Some comments on alt.whistleblowers from an (up to now) lurker. In brief, this strikes me as being a very foolish idea. In detail: -- Does anyone really think this is going to have much of an effect on anything? My suspicion is that a forum providing unlimited ability for people to anonymously post undocumented accusations against powerful people will be summarily ignored, not just by the targets of the accusations, but by everybody else with an actual life. There seems to be no discussion of the biggest weakness of this idea: the expected signal to noise ratio. This accomplishes nothing if it is overrun by, say, Kennedy asassination loons. It doesn't seem wise to me for the Cypherpunks' first major public act to be something this pointless and ill-conceived. Ok. Suppose I'm wrong about the above, and this thing works like people seem to think it will. -- The tools available to accomplish this task (PGP, remailers, anon servers) are certainly impressive, but I really don't think they're well developed enough yet to give cause for much confidence in taking on the government and the entire U.S. corporate sector in a frontal assault. -- Is this really in line with the purpose of the Cypherpunks? To quote from the charter "Cypherpunks write code. They know that someone has to write code to defend privacy, and since it's their privacy, they're going to write it. Cypherpunks publish their code so that their fellow cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Cypherpunks realize that security is not built in a day and are patient with incremental progress." I like this paragraph, and what it says to me is that (a) people are, in the end, responsible for their OWN security and need to be made to realize this, and (b) PATIENCE is the most important prerequisite for success. Both of these principles are being violated by the hasty creation of alt.whistleblowers. This has nothing to do with enabling people to independently achieve data security, and it shows no patience whatsoever. Wouldn't everybody be better served by quiet, patient development and distribution of tools, instead of a huge juvenile "FUCK YOU!" to people who could really care less? Let's not piss away a solid foundation with cheap theatrics. -- Will "Getting people to fight by letting the force of momentum work is like rolling logs and rocks. Logs and rocks are still when in a secure place, but roll on an incline; they remain stationary if square, they roll if round. Therefore, when people are skillfully led into battle, the momentum is like that of round rocks rolling down a high mountain -- this is force." -- Sun Tzu *** PGP PUBLIC KEY AVAILABLE BY FINGER