<<My fingers did me wrong and sent this during editing. Please
disregard the immediately preceeding post --- SRF>>
Tim May wrote:
> Well put. (This is the second fine essay from Gil Hamilton this
> morning...I hope this signals more signal in the S/N ratio is coming.)
I've noticed that, too. Hardly any spam in the last day. Woo-hoo.
> Recall the case around October or November of last year when the FBI
> applied pressure to an ISP to get a "Y2K training tape" yanked off
> the site. The training tape, which was available for download as an
> MPEG or somesuch, purported to show how on New Year's Eve the army
> would move in to either suppress or foment disorder. An entertaining
> little video, but pretty clearly a work of performance art.
>
> (I don't have URLs handy for the swirl of stories written about it at
> the time. I think Declan did a piece on it.)
>
> The FBI did not seek a court order, which is the legal way to
> (sometimes) quash speech. Rather, it applied extra-legal pressures.
>
> And the ISP caved in.
>
> IIRC, the ACLU was talking at one point about a lawsuit against the
> Feds for applying this kind of extra-legal pressure. Haven't heard
> any follow-up. Perhaps lost in the Y2K fizzle.
The FBI first contacted Mike Z. He didn't pull his site, so the
FBI then contacted his ISP. The ISP, a one-man shop, caved
immediately. Like Tim, I haven't seen anything about this since last
year.
One of the first mentions was in the Village Voice:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9947/boal.shtml
Wired covered it:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,32772,00.html
Slashdot covered it:
Original article: http://slashdot.org/yro/99/11/24/013232_F.shtml
Follow-up: http://slashdot.org/articles/99/11/30/1258205.shtml
(The Village Voice and Wired articles are both linked from the
Slashdot pages. The Slashdot pages are quite large---over 300KB---
because of all the comments.)
--
Steve Furlong, Computer Condottiere Have GNU, will travel
518-374-4720 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
