Re: How to eliminate liability?

[David Honig <honig@otc.net>]

At 02:07 PM 1/23/98 PST, John M wrote:
>but I hadn't heard of it.  I 
>have been meaning to buy Schneier's book...

Still waiting for my Dobb's CDROM too..

>meaningful information without the other parts.  Because of this, I have 
>been asking myself, how could any one datahaven operator be held 
>responsible for holding classified, porn, or other information if they 
>only have a meaningless slice of it?
>
>Perhaps this is more a legal question (even more out of my league) than 
>anything...  Any comments?

I think the essential issue is to convince the
courts that running a cryptoarchive background
process (distributed Eternity server) makes you a "Common Carrier", with
all the legal protection you get from that classification.  

I agree with you and Bill that
this is feasible once the legal profession gets a clue.. maybe in our
lifetimes :-)

The worst-case situation is a very widely 
dispersed government denying that kind of 
common-carrier status.  Imagine congress
signing something giving the UN that power,
then declaring all encrypted-anonymous-archives 
illegal.  Send a few blue-hats or a cruise missile
to take out the non-signers.  Back home: "who cares, just the UN protecting
the children, so what if
a Cayman casino or Togo bank gets toasted.  No one was hurt, and the world
is safe for imbiciles"

In such a scenario you could take other steps.
Steganography helps keep you from being noticed.
Bursty-communications patterns are harder to 
stop/trace.  CDROMs are readily manufactured
hidden, and disguised.

Perhaps the cypherpunk edition of Netscape
will include anonymous remailing / traffic mixing
services by default :-)





David Honig 			honig@alum.mit.edu
---------------------------------------------------
If we can prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people
under the pretense of
 caring for them, they will be happy.  -TJ