On Wednesday, September 26, 2001, at 10:13 AM, Declan McCullagh wrote:
On Tue, Sep 25, 2001 at 11:03:03PM -0500, Aimee Farr wrote:
It is discouraging to see the disdain in which many of you hold the FBI during a time when we need cooperation and insight from nontraditional sources.
The FBI is responsible for counterterrorism efforts in the U.S. They have received billions in this area, one of the most rapidly-growing in their budgets. They have failed miserably. It makese sense, as I said in a BBC interview last week, not to hold them in "disdain," but not to whitewash their failure either.
That said, it's hardly unreasonable for Americans to help the FBI (a flight school instructor who recognizes the names of some of his former students in the media might well want to phone the FBI). But cypherpunks can't be blamed for being critical of the FBI's counterrorist efforts so far.
Indeed, if I ran a flight school I would probably answer any questions the FBI might have, even if I were fairly certain none of the attackers had trained at my school. Ditto for a handful of other situations, where being helpful to the FBI would be the right thing to do. But if were just an Arab, or just a Muslim, or just a Cypherpunk, then I would certainly not answer any questions whatsoever, especially not when a general throttling of civil liberties and a search for scapegoats is going on. (I chortle when I read about stegonography. I posted the first description of the LSB method in images and sound files in a 1990 sci.crypt posting. I later developed the idea further. Now I see bozo journalists theorizing that OBL used stego, when in fact there's no evidence his agents used computers for more than simple AOL mail. I even see Bruce Schneier sagely opining about "dead drops." Do a search on "digital dead drops" in my 1994 Cyphernomicon...I explored these options for freedom fighters a decade ago.) --Tim May