Hey, I'm not allowed to say this is a fantastically dumb idea in proper journalism, am I? This was lesson I learnt on my first day working at a magazine. My initial assignment was to attend ANSI C++ standards committee meeting. I went along, carefully collected up all the drunken gossip, came back, and wrote up how incredibly doomed I thought it looked. My editor pointed out that yes, it was doomed, but some of my audience didn't think that, and they'd be the ones who'd really like to know what went on there without all this editorialising, thank you very much. This is not to say that I agree with that, which is why we ended up doing NTK. Some things are just too stupid not to pass comment.

Aaaanyway. Habeas is basically MAPS on a stronger legal footing. But do blackhole lists work? Dunno. You're suspicious about them, because they seem very manually-entered, very arbitrary, very prone-to-corruption, and very anti-connectivity. But there's a whole bunch of people - sysadmins mainly - who love 'em. All of your criticisms work, I think, for any blackhole system, not just Habeas, so it's a bit harsh to say that these are all flaws exclusively of their system.

 I think Habeas' problem is less that their plan completely sucks, and more that the one group who really applaud the idea of blackholes will be suspicious of clever legal hacks. I spoke to a few sysadmins yesterday, and they were very "Hmmm. Neat. Yeah, that sounds okay.". It was interesting to wake up and watch the slashdot hive-mind turn against it.

I dunno -- the point isn't so much to damn this (as you would in editorial), but to point out that it raises as many questions as it answers.

For example:

* If blackholes solved spam, then why isn't spam solved?

* Since the majority of spammers are already engaged in illegal activity, how will making some minority of spammers' activities slightly more illegal help us solve the spam problem?

* How will Habeas prosecute anonymous 419 scammers in corrupt kelptocracies where the rule of law has been all but eliminated?

* How can Habeas possibly police the use of its haiku in a way that's cost-effective?
Of course, it's hard to do this without getting an actual interview with the Habeas people -- that's the key difference between editorial and reportage; instead of asking the impossible questions rhetorically, you ask them of real people.

I really like the piece, Danny, just in case that wasn't clear, but I think that your experiment needs the investigative side of things in order to attain actual journalism.