[9414] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: International Enforcement
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bruce Gingery)
Tue Jan 4 18:58:35 1994
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 1994 16:40:45 -0700 (MST)
From: Bruce Gingery <lcbginge@antelope.wcc.edu>
To: francis@avalle.insoft.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <9401041529.AA04993@avalle.insoft.com>
On Tue, 4 Jan 1994 francis@avalle.insoft.com wrote:
> A judge can't just ignore the law. Anyway, it's the *lack* of a
> protective treaty that could endanger the site managers.
>
> > and merely the lack of culpability of the "carriers"
> >(individuals who carry) could be attributed as precedent.
>
> What do you mean by "lack of culpability"? (Maybe: what carriers are
> you talking about?)
>
> I reiterate: in the hardcopy case, someone gets info out of Canada and
> to the Buffalo paper, which prints it; the paper can't be prosecuted,
> but the people who carry it across the border can have it confiscated.
> Analogously, in the electronic case, the info gets to someone in the
> US, who posts it; the poster is safe, but the people who export it to
> Canada may be in trouble.
And if the "poster" places the entire newspaper in a box and ship it via
the two "national" postal services, who violates the law and is liable for
the contents of the box? If the "poster" encapsulates the information in
a message which may or may not be "plain text" in transit, who is culpable
for transporting that message.
If the "package" sits in a warehouse on the Canadian side of the border,
are warehouse personnel clupable if they don't "censor" the package
according to the edicts? How many postmasters have been jailed for
violation of a gag order, when their personnel, or machinery in their
control technically violate the ban on dissemination> If a BBS or other
system operator does not "censor" the E-Mail reposited in his or her system,
is he/she culpable?
At what point does it become reasonable to "shoot the messenger"? Can
information be contraband, despite or because of a gag order? Again, I
reiterate, the ONLY person who may PROPERLY be held liable is the one who
initially gathers and diseminates the information in violation of the
bench order. Any other action by the bench is A COVER FOR THE
INCOMPETENCE OF THE PERSON ON THE BENCH and NOT proper action. Conspiracy
should have to be proved to hold ANYBODY ELSE in the chain you've described, or
the physical analogy I've described!
Take your case one step farther. The details of the case on which the
judge issued a gag order, are of wide enough interest, that the wire
services pick up the story from the (was it Buffalo?) newspaper. If that
story goes out on a satellite channel which is picked up automatically in
Canada, should not the judge order the damn satellite shot down or
otherwise confiscated? Indeed, by the case being made on the other side
of this issue, the company which RECEIVES this story, even if they know
about the gag order and don't pass it beyond internal personnel in the
wire service subscriber, should be held in contempt of the gag order, with
the likely followup of their place of business being locked down, or the
equiment confiscated and the people jailed. What if they have an
automatic feed into a Cable-TV headlines display which is triggered by the
receipt of the satellite transmission...
Perhaps the PROPER answer is do away with gag orders and all
interference with communications. Internet has done pretty well for quite
some time with a "self-controlled" anarchy. There's the precedent and
experimental "test case", and a big one at that.
Bruce Gingery lcbginge@antelope.wcc.edu
