Re: Jim Bell raid

[Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>]

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At 04:56 AM 4/9/97 -0400, Sergey Goldgaber wrote:
>The search warrant was not made public on the cpunks list.  As you can see
>form the above excerpt, I was commenting on the "IRS Inspection" report,
which
>was virtually the first description of Jim Bell's arrest, long before there
>were even requests for information on the procedures for obtaining the
>search warrants, etc...

I realize that we're talking about net-time, but "long before" seems like a
poor way to describe the 2-2.5 days between the appearance of the "IRS
Inspection" report (which was, in fact, the transcription of newspaper story)
and the WWW publication of the warrant & accompanying material. Also, Declan
was posting details from the warrant within 24 hours of the initial message.

>After following the debate, I would definately agree that AP played an
>important part in sparking the paranoia of the govt. officials to arrest
>Jim, which in turn sparked off paranoia on the list, and rather reactionary
>comments towards AP, and reactionary flames towards the reactionaries.  :)
>Hopefully this trend won't continue.

As far as I can tell, the events of last week haven't changed people's
opinions of AP at all - people who thought it was interesting/useful still
do, and people who thought it was uninteresting/stupid still do. I can't
speak for other posters to the list, but I'm inclined to distance myself from
AP not because I'm scared of a government raid, but because I think it's
theoretically uninteresting/unremarkable, politically/tactically poorly
considered, morally indefensible, and irresponsibly misleading to the extent
it purports to discuss US law. I don't want my comments about Jim Bell's
right to discuss his silly ideas to be confused with apologies or approval
for the ideas themselves. 

I believe Jim has every right to write essays about AP, give speeches &
seminars about AP, talk about "wonderful things" all that he likes, etc. But
the "marketplace of ideas" model, whereby good speech is expected to negate
bad speech, depends on the willingness of other people to provide "good
speech", or at least call "bad speech" into question. I think AP is "bad
speech" in the same way the "the earth is flat" is bad speech; it is (and
ought to be) legal to say it, but it's also a non-useful idea, which I hope
will be abandoned in favor of more useful ideas.

I've been ignoring (pre-raid) discussions about AP because I think that an
eternal recycling of arguments is uninteresting and unproductive. I think
that the search of Jim's house, and its relationship to his free speech
activities, is interesting - not because of the [lack of] quality of his
ideas, but because I think this may be a case where law enforcement used its
power to search & seize property in a punitive fashion. And that concerns me,
because I think that isn't uncommon where the target is a "dissident", of one
flavor or another; and I think that dissidents don't/shouldn't lose their
civil rights as a consequence of their status. ("when they came for .."
argument incorporated herein by reference.)

(The search is also interesting for reasons unrelated to Jim and his ideas,
because it provides insight into the level and type and timing of law
enforcement access to the net, treatment of a "confidential informant", and
protocol/procedure for search & seizure of computers and potentially
encrypted data, etc.)  

But that doesn't mean that the dissidents get special respect or treatment
for poor thinking. I think AP is poorly reasoned and poorly researched. (And
I think that "dissident" + "poor analysis/research" + "obsessive focus" =
"loon", hence my original comments.) 


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--
Greg Broiles                | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell:
gbroiles@netbox.com         | 
http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto.
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