X-Message-Number: 2279
From: 
Subject: CRYONICS  Orphan column
Date: Tue, 25 May 93 01:48:32 PDT

[As subscribers to Cryonics know, I have been grinding out a column on 
my mix of interests for over two years.  I wrote this one for two 
issues back, but since the magazine was a little short of space, and 
the column was kind of tangential to cryonics, Ralph Whelan (the 
editor) didn't use it.  Since the material is kind of perishable (some 
is already very dated) I thought I would post it for those who might 
have wondered where the column went.] 

News of the Weird

H. Keith Henson


I decided to write about current events this time.  Of course, by the 
time this gets printed and mailed out to you, what I write about will 
be rather old news, but there might be some lesions here.

There was another series of raids on computer systems lately.  I 
happened to get involved in the aftermath of one of them, where the 
Customs Service raided and confiscated a "Fidonet" node in a national 
network of 20,000 nodes.  I providing copies of the legal research 
which was done in Alcor's email case and the Steve Jackson case 
reported here last time.  You may have heard about this series of 
raids, "Operation Longarm" because "child porn" is a hot button item 
which gets lots of media attention. 

It seems that Customs got a line on a bbs in Denmark which catered to 
this particular crowd.  They tapped the overseas calls made to that 
board, and eventually raided all those they thought had these 
particular bits (which made up the questionable graphic images) stored 
on their computers. 

I am not about to defend child porn, but like every other witch hunt 
the government gets into, innocent people get trampled.  This happened 
to Alcor in the Dora Kent events, to Steve Jackson over the E911 
excitement, to the day care people in Newport Beach caught in totally 
improbable accusations of child abuse, and the witches in Salem.  Lynch 
mobs are easy to raise, and cops are not immune to the allure. 

The guy who ran the fidonet node told me he had never heard of the 
Denmark bbs, and had no images on his machine which were not on a 
thousand other machines.  But he thinks he had a user on his node who 
had called the Denmark board. 

Guilty or innocent, the customs officials who conducted the raid made 
the same procedural errors the coroners made when they raided Alcor, 
and the Secret Service made in the Steve Jackson Games raid.  They did 
not have warrants to block the email of some 400 people with accounts 
on that machine as the Electronic Communication Privacy Act requires, 
and, since the machine was in the process of storing and forwarding 
(the electronic equivalent of publishing) to some hundreds of 
conferences on Fidonet, they ran afoul of the Privacy Protection Act 
(designed to protect newspaper offices) as well.  It will be 
interesting to see how this one turns out. 

After I started on this column, a report on the judgement in the Steve 
Jackson case came over the net.  

> From: Steve Jackson <>
> Subject: We have a verdict.
> Originator: 
> X-Submissions: 
> Organization: Texas Internet Consulting
> Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1993 21:24:46 GMT
> 
> We won.
>  
> Pete Kennedy, our attorney at George, Donaldson & Ford, called me
> with the news about 3:30 today. Apparently the decision came in late
> Friday while Pete was at the CFP.
>  
> The judge ruled for us on both the PPA and ECPA, though he says that
> taking the computer out the door was not an "interception." (I have not
> read the decision yet, so no quotes here.)
>  
> He awarded damages of $1,000 per plaintiff under the ECPA.
>  
> Under the PPA, he awarded SJ Games $42,259 for lost profits in 1990, and
> out of pocket costs of $8,781.
>  
> Our attorneys are also entitled to submit a request for their costs.
>  
> No word on appeal yet.
>  
> Look for a more complete and coherent account after we all read
> the decision.
>  
> Please copy this announcement to all electronic and other media.
>  
> Thanks for your support through all this!

Texas has been a major source of news lately.  The shootout between 
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the Branch Dividians 
has been going on two weeks at the time I wrote this.  I have a deep 
understanding of (and loathing for) cults.  But I must say that the 
cowboy activities of the BATF in staging a "media event" with TV 
cameras rolling near Waco was very disturbing.  As I understand it, 
the offense used as an excuse for the original raid (converting a semi 
auto to full auto) is punishable by a *fine*.  The guy they were after 
would have come in to be arrested if they had asked him, but 
descending in force on armed people waiting for the minions of evil to 
attack them at the end of the world was a *big* mistake.  I have not 
seen the footage involved, but there were reports that the BATF fired 
first (and by accident at that!). 

There was considerable discussion about the actions of the government 
in this case over the Extropians email list.  An armed group does seem 
to attract a whole lot of unwelcome attention.  Reminds me of the long 
form of the Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times, and 
attract the attention of important people."  There may be a lesion 
here.  Extropians (many of whom are signed up for cryonics) are in 
many ways as divergent in thinking as the Davidians, but so far we 
have not attracted much attention. 

The other email group I read is "cyperpunks," a group devoted to 
spreading the use of strong encryption for net traffic.  (There is 
considerable overlap between these two groups and Kevin Brown's 
Cryonet readership.)  Operation Longarm got some coverage because it 
was rumored that one or more of the people scooped up had encrypted 
their files.  One of the more interesting (but unknown) legal questions 
is:  can a person be forced to reveal the encryption key to their 
files?  Or could they invoke the Fifth Amendment?  We may know soon. 

Another interesting thread was on the bazaar concept of "legal" kiddy 
porn.  Computers are widely used to "age" the appearance of photographs 
of children who have been missing for years.  The inverse process is 
quite a bit simpler.  Playboy photos and entire porn videos could be 
treated to a computer "unaging" process on the actors which would 
"morph" them to look younger.  Of course, the morphing need not start 
with human actors, you could start with *frogs*. 

It's after midnight, and this is getting ridiculous.  I might try to 
do something more technical next time. 

[Or I may sign off doing these columns--Keith]

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