On Thu, Apr 10, 1997 at 10:04:01PM -0600, Toto wrote: [a piece on Tim May] Toto, thanks for your thoughtful comments. Your touching defense of Tim is interesting. Contrary to what you might think, I really don't have anything against Tim May, and I do go read things he (or others) have written in the past. But I am getting to the crusty old fart stage myself... As to his legacy, and the legacy of cypherpunks in general, that remains to be seen. None of the cypherpunks are in a position to be able to judge very well, because they are so close to their favorite issues that of course they look very large. But it isn't a certainty that any of the predictions of crypto-anarchy, for example, will come to pass. It is possible that the surveillance state will win. More likely, of course, the world will go in a direction that will surprise all of us (except that Tim will tell us he considered the possibility in a paper he wrote back in the 1970s). What will look portentious and what will look pretentious 10 years from now is hard to judge... Personally, I am in favor of absolute personal privacy, but I don't define that to include economic dealings -- as far as I am concerned, business or economic privacy is at a lower level of concern than personal privacy. This puts me at odds with the prevailing libertarian bent of cypherpunks, of course. However, I was thrown off my stride by the high level of downright hostility so common on this list. Like most people, I tend to respond in kind. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html