When I see the calls for giving up the Fourth and First Amendments, the calls for backdoored crypto, the claims that Cypherpunks must put on "CypherAngels" red berets and join Curtis Sliwa and the San Francisco Police Academy in using their skills to narc out evil persons who choose not to escrow their diaries with the local and federal police, I am nauseated. (I have written half a dozen posts suggesting some of these people simply be killed by any means possible, but I have deleted most of them before sending. Frankly, I see a war coming and I see that hundreds of thousands of "them" need to be exterminated. But I digress.) I don't have the desire, energy, or patience to write the kinds of essays I wrote in 1992-95 (and even earlier, 1988-1991, before the Cypherpunks list). I wrote then about the implications of privacy, about the First and Fourth Amendments, about the technologies that were inexorably changing the landscape of fhe world. A lot of others did as well. (I guess I'm sort of glad, for nostalgic reasons, that my friend Eric Hughes wrote his "elegiac" piece...except I fell asleep after a few paragraphs of the Kennedyesque say-nothing-but-say-it-eligiacally article. Note to Eric: get some fire back in your belly, boy! This is war, and I don't mean war against some Arabs.) Newcomers like "Nomen Nescio," "Aimee Farr," and "chefron" are now whining about what some of them call "moral crypto" and are calling for "cooperation" with the government. Sort of like "moral hotel rooms," where every hotel videotapes room activities and "only shares when government shows a good reason." Or like calls for "ink escrow," where potential subversives, and everybody in fact, escrows their journal and letter writings just in case O'Brien feels a need to look at the writings of Lucky Green, Winston Smith, or Tim May. Feh, this is well-trod ground. Why am I not writing impassioned defenses of crypto? Because it was all said back in 1992-3 when the Clipper issue arose. (Clipper was leaked in April 1993. Very longterm subscribers may remember that I took an article written by Dorothy Denning (yes, _that_ Denning!) to likely mean a proposal was being considered to require government backdoors for all crypto. I wrote an artcle for sci.crypt entitled "A Trial Balloon To Ban Crypto?" which generated something like 500 responses on the Usenet, plus discussion on the brand-new Cypherpunks list and the Extropians list. This was in October 1992, almost 9 years ago. Deja/Google does not go back this far, nor do the Cypherpunks archives currently on the Web. But, I assure you, this happened.) I lack the patience to re-write the defenses of privacy and crypto I and others wrote so many years ago. I have probably averaged a few posts per day for 9 years, or, perhaps ten thousand or more posts. Some were just followups, but many launched threads. Perhaps 100 or so were major essays. Whatever, if I have not said it by now, a few more posts to try to convince Aimee Farr (who seems to read nothing of past discussions) or "chefron" or "Nomen Nescio" will obviously not make a difference. The 2001 debate is shaping up to be just a super-fast-forward version of the 1993 debate. Frankly, I have lost patience in many ways. I think most _active_ enemies of liberty should simply be killed. Lined up against the wall if there are ever trials, or killed en masse in their dens if necessary. Nothing is to be gained by arguing with them. I don't care if newbies to the issue are "put off" by my lack of patience. Others can play the role of high school teachers explaining the basics of the Constitution. And the archives exist, even if not all the way back to 1992-5. My own Cyphernomicon exists, from 1994, in (apparently) enough pieces that even the New World Order cannot stamp it out. The new Ludlow book, "Crypto Anarchy, Pirate Utopias, etc." (title similar to this) has some articles written by several of us that are better than anything we could write from scratch to use in argument with "chefron:" and "Nomen Nescio." Finally, I have finally received the proof copy of my chapter in Vernor Vinge and Jim Frenkel's long-delayed re-issue of "True Names." My chapter is entitled "True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy" and makes my strongest case. Unfortunately, I wrote the chapter several years ago, expecting publication by 1998 at the latest. The project was delayed and delayed and then I heard nothing and then it was announced and then delayed and...you get the picture. Jim Frenkel is urgently seeking minor corrections, with the final contract FedExed to me a few days ago, just in time to get caught in the WTC grounding! Talk about irony. I really don't care if Nomen Nescio and Jim Choate and Agent Farr like or dislike what is inevitably coming. It is coming, and millions will pay the price for their criminality. Hundreds of millions more will learn what freedom means. --Tim May