[declan at well.com: [Politech] Lawsuit challenges law targeting Internet "annoyances" [fs]]

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 11:45:32AM -0500, Ashton Vaz wrote:

> Seems like a reasonable law.  Why are people scared/upset by this?  

Seems like a reasonable law? Sure, if you've just put down the crack pipe.
A reasonable law should *protect* the operator.

> Isn't anyone paying attention to this clause - "and with intent to 
> annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person"?  It isn't anonymity or 

If the abusive traffic *seems* to originate from your server, then
1) intent to annoy, abuse, threaten or harass is clearly evident from abuse
   complaint (emails, web server logs, etc).
2) the originator is suddenly you, until proven otherwise

The proof is usually associated with a search warrant, hardware
confiscation (the process is so slow you can consider that loss
permanent), and plenty of quality time spent with your lawyer, 
and in court.

I can see how this helps making more USians run Tor servers.

> anonymizing services that are being targeted, but misuse of anonymizing 
> technologies.

But misuse of anonymizing technologies is habitual. The current anonymizing
infrastructure doesn't allow persistent pseudonyms and prestige tracking,
so this is an inevitable side effect of providing anonymizing service at all. 
We could use a law making operators guilty until proven otherwise like another 
trepanation. 

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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