Excerpts from mail: 23-Jul-95 Re: Zimmerman legal fund aba@dcs.exeter.ac.uk (5163)
Anon writes:
Could someone in the know talk about the relationship between FV and the ZLDF? I don't like to spread misinformation, so I won't answer based on conjectures.
I'd be interested to hear this too, but what I am concerned about is that the whole thing is too strongly tied to first virtual.
The relationship is a completely open and friendly one, without any strings attached that I'm aware of. What most of you probably don't know is that FV has been a supporter of Phil Zimmerman's since long before you heard of us. We have had Phil on a monthly retainer since before the public rollout of our service (which probably means since before you even *heard* of First Virtual, since we didn't make any vaporware announcements). We've done this in order to get some advice on cryptography and some help with some specific needs (pgp-telnet, for example), but mostly we've done it because we thought he both needed and deserved our support. Why would a startup company want to devote significant resources to supporting Phil? Basically, we felt it was the right thing to do, particularly in our case. Here's why: like most net citizens, we believe that the people deserve free access to cryptography. However, we had just invented something nobody had ever imagined before -- a way to do reasonably safe net commerce *without* cryptography. Now, we thought this would be a good thing for society in its own right, for many reasons that would be a real digression here, but we recognized that every technology has both a good side and a bad side. Insofar as electronic commerce was going to be the motivating factor for permitting universal access to cryptography, FV's technology is/was a bad thing, because it decreases (at least somewhat) that motivation. We believe the positive features of our technology outweigh this negative, but we also felt we had a moral duty to lend our support to public access to cryptography, to try to offset any negative effect that our invention might have in that regard. So, FV has been a friend of Phil's for a long time. We launched the Yellow Ribbon campaign and the FV-based fundraising drive in that spirit, though clearly it doesn't exactly hurt us if people sign up for FV in order to donate to Phil. That really wasn't our motivation, however, and we sought to underscore that fact by making a donation to Phil's defense fund every time people sign up for a new account expressly in order to donate to ZLDF. In other words, if you are a Zimmerman supporter and you were thinking it might be nice to have an FV account anyway, you can help Phil even more by signing up and paying your $2 fee through the ZLDF pages. We've had lots of discussions with Phil Z and Phil D, and any time they expressed any discomfort with any of our ideas, we dropped them. There are two web sites basically because they are taking care of the informational aspects and we're concentrating (pro bono) on the online fundraising aspects. If we've overly stressed FV as a collection mechanism, I apologize, but you must bear in mind that we've been living and breathing the FV payment system for 18 months now, and it would be kind of hard for us not to even *mention* it. :-)
I mean there was the Yellow Ribbon Campaign but all URLs out of that page point to FV, no mention of the at least two other (more convenient for most people, and hence in Phil Zs interests) methods:
a) PGPed email CC no. to Phil Dubois (Phil Zs chief legal counsel)
b) similar PGPed email CC no. to some guy in Europe who was offering to collect up all of the European donations, and send them to Dubois in lump sums to save on currency exchange costs.
Well, only on the cypherpunks list would you be likely to find general agreement that PGP'ed credit card numbers are "easier" than First Virtual. Many thousands of extremely naive net citizens are now happy FV customers, and I seriously doubt that most of them could master PGP without a full-day tutorial. (We're not talking about rocket scientists here, folks.) Mostly, though, I felt that the FV/ZLDF association was extremely important to defuse any potential political arguments of the form "FV has proven that public access to crypto is unnecessary." Such arguments would hurt the crypto cause, and would NOT sit well with the FV team, either. The truth is we're completely on the same side of this issue, folks. No hidden agendas, I promise. On behalf of First Virtual, I encourage everyone to donate money to ZLDF, using any mechanism that works. Better yet, use them all. -- Nathaniel -------- Nathaniel S. Borenstein <nsb@fv.com> | When privacy is outlawed, Chief Scientist, First Virtual Holdings | only outlaws will have privacy! FAQ & PGP key: nsb+faq@nsb.fv.com | SUPPORT THE ZIMMERMAN DEFENSE FUND! ---VIRTUAL YELLOW RIBBON-->> zldf@clark.net (http://www.netresponse.com/zldf)