At 8:42 PM -0500 11/4/00, anonymous@openpgp.net wrote:
http://www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=20001120&s=price
by DAVID PRICE
On December 20, 1919, under the heading "Scientists as Spies," The Nation published a letter by Franz Boas, the father of academic anthropology in America. Boas charged that four American anthropologists, whom he did not name, had abused their professional research positions by conducting espionage in Central America during the
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The American Anthropological Association also secretly collaborated with the CIA. In the early 1950s the AAA's executive board negotiated a secret agreement with the CIA under which agency personnel and computers were used to produce a cross-listed
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neither to explicitly prohibit nor to penalize secretive government research. It is time for US anthropologists to examine the political consequences of their history and take a hard, thoughtful look at Boas's complaint and the implications implicit in the association's refusal to condemn secret research and to re-enact sanctions against anthropologists engaging in espionage.
Wouldn't it be much more efficient to use Cypherpunk technologies to make their espionage widely known to their subjects? That way the targets of the CIA spying could simply find ways to dispose of the spies locally. That would presumably deter anthropologists acting as spies and saboteurs more than all of the "official denunciations" ever could. Note: This has happened several times, actually. A list of spies pretending to be cultural attaches resulted in the assassinations of CIA agents in Athens, Bogota, and other cities. Sounds fair to me. --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.