On Sun, 17 Sep 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > And even if they decided to intrude on privacy, it would be... be...
> > well, for those of you who truly understand POP and HTTP and SMTP and
> > TCP/IP and UUCP and so on, you can only imagine how difficult it would be
> > to set up the e-mail equivilent of, say, a water meter. And how much joy
> > the Open Source community would take in subverting same. It just ain't
> > gonna happen.
> These reasons have never stopped the government before.
> The USPS has laid claim to many things, including "mail" openings in our
> own homes. The infrastructure to support an email surcharge would suit
> the needs of the FBI's carnivore program very well. If the open source
> community "subverted" this, we would all become criminals.
> Microsoft, among others, would love that.
You know, I wasn't even going to bother to respond to this, but you bring
up issues that I feel need to be addressed. There is a fine line between
common-sense caution in trusting authority, and paranoia. Frankly, I
think that you've crossed it. First and foremost, carnivore is intended
to stop (or, rather, track) DDoS attacks -- e-mail is a *VERY* different
creature, and propagated in very different ways. (Well, it goes over a
TCP stream, right? Not necessarily. It is all SMTP RFC compliant,
right? Well, no. Etc.) Second, attempting to monitor e-mail would make
the hue and cry over the CDA look like a kindergarten scuffle. Third,
the OS community doesn't need to "subvert" it -- it's subverted by the
very nature of this distributed thing called the Internet: can you run
Sendmail on your box? Of course! Is there a deterministic way to trace
traffic? No! All of this (and much more) makes it fantastically
difficult to implement anything as paranoid as the government attempting
to implement e-mail tarriffs. And, frankly, a law that can't, or won't,
be enforced suddenly becomes meaningless. (Just ask all the people I see
who change lanes without using their blinkers, or, better yet, some of
the sex laws still in place in some of the South, not to mention
thousands of laws that have become anachronisms, but never revoked.) If
you believe that we're already in enough of a police state that this
irrelevent, I suggest you contemplate moving, instead of complaining.
I'm not denying that the gov't wishes to make money off of the Internet
-- who doesn't? But, just for the hell of it, might I remind you that
the government GAVE AWAY the Internet after (*gasp*) using our tax
dollars to jumpstart it. Read _Where Wizards Stay Up Late_ for a fairly
in-depth (if dry) history of the beginnings of same. Government should
always, IMHO, be held under suspicion, but that doesn't mean it's
inherently evil, or inherently out to get us, and operating as if it were
is just a good way to start jumping at shadows.
Sincerely,
Ken (Centrist-is-my-middle-name [pun intended]) D'Ambrosio
P.S. And, just FYI, I'm sure that if you were to open a post office box,
you could board up the "'mail' openings" in your house without the USPS
batting an eye. And why you put "mail" in quotes is beyond me -- do you
imagine they're used for something else? And I bet you could even refuse
to receive any mail, whatsoever, though that would probably make you
unpopular with, say, PSNH, among others, when bill time rolls around.
It's the fact that that is where the mail is delivered that the USPS
concerns itself with; once that is not the case, I would bet they don't
give a hoot.
P.P.S. The only reason I sent this to the list was because yours was the
second such e-mail I've responded to, and I've deleted out-of-hand the
vast majority of e-mails with this subject line. If anyone wishes to
argue with me further about this, please do so directly, so that we
needn't spam the members of the list who wish, gad-zooks, to read about
Linux, and not potential infringements of civil liberties.
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