A couple of people have sent me mail saying, in one case almost
literally, "Ira Magaziner has the U.S. military's bombs, we don't,
game over." "The U.S. Army has nuclear weapons" one credulous person
has said to me.
To those saying this, I'd like to say: you've been brainwashed.
Ira Magaziner is NOT the commander in chief of the military, nor is he
in a position to go out and bomb your offices, or send troops to shoot
you, nor would such an order be legal, and no army officer would obey it.
More importantly, and more seriously, Ira Magaziner has NO LEGAL BASIS
for issuing his dictat. No law authorizes the U.S. Government to
regulate or take action in this area, and the U.S. executive branch
only gets to act when it has legal authority granted by the Congress.
The US Government is a government of LAWS, not a dictatorship. People
often forget this, and assume the executive can just order anyone to
do anything, but it cannot. It has to have a law in order to act --
and it has no law in this case, and thus no authority. If it did have
a law, it would likely be forced (before rulemaking) to follow a
detailed procedure, including publication of regulations in the
federal register, holding of hearings, etc. No such activity has taken
place.
In short, Ira Magaziner's "Green Paper" is just that -- a green piece
of paper. It has no legal basis, no standing. Legally, its just his
office's opinion.
If you disobey it, at worst, he can sue you -- maybe. I'm sure he
wouldn't want you to think this, but I can't see any basis for
believing otherwise.
In a situation like this, if you disobey Mr. Magaziner, what can he,
in practice, do to you? You have broken no law. He had no legal
authority to make his statement in the first place. Given this, who
are the courts going to get mad at? Certainly not anyone following the
currently written U.S. Code, which, as I noted, doesn't seem to have a
section on "executive issuing unilateral orders without hearings to
private citizens on what they can do with DNS servers".
Perry
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jan 30 2000 - 03:22:21 PST