Re: FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 10:18 PM 6/6/96, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
>Jim McCoy wrote:
....
>> As long as that person is not the President of the United States (at least
>> for U.S. citizens.)  This was the issue which initiated this thread, the
>> implied threat made by our favorite nutcase.
>
>Are you sure? Can you cite references? From my readings on the 1st
>amendments, any general kind of speech is legal, even if it advocates
>killing certain officials, including us presidents. *If* instead of
>general advocacy a person gave specific orders or concrete requests to
>kill the prez, then it would not be speech. Please correct me if I am
>wrong.

* First, I disagree with Bruce Baugh's earlier comment that there is a
nonzero chance this list could be "shut down." (Well, "nonzero" covers a
_lot_ of numbers, but as it usually understood in hackerspeak, "nonzero"
means "finite," and "finite" means "a credible chance." It is this with
which I disagree.)

There is virtually no chance that even fairly egregious threats would allow
the government to "shut down" a public forum. Prior restraint and all that.
I suppose there is some slight chance that John Gilmore could be held
liable in some way for messages flowing through his "toad" machine, and
that hence the instantiation of the Cypherpunks list _on toad_ could be
affected. But I am skeptical even of this. In past cases where the
government felt a newspaper or magazine had published or planned to publish
material they felt was illegal ("The Progressive" and "The New York Times,"
for example), the ongoing operations of these newspapers were not stopped.

(There may be cases people can dig up where some newspaper or newsletter
was "shut down," but I think such cases would be hard to find in the last
several decades. Am I wrong on this?)

* Second, there are indeed various laws about threatening the President.
And there are laws about directly threatening others as well. ("Directly
threatening" is a fuzzy idea, which I don't plan to debate here.)

However, recall that Senator Jesse Helms elliptically threatened President
Clinton by saying that Clinton had probably better be wearing a
bullet-proof vest if he ever visited Helms' part of the country. (Even the
Republicans were shocked by this, and, I surmise, cast Helms into the outer
darkness, as Helms has been keeping a low profile for the past 18 months.)

* Third, while I am bored with Bell's "single note" point of view ("I have
a solution for this") and while I feel his "assassination politics" is both
naive and derivative, I don't think his advocacy of AP constitutes a direct
threat to anyone. He is not actually setting up the betting markets which
would make AP more of a reality, nor is he calling for the killing of any
particilar persons.

* Fourth, merely discussing alternative political systems is not enough to
trigger legal action, at least not today.

* Finally, there may be provisions in the Terrorism Act (don't know precise
name, but Clinton signed it into law a few months ago) which could
conceivably trigger having certain groups classified as "terrorist groups."
The law is too new and too untested, I think, to have any implications for
a mailing list such as ours.

Frankly, the list is much likelier to die off from debates about fascism
and Hillary's investments than it is to be "shut down" by government
action.

--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Licensed Ontologist         | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."