While grudgingly accepting the larger message of your posting, I qualify this with the following observation: Thank you. I'll clarify what you responded to below. re: partisan issue v. direct action When you're engaged in politics, you try to be politic. When you're directly acting, you can tell 'em to fuck off. And I find no particular contradiction in participating in both contexts at the same time. The key is to realize that there are two different contexts with different rules of rhetoric. Egregious among the ``large, faceless organizations'' is the tyranny erected by the majority, ``at least half the people'', called democratic political government. Not everyone believes this. Be politic when doing politics. My interpretation of the welcome message has always been that a cypherpunk works to create his own privacy _in spite of_ interference [...] And do whatever you want when not doing politics. It was not my intention to become involved with political issues as such when cypherpunks started. Clipper changed that. Direct action of writing and deploying code should continue, as well as the political education and action necessary to allow deployment to exist. Eric