L.Detweiler here. I'm extremely hurt by Hal Finney's recent accusations that I am trying to `sabotage' remailers. Quite to the contrary, I am attempting to strengthen your infrastructure through frequent use and pointing out the lapses in design. I see cypherpunks attacking Unix security holes with such fervor, but how is that you, as designers, failed to even anticipate a `geometrical explosion' attack after several years of remailer operation? If I wanted to destroy your remailers I would be sending you exploding mailbombs every second! Hal Finney claims that I have a `well known enmity' to anonymity & pseudonymity. Quite to the contrary I am fully in favor of responsible uses of it. But I also believe it is not for a remailer operator to determine `responsible use'. (And, actually, I thought you did too). The entire population of cyberspace does not understand this simple concept: cutting off a message at the source is censorship; cutting it off at the destination is filtering. I am trying to force people to understand this. Where are the reputation systems that some Cypherpunks have talked about? They are *far* more important to cyberspatial development than remailers. And in fact they will help us deal with remailers in a positive way. The essence of the animosity toward remailers is not that anonymity is involved, but that people wish to be able to control what they themselves read, and (for the closet control freaks) what other people read. The latter urge I believe is generally a perversion of free speech, outside of exceptional cases (e.g. where a parent controls what their child reads, although even this I have some objections to). But the former demand is certainly legitimate. I don't believe we have a right to ever *force* anyone to listen to us. The basic solution to this is a reputation system that associates a `credibility' or `interest' factor to `sources' (e.g. senders, identified by their email addresses) based on collective judgement, i.e. voting. It is a trivial concept but one which has so far utterly eluded *everyone* in cyberspace. It is the solution to virtually every filtering and censorship hullaballo that erupts every few seconds at some place over Usenet, mailing lists, and cyberspace. The Cypherpunks are in the best position to implement such a system. But instead you attack the wrong end of the problem, just as everyone else in cyberspace. Your philosophy should push you to realize the solution, but you are blinded by the same delusions that everyone else is. As for recent messages sent to remailers: it is true that I have been sending many messages. Mathew Ghio has switched off his remailer until they stop, he says. How fragile a system! How utterly fragile! Strive to achieve the level of resiliency of a phone system. Does the whole network come to a halt when one crank caller gets loose? Do people panic and scream that We're Under Attack By the Detweiler The Antichrist when some telemarketer gets a computerized autodialer? In cyberspace, it is the equivalent of an atom bomb. Why? Because it is an untamed wilderness, full of petty demagogues who derive their power and get their jollies from perpetuating this turmoil by failing to modify the infrastructure and adopt the attitude `our system is not so fragile it will be destroyed by abuse'. Yes, that is the key: abuse of the phone system exists, but there are established protocols for dealing with it. It is not a case of every new `abuse' becoming an international debacle with hordes of people screaming for blood and vengeance. Zen saying: `man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark'. * * * Yes, I am sending out many messages through your remailers. They are designed to get Netcom to change what I see as oppressive policies: 1. They do not agree that their own forums are public forums. They prohibit notes about competition and intimidate people from posting criticism by calling them over the phone over negative posts. 2. Bruce Woodcock censored my other account for the reason that I borrowed a Support `signature' for satiric effect (in news.admin.policy). On the phone he took the ridiculous position that it wasn't my stealing the signature but `the content of the message'. 3. Bruce Woodcock at Netcom fails to make his affiliation with Netcom clear in his messages in netcom.general. He has repeatedly browbeated and dismissed customers in the forum. I see him as illustrative of a problem at Netcom where the sysadmins don't really give a damn about any individual user or customer satisfaction of individuals. And there is *no coherent policy* about terminating accounts. 4. Whether you realize it, when the people you don't like are censored, your own protection from tyranny and oppression is diminished. If the least among us is not free or has been done an injustice, then none of us are free and we all have been done an injustice. When my account is yanked without any consequence to Netcom, they can yank any one of your accounts without consequence. 5. Freedom of speech does *not* exist unless you have *security*. If you can be deprived your ability to post by anyone, anywhere, anytime, for any reason, you do *not* have any security. `BS. I can get an account somewhere else easy.' You are dangerously deluded in this thinking. Unless there are safeguards no one has any right. 6. I have deliberately gone "easy" on my output of messages to remailers. I could easily flood them all into oblivion. But I am sending messages at a gentle drip-drip-drip pace. They make an excellent cloud over any traffic analysis being done, IMHO. 7. Ultimately we are on the same side of freedom of speech and privacy. I have only criticized cypherpunks for hypocrisy and sinister aspects of your practices that seem to contradict your own adopted philosophy. If your philosophy was openly `we are going to poison cyberspace with untold tentacles to manipulate puublic opinion' I might still attack you but certainly wouldn't accuse you of hypocrisy <g> 8. Someone remarked on my postings as `performance art'. This is my intent. I am quite amused at people like T.C.May calling it `intense abuse'. Hee, hee. I can imagine T.C.May going to see Star Wars and after getting out of the movie diverting all his money into Scud Launchers because it makes clear DARTH VADAR IS COMING! 9. Why should I lose my netcom account for vague, unspecified reasons? I am the Oliphant, the Thomas Nast, the Mark Twain, the Doonesbury of Cyberspace. And I have been censored at something like 5 accounts now for my editorial cartoons and razor-sharp satire in cyberspace. Why? Because I am a perfecting this misunderstood `art of flaming and provocation to effect social consciousness'. And every time that I am censored and no one gives a damn, and my jugular vein is slashed in front of you all with nary an objection (and an abundance of encouragement) it is a chip off of *YOUR* rights in cyberspace. 10. I am the Jew of cyberspace, kicked out of my house with my furniture confiscated at Netcom despite my pleadings. Yes, I had many megabytes of private email and files that were not backed up. And they all evaporated when someone at Netcom (gosh, I don't know who, they only give first names) decided they didn't like my scathing satire of Netcom in news.admin.policy. What was the procedure to censor me? The criteria? It is as unknown as civility in cyberspace. Cypherpunks, I continue to try to get you and the rest of the world in cyberspace to realize you are playing with fire and gasolene. You don't understand the forces at play and you, through your own actions and thoughts, are perpetuating a dangerously unstable system when simple solutions are hair-widths away. Why am I not implementing these so called `simple solutions' myself? Because the basic problem is not that no one is implementing them, it is that no one has the understanding to do so. This is a problem of a serious mental block on the part of everyone with a brain and a keyboard. And I am trying to break through that mental block in the collective consciousness of Cyberspace the only way I know how. If you permit my messages to percolate through your remailers, your infrastructure will be ultimately strengthened as people begin to understand that the proper response to inflammatory anonymous email is a disinterested "ho hum yawn" instead of erupting like Mount Saint Helens or shaking in livid anger like the San Andreas Fault. You complain about overreaction of outsiders to anonymous mail? It is nothing compared to your own insane frenzies. `THE REMAILERS ARE DYING FROM DETWEILER DAMNATION! YAAAAH' How can you claim I am trying to sabotage your remailers? I am immensely dependent on them. I am more dependent on them than *you* are. I don't have a voice without them. My Nyx account would be censored immediately from your screeching complaints if I didn't post through them! I can send messages, therefore I am. I cannot post from my own account, therefore I am dead. Look at how you target even innocent bystanders with postmaster-mailing-bomb campaigns without the slightest provocation! Look at how Tim May immediately exploits Netcom records to try to `out' me wherever I live in cyberspace? You should be ashamed of yourselves. Have you ever read Calvin? `Rules are for everyone else, not for me.' `I will have the power, but no one else will.' Your grandiose philosophy of privacy, in practice is that `We will be bathed in the riches of privacy but our enemies will be robbed of it.' I will continue to send my messages through your remailers. If you wish to shut them down because you really believe they are a threat to your existence, fine. But if they are, I think you should reconsider your philosophy of anonymity in cyberspace as fundamentally impossible in practice. I have been *gentle* with your remailers. I haven't even studied the Perl code for the *really* insidious holes and glitches. Believe me, if I wanted to destroy cypherpunk remailers I would have brought them to their knees a *long* time ago. I am trying to provide the impetus to you to *strengthen* them. And the Netcom `electric prod' is a way to kill two birds with one stone. Would I spend dozens of hours writing about `Anonymity on the Internet' if I was against it? No, your lesson to learn is that I believe in it with such passion that I have dedicated a significant fraction of my waking hours to promote it-- but through means that are poorly understood. Sincerely, L.Detweiler