Jim McCoy writes:
What amuses me most about this series of rantings by whomever, other than the paranoid and baseless claims made by the anonymous poster, is the number of people who have been complaining about the author doing so anonymously through a remailer. The irony of such a situation is too rich to pass up.
I have no problem with the existance of anonymous remailers, and I don't want to see them banned or prevented -- indeed, I encourage their existance. However, that doesn't mean that I always favor their use, or that I won't look down on someone for using one inappropriately. To put it another way: I believe that every adult person has the right to have sex with any other willing adult person. However, I think it might not be tasteful if my neighbors decided to bugger each other on the front lawn. Not, you understand, that it should be illegal, but it does make me wonder about them. In the case of the given poster, he claims that he's using anonymity not because he fears backlash (he should but thats another story) but as a form of "protest". This is as illogical as the content of his messages...
It seems that cypherpunks can dish it out when other newsgroups and mailing lists suffer such problems ("well, the remailers do nothing that telneting to port 25 cannot do..." or "internet identity is such a fiction anyway, get used to it" seem to be common responses), but when the cypherpunks lists is the victim of unpleasant anonymous messages we fall back to the tired refrain of "if you have nothing to hide why are you posting anonymously." How sad.
Why is this sad? I think you don't get the difference between what is permissable and what is in good taste. Perry