Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!world!decwrl!ucbvax!mindcrf.UUCP!karish
From: karish@mindcrf.UUCP (Chuck Karish)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Re: frontier justice
Message-ID: <9010061608.AA20167@mindcrf.mindcraft.com>
Date: 6 Oct 90 16:08:08 GMT
References: <16426@know.pws.bull.com>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: Mindcraft, Inc.
Lines: 44

In article <16426@know.pws.bull.com> eli@PWS.BULL.COM (Steve Elias) writes:
>eli> please cut the bullshit.  the hacker dude and his friends were coke
>eli> addicted dipshits selling info to the KGB.  your comparison is obnoxious.
>
>chuck> This brings to mind Gene Spafford's admonition to Mike Godwin that he
>chuck> stop whining about civil liberties and use his energy putting crooks in
>chuck> jail.  The assumptions that we can always tell the good guys from the
>chuck> bad guys, and that anything goes when it's time to fight the baddies,
>chuck> are dangerous ones.  They embody the same lazy cupidity that forms the
>chuck> intellectual basis for the 'war on drugs'.
>
>is that really what Gene said, or is that how your mindcraft read it?

Message-ID: <11502@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
    Along with the vigorous protestations about rights, I think it would
    be much more constructive to think up ways to stop cracking/hacking
    and help catch the transgressors than it would be to continue to
    publicly slam people who don't necessarily agree with you.

>civil liberties, indeed!  the implication that Cliff violated
>peoples' civil liberties is again obnoxious to me, wrangler.

This is more `us against them' thinking.  I agree that Stoll is a Good
Guy, and that his detective work was justified and commendable.  The
work, and his book, pointed out some real dangers to our society.

Whether or not the intrusive actions in this case were justified, it's
troublesome that they were (according to people who saw the show, which
I didn't) presented uncritically.  I thought this discussion was about
the issues that should have been developed; I don't see any need to
discuss Cliff Stoll's character.

>chuck> You can always tell the bad guys in the movies [ ... ]
>
>if the NOVA show didn't show you enough of Cliff for you to figure
>out whether he's a "good guy" or a "bad guy", then perhaps the show
>wasn't done that well after all.

That he was presented as a hero doesn't make all his actions proper
models for other situations.  NOVA could have pointed this out.
-- 

	Chuck Karish		karish@mindcraft.com
	Mindcraft, Inc.		(415) 323-9000