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From: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu (Muffy Barkocy)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: civilized society? (was Re: Student suspended for distributing /etc/passwd)
Message-ID: <MUFFY.91Jun22191455@remarque.berkeley.edu>
Date: 23 Jun 91 03:14:55 GMT
Article-I.D.: remarque.MUFFY.91Jun22191455
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	<1991Jun22.234109.25051@athena.cs.uga.edu>
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In-Reply-To: mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu's message of 22 Jun 91 23: 41:09 GMT

In article <1991Jun22.234109.25051@athena.cs.uga.edu> mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu (Michael A. Covington) writes:
   The other thing about "intent" is that every cracker I've ever heard of
   has convinced _himself_ that his intentions were above reproach.

   Having good intentions is not enough; in a civilized society,
   people actually obey the rules.

Really?  How about Gandhi?  Rosa Parks?  George Sand?  In some
"civilized societies," people are killed for not obeying "the rules."
In others, they can, to some degree, consider "the rules" and determine
that they do not think certain "rules" deserve to be obeyed.  They can
even try to change these rules.  In the process of making the change,
they may or may not obey "the rules."

Speaking of "the rules," there are many different types of "rules," all
of which are obeyed to a greater or lesser degree by different people.
In the case of student accounts, when I was first given one, there were
no "rules," as far as I knew.  The instructor just handed them out and
gave us assignments.  There may have actually been written rules, there
may not have been.  I still don't know.  In society, we have various
sorts of rules: some are laws, with associated legal punishments; others
are "morals" and other rules of conduct, which are primarily enforced by
the disapproval of the people around us.

Nonetheless, things do change, and the changes are often caused or
helped by disobedience.  I am not attempting to say that it is a good
thing to disobey the law/rule/convention of, for example, not mailing a
password file to someone.  What I'm saying is that a pronouncement that
"it's wrong because it's always been wrong/society says it's wrong, and
that's that" is a very dangerous thing.  If we are not free to object to
or even disobey "rules" that we do not agree with, I don't think we have
all that much of a "civilization."  Of course, that doesn't mean people
should be surprised at being punished (in whatever way) for disobeying.
Also, in our "civilized society," discussing or objecting to the
severity of a punishment is not the same as saying the action was not
"wrong."

Muffy