The coup was planned and executed along the same lines as the Brezhnev’s hardline coup which removed Khrushev from power – taking over media, and then waiting for the regional leaders to switch allegiance over to the new clique. It is crucial to success of a coup d’etat to create impression that the new clique is firmly in control (since offering allegiance to the losing side meant an end of career (or worse) to these leaders).

By mid-1991 Relcom had presence in every mid-size city in the USSR – mostly in research and military institutions, and high-tech businesses – all of which had some links to local powers-that-are. The distribution of contrarian reports during near-total media blackout ensured wait-end-see attitude among the regional civil administrators and military commanders, which, in turn (when the anticipated pouring of offers of loyalty didn’t materialize) caused coup leaders to lose their nerve.

There was no significant media or government participation in on-line activities before the coup; that changed on 19th – every major news agency and a lot of government offices in USSR became connected to the Internet on that day (the entire staff at DEMOS spent most of that day (and night – didn’t get much sleep for three days) activating new accounts and instructing new users – in some cases by going directly to user premises (including Yeltsin’s office in Parliament building) and bringing pre-configured equipment. All “progressive” newspapers (and leaflets) printed 20th and 21th consisted mostly from the news arriving over the Internet (they credited it, too).

In the retrospect, the coup turned out to be a major advertisement campaign for the Internet; by the end of 1991 there were about 150 regional ISPs (mostly affiliated with Relcom, but other independent networks such as Glasnet got a boost, too) – as evident from the routing maps from that time.

They have a Firefox plug-in, and you can learn more about them here: http://www.torproject.org/

(There also was a satirical element to this name, which sounds like “partcom”, “narcom”, etc – common abbreviations for “party comissar”, “narodny (people’s) comissar”, etc).

Anyway, the founders of the company which created Relcom (which was the first Internet Service Provider in the USSR) couldn’t be called libertarians – most were engineers with dissident leanings, but otherwise rather well-integrated within Soviet regime. I still remember, however, one conversation with Valery Bardin (one of the founders), who told me that a decent person has no choice but to be an anarchist.

Ron Paul won’t run on a third party ticket because he doesn’t want to be a “spoiler”.

Once done, he takes his government assured money and walks away.

What these individuals do not seem to understand is that if you are posting, retrieving e-mail, or if your website is hosted at another party’s server, you are subject to the terms and conditions of the individual whose site you are using. In other words, you’re under a contractual obligation to play by their rules, or else you risk being banned from the site.

To my knowledge, contracts are supposed to be important to libertarians. So, violating the terms of service while using another’s website/server would, IMHO, be against libertarian philosophy.