Greg Broiles <gbroiles@darkwing.uoregon.edu> opined:
NSB's messages have suggested, amongst the fear-mongering, that the real target of the card-shark publicity campaign is not Joe Consumer but bankers, investors, and other "big money" folks; people who care about the large-scale fraud rate of credit card use. <snip>
True enough. Of course, those are the folks who take the weight when credit card sales go sour... or the system is victimized by widespread automated fraud.
While, as Vin McLellan points out, Simson Garfinkel's articles were technically accurate (modulo the quote from Daguio, where he's quoted as suggesting an "out of hand" transaction, which is likely either a typo or a misunderstanding - dollars to donuts he said "out of band"), they also appeared as part of a marketing process.
Actually, the most striking thing about the Garfinkel articles was the degree to which he made the First Virtual marketing/propaganda Campaign against consumer-PC-based credit card encryptors _the focus_ of the Mercury News articles. FV's attack-code demo was overtly presented as a propaganda ploy -- "a direct attack" on Netscape's security model -- by Garfinkel. There was nothing in the Merc text that carried the hysterial pitch of the press release FV posted to C'punks; nothing of the pious Crusade to Save Electronic Commerce that set everyone teeth on edge. FV's Stein and Borenstein were presented as competitive businessmen, out to rough up a competitor who had been getting too much uncritical attention. (The long sidebars on FV's technology are what you'd expect for the Mercury News' coverage of a local SoCal contender.) The Murky News' "Chief Scientist, FV" quote -- Borenstein recalling audiences in the White House, Treasury, etc., who declared, "We thought that only the NSA knew how to do this." -- was absolutely priceless. Everyone who didn't need a ten-page memo to supply the technical and historical context got the giggle. It's the Quote of the Week in Silicon Valley and NoHo. Deftly, with a straight face, Garfinkel left Nathaniel standing there with his pants down, wondering where the draft was coming from. (Mr. Borenstein, no slouch on-line, has faired far better in his give and take among the Cypherpunks -- who in their rabid majority only wanted to lynch him.)
....the implication of the Murky News articles, that one [FV] can be trusted but not the other.... <snip>
It's a shame that Garfinkel didn't spend more time/column space on suggestions or observations from the independent people he interviewed and less time on the "hot news - Netscape security broken by a competitor" angle.... <snip>
Your observations had me wondering if we read the same articles. My thought: would that all snow jobs were handled by journalists with the same dry perspicacity!
We should, however, learn from what FV did right - they wrote software which (apparently) had or can have a real political effect. (It seems to have worked on Garfinkel, anyway). Cypherpunks write code? FV wrote code and got some attention for their otherwise unexciting message. <snip>
Now _that's_ a useful and on-target observation. Suerte, _Vin Vin McLellan +The Privacy Guild+ <vin@shore.net> 53 Nichols St., Chelsea, Ma. 02150 USA Tel: (617) 884-5548 <*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*>