What happens when governments are online and someone pseudo-spoofs the state legislature? Writing about "Free Willy" I said that as a mere user, I had no way to know whether or not this came from president@whitehouse.gov except by the content. If the content passed a style analysis, then I would have to accept it as real. The SOURCE of my problem is the parameters for email chosen by the administrators of a point, two systems away from me. Mark@blackplague, suggested that there was no problem at all: "You just have to learn to read mail headers to get the gist of what they are saying." Well, yes, but this is the header I saw: Message 5/12 From President@whitehouse.gov Dec 19 '93 at 2:13 pm pst Return-Path: <heifetz!toad.com!owner-cypherpunks> Return-Path: <President@whitehouse.gov> Date: Sun, 19 Dec 93 14:13:02 PST That's all I saw. And I said that in my original post. The problem remains unsolved for me. The message came from the White House, was picked up at heifetz and I got it here. Seems clear. Mark@blackplague suggests: A big clue is when it has "Apparently-To:" in the header... But I see this all the time. I have an account on the Well. I transfer email from there to my local system with a forward file. Proves only that the mail was forwarded from one system to another. And again, I didn't see any of that, myself. I was merely comparing the analysis of headers offered by two 'punkers to show that the "solutions" offered differed from each other. The problem remains. Nothing on a computer can be trusted. PGP? Sorry, it's not for users. I see these PGP Keys appended to messages all the time. Garbage characters. I have no intention of grabbing them, making them fields in a record or records in a file or files in a database, on the unlikely chance that someday I might want to send a secret message to someone. Speaking as a mere user, when the government cracks down on crypto, no one will care. By comparison, the mainstream magazine INFORMATION WEEK tried to make a story out of Alona Shores. No one cared. Also, consider that Prodigy hasn't gone out of business. I get their free diskettes whenever I can and then reformat them for my own use as backup media. But 99% of Prodigy's clients were unaffected by the Burning Issues. By comparison, in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, pirates from Cilicia lived by kidnapping people and selling them as slaves. They thrived because slavery was accepted. They raided and destroyed the freeport Delos. No one cared much. They erred when they nabbed rich Romans. Pompey shut them down. But slavery wasn't ended. The pirates weren't erased: they merely became (respectable) subjects of the Romans. We live in a society that accepts slavery. Before you "revolt" remember Spartacus: Pompey shut him down, also. We COULD verify "Free Willy" of course. (stop me if you've heard this) The White House publishes its public crypto key. Using its private key, it sends out a message. The published key unlocks the message and we know it came from Willy Himself. Great idea. Until and unless there is a paradigm shift, it will never happen. That shift could mean an end to browsing the newsies, since you'd have to have a key for every source. What happens when governments are online and someone pseudo-spoofs the state legislature?