Petty Civil Disobedience

Jeff Weinstein writes:
> 
>   I predict that 6 months after the first internet rating system is widely
> deployed, the largest use of search engines such as altavista will be to
> look for pages with the most "naughty" ratings.  Perhaps such services will
> allow text searches for free, but charge for searches based on the rating
> tag...

Not much crypto relevance, but the CDA has had much more effect than we may
realize at first. I regularly read about 25 newsgroups with an extremely wide
range of subject matter, and over the last few weeks I have seen literally
hundreds of people with things in their .sigs like, "Please excuse this CDA-
required obscenity: FUCK."

Victimless crime laws (more accurately, "consensual crime laws") have this as
their primary effect, I've found, especially when the "crime" in question is
especially petty or harmless to others. When the public is treated like a
child, it will start acting more like one. The greater the penalty for any
transgressions, the more people will start transgressing. Naturally, this
doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot in the big picture -- as James Donald has
said, if just one out of a hundred tax serfs picked up their gun and said,
"I ain't payin'," the IRS would collapse. This hasn't happened because most
people aren't into civil disobedience -- or rather, NOT WHEN THEY FEEL THE
RISK IS TOO GREAT. But if they perceive little or no risk, they will happily
break the law regularly and openly, making no attempt to conceal their
activities. Childish, because there are far more meaningful laws they could
be ignoring. But the first reaction of a child when it's told it can't do
something is to go out and do it.

Obviously, very few people feel truly threatened by CDA penalties.

-- 
http://yakko.cs.wmich.edu/~frogfarm  ...for the best in unapproved information
Tell your friends 'n neighbors you read this on the evil pornographic Internet
"Where one burns books, one will also burn people eventually." -Heinrich Heine
People and books aren't for burning. No more Alexandrias, Auschwitzs or Wacos.

Excerpts from internet.cypherpunks: 9-Mar-96 Petty Civil Disobedience by
Damaged Justice@yakko.cs 
> Not much crypto relevance, but the CDA has had much more effect than we may
> realize at first. I regularly read about 25 newsgroups with an extremely wide
> range of subject matter, and over the last few weeks I have seen literally
> hundreds of people with things in their .sigs like, "Please excuse this CDA-
> required obscenity: FUCK."
[...]
> Obviously, very few people feel truly threatened by CDA penalties.

That's because of a few possible reasons:

 a) Portions of the CDA are enjoined from being enforced and we have a
legally-binding agreement with the DoJ covering the rest. So the fear of
prosecution is not great.
 b) We expect to win court challenge, so fear of prosecution is not great.
 c) Nobody seriously believes the government will prosecute people using
word "FUCK," so fear of prosecution is not great.

The CDA is overbroad, and must be struck down. But at the same time, the
DoJ initially would use it to go after those who have otherwise
Constitutionally-protected porn publicly-available online. (Obscenity is
already illegal.) I'd be more interested in tracking the actions of
owners of adult web sites and those with explicit sexual images...
Perhaps we should put up our own protest web sites with one or two
explicit sexual images as real civil disobedience?

-Declan