Sender: "Steve Eppley" <•••@••.•••> > U.S. Marshals seized computer equipment and files Friday >from an Arlington man charged with posting copyrighted materials >on the Internet criticizing the Church of Scientology. In these modern times, shouldn't this seizure be considered a violation of the Constitution? Isn't it unreasonable to seize someone's computer as evidence, when making a tape backup of the hard disk will suffice? (Better yet: make several backups--encrypted and authenticated--and disperse them to safeguard against tampering, and leave one of the authenticatable backups with the defendant.) If ignorance of the law is no excuse, neither should be law enforcement's ignorance of technology. ---Steve (Steve Eppley •••@••.•••) @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Sender: George White <•••@••.•••> On Fri, 1 Sep 1995, Cyber Rights wrote: Government information should include many types of public data. There is a lot of information collected at all levels of government that is, in principle, public. Although this information is increasing stored in machine readable form, much of it is difficult to obtain in a form that is easy to use. An increasing fraction of the public has the resources to perform analyses with such public information that can have implications for decisions. There are examples where decisions were based on erroneous analyses or invalid data. Public scrutiny can help reduce the incidence of such errors. Access to machine readable data can help the "public" provide higher quality input to elected government. A case history on access to public data in Maine is available at http://ccn.cs.dal.ca/~aa056/Freedom_of_Access/Freedom_of_Access.html > Some people think email to legislators will make a big difference in > how people feel about government, and how responsive it is. But many > others have pointed out that email will soon be abused with massive > mailings of form letters (as paper mail is now). ... I agree that the likely path is towards online voting, but there is a second path that uses net resources to develop high quality submissions, particularly in areas of local responsibility (e.g., municipality or county level decisions), based on input from interested parties around the world. Subjects such as land use bylaws, regulations for recreational vehicles, etc. are examples where local decisions could benefit from the perspective the internet could provide: experiences in other jurisdictions, example wordings, etc. are not often available to local decision processes. > ... > Again, I agree with the critics. Revolutions are led by small groups > of people with a full-time commitment to their goal; they have > persuaded the masses of their trustworthiness but do not consult > everybody for every decision. > ... > > Essentially, I think we don't need better ways to talk to our > legislators, but better ways to talk to each other. ... > While I basically agree, the issue of access to public information is key. Currently legislators often make decisions based on a single analysis whose assumptions are never examined. We should be using net resources to improve the quality of our discussions and thus the input we can make to government. For this to happen we need the raw information. There has been plenty of noise about things (naughty pictures and bomb building manuals) that some want excluded from the internet, but we must also consider things that are not on the net but should be. If individuals will install filters to control what things on the net can be seen, perhaps access to public records should be viewed as a filtering problem: by default, all public records are visible unless through due process we install a filter. -- George White <•••@••.•••> <•••@••.•••> ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~-~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~ Posted by -- Andrew Oram -- •••@••.••• -- Cambridge, Mass., USA Moderator: CYBER-RIGHTS (CPSR) World Wide Web: http://jasper.ora.com/andyo/cyber-rights/cyber-rights.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~hwh6k/public/cyber-rights.html FTP: ftp://jasper.ora.com/pub/andyo/cyber-rights You are encouraged to forward and cross-post messages and online materials, pursuant to any contained copyright & redistribution restrictions. ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~-~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~
