Re: Cypherpunks as a Continuing Criminal Enterprise?

[Petro <petro@playboy.com>]

At 12:07 AM -0500 9/9/98, Tim May wrote:
>Could our group be charged as a "continuing criminal enterprise" under the
>RICO statute?
>
>It occurs to me that if Carl Johnson, who is linked several times to our
>group/list in the court documents, is successfully prosecuted,then the Feds
>may be able to cite both Bell and Johnson as evidence of a conspiracy.
>Which probably wouldn't be too hard to prove, as many of us have admitted
>to conspiring mightily to undermine various institutions. (And we even use
>encypted e-mail, the very essence of a secret conspiracy.)

	As far as I know, conspiring to END the government, or change the
government is perfectly legal, as long as you are not planning on using
violence to carry it out.

	We (well, as many as are, we is a difficult thing on this list) are
prepared to _resist with violence_ the invasion of our homes, and (to a
different extent) the removal of our rights, but those are in themselves
illegal things, so defending oneself from them is the most basic
"inalienable right".

	Then again, we are dealing with the Peoples United Soverign States
Government.

>It might be fun to see them try this. Would they charge some of us as

	Well, at least for those of you rich enough to pay for lawyers. The
rest of us will either have to plea, flee, or die.

>ringleaders? Or would they declare the entity itself an illegal
>organization? (As they have done with various cultural, political, and even
>religous groups, like Hezbollah, the Aum religion, etc.)

	Hmmm, if they were to do this, how bout we have a second set of
servers running the distributed mailing list software under a different
name, say Sinderallapunx, or OldDemocrapunks.

	Ok, so being a "member" of cypherpunks is illegal, change the name,
let them have their "victory".

>Interesting times.


petro@playboy.com----for work related issues. I don't speak for Playboy.
petro@bounty.org-----for everthing else.      They wouldn't like that.
                                              They REALLY
Economic speech IS political speech.          wouldn't like that.