From: mc/G=Brad/S=Hicks/OU=0205925@mhs.attmail.com
Subject: Re- EFFector Online 3.06- B
Originator: daemon@eff.org
Organization: EFF mail-news gateway
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 15:44:57 GMT

Date: 10/2/92   11:43 AM
Subj: Re: EFFector Online 3.06: Bruce Sterling
 
Hmmm.  I thought it was an excellent article, a fantastic article.  Bruce
is wrestling with moral issues that are NEVER simple to tangle; as he well
points out, once you acknowledge moral relativism, drawing lines is not
easy ... but sometimes necessary.  He admits that these are judgements
that he's uncomfortable with, and that his rules are rules he's still
negotiating with himself.  Those are all good signs of high integrity.
 
The line he draws is that if you hack for cash, it's immoral.  Presumably
that means that if you hack for cash it's immoral whether the cash comes
from the KGB, the DEA, or the Washington Post.  If that's the line he
draws (and I suspect it is), then while I disagree, I can respect it.
 
On the other hand, over-reliance on the "Hannover hackers" case for
examples makes me unhappy.  Particularly when I read somebody here's
(Mike's?) description of Pengo et al's actions as "selling out their
country."
 
That particular gang was made up of citizens of one country, being
contracted by a second country, to spy on a third country.  No matter how
you slice it, that's NOT selling out your own country.  This is
particularly true when the third country had maintained military
occupation of the first country for more than a generation, and when the
third country's stated military policy was to sacrifice the first
country's civilians in a nuclear exchange in the event of any military
action by the second country that it disapproved of enough.
 
Is it really as impossible as it seems to get people here, especially Mike
Godwin, to remember that at the time of the hack, the United States was
the only nuclear power with an explicit "first use" policy?  It was
explicit US policy that if the USSR or its "puppets" invaded any NATO
country with conventional weapons, the US would retaliate with nukes.
Several attempts were made in Congress to overturn this policy, and each
attempt either failed or was vetoed.  Also at the same time as the hack,
the US's SDI tests were in flagrant violation of the ABM treaty.  And do I
have to remind you that the United States is the only country with a
history of use of nuclear weapons in war -- and that that use consisted of
two nuclear attacks on civilians?  These three things taken together
persuaded a lot of people, particularly German anarcho-pacifists and
Greens, that the US was pushing the world closer to a global thermonuclear
holocaust.
 
Once you wander into moral relativism, it's hard to say where anybody
would draw the line.  But something tells me that German anarchists and
pacifists saw nothing wrong with digging for American strategies on
nuclear weapons placement in Germany, or on American plans to ignore the
ABM treaty via SDI.  And by every record I've seen, those two classes of
information were the primary target.
 
By Bruce Sterling's rules, the fact that they accepted payment for this
makes them the bad guys.  After all, sex is moral but prostitution is
immoral.  Personally, I prefer an old (if unpopular) Libertarian slogan:
"Prostitution is the combination of sex and free enterprise.  Which one do
you oppose?"  I think that if it's moral to do something, it's moral to
get paid for it.
 
Since we're talking about a Bruce Sterling article, where I would draw the
line is mostly irrelevant, but if you care:  I tend to draw my lines in
keeping with the Law of the New Aeon.  As long as you remember that "every
man and woman is a star," and respect other people's rights to live as
they will, etc., including their right to kill you if you infringe on
their rights, then you are unlikely to run amok.  When in doubt, the
Wiccan Rede is a good rede (definition: "rule of thumb"): "An it harm
none, do what thou wilt."  And like Bruce, no, I'm not certain that these
are the final answers, or even MY final answers.
 
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
 J. Brad Hicks                 | Poor is the man whose pleasures depend
 mhs!mc!Brad_Hicks@attmail.com | on the permission of another.
 
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk,misc.int-property,alt.suit.att-bsdi,comp.unix.bsd