any communication containing
>any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of
>another, shall be fined not more than $1,000 or imprisoned not more
>than five years, or both." I may not be able to continue operating
>either of my remailers (alumni.caltech.edu and shell.portal.com) for
>much longer due to this kind of abuse.
You may recall that when the Leahy encryption bill was proposed, and many
people around here were fawning all over it, I raised the issue that it
would allow the govt to harrass and prosecutor encrypted remailer operators
since their use of encryption allows investigations to be thwarted. What
you've just seen, while not directly involving encryption, is the analogous
version of such harassment with simple remailers.
If there is any need for laws or regulations here, it is one to explicitly
exempt remailers from responsibility for email they forward, or decrypt and
then forward. (It isn't clear, for example, why a remailer is any more
responsible for the contents of a message than any other point on the
Internet chain.)
Obligatory AP reference:
If AP was up and functioning, there wouldn't be a government to fund an FBI
to pay agents to come and harass you for forwarding a message that they've
probably misinterpreted anyway.
Jim Bell
[email protected]