[46884] in Cypherpunks
Re: PRIVACY: Private traces in public places
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Young)
Wed Jan 10 08:38:36 1996
From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 08:28:37 -0500
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Responding to msg by nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous) on Wed, 10
Jan 1:43 PM
> Last summer the first case in Britain of a libel on the
Internet was
> settled out of court when Laurence Godfrey accepted
undisclosed
> damages from another nuclear physicist, Philip
Hallam-Baker, over
> remarks made in 1993 on Usenet, an electronic conference
with 16
> million users. And Peter Lilley, the Social Security
Secretary, sent a
> stiff letter to the vice-chancellor of Leeds University
after one of
> its students used a faculty computer to make defamatory
allegations
> about him.
----------
The NYT reports that by 2000 there will be over 1 million
lawyers in the US.
These fine-minders, supported by the burgeoning private
investigative and security fields, will surely mine electronic
archives as thoroughly as they research paper -- and thanks to
wondrous Altavistas maybe more thoroughly.
And backed by these highly skilled lobbyists, laws will change
to make remunerative rain of -- and by -- archiving and search
technology as they have to capitalize on the technology of
doing the same in the worlds of printing, telegraph, telephone
and television.
Promotion of these privacy-invasive services on the Net
parallels the defensive measures explored on cypherpunks.
Perhaps all c'punks should subscribe to cyberia-l and vice
versa; they are hand in hand, or fist to fist, on this.
