In Reply to: Here's an alternative posted by Alan on June 12, 2004 at 08:27:41:
As easy as that is to do, most people have no idea how to do it. I don't see a lot of proxy use over at NDN, generally, only when we have a serious hacker type trolling the system.
At NDN, we do have a specific policy that we will attempt to notify a user before we comply with a subpoena. That gives a user some lead time to act before we hand the info over, and then their ISP hands it over, which could take a few weeks, especially if they are on a big ISP like AOL.
The thing is that the government doesn't yet treat online communication as protected speech. The laws are all over the place, from state to state and at the federal level.
I've been running online services since 1983, and it has been a battle every day to try and get law enforcement and the courts to understand that electronic communication is the same as spoken and printed communication. I would like to see the same protection that we have against wiretaps and reading our snail mail.
9-11 was a stumbling block to all of this, because in the frenzy to catch real terrorists, we are all treated as potential terrorists. It impacts our ability to engage in private protected speech using our computers. We used to use the telephone and write letters to do what we now do with computers. But, the same rights have not come along with the technology.
I joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation when it first started up. At that time, it was to protect the rights of users of computer BBS systems, and I ran one of the largest ones on the west coast. This group has continued to fight for online privacy and free speech, and is very worth looking at.