I was outside the USA, and it was just a request with no legal weight. I stayed on a tiny island in the Caribbean for the duration of the trial. (It wasn't a

I was outside the USA, and it was just a request with no legal weight. I stayed on a tiny island in the Caribbean for the duration of the trial. (It wasn't a big deal to FBI, either -- I answered their questions through counsel, and the whole thing was essentially a formality. Jim Bell was posting to a public list for which I maintained public archives, so I had no legal or moral duty to him or anyone else. I was 18 or 19, and almost went because it would have been a free trip to DC and potentially interesting, but the correctly raised concern is that I could have been ordered to remain available if I had been there. Not worth the risk, especially since I wasn't particularly helpful to anyone (I would have been fine with helping IRS CID when a guy was posting personal threats on people publicly) I actually tried to explain to both sides that my archiver wasn't assured to be canonical; it was just a regular list subscriber, with a simple to discover email address, and no inbound filtering (since cp list addresses were distributed and constantly changing), so anyone could post random messages to it. Even worse, sending a forged message id with new content would overwrite the original message.