On 14 Sep 2001, at 15:18, Jim Choate wrote:
On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, Nomen Nescio wrote:
You and other critics have every right to speak your mind and make your position known. Indeed, the cypherpunks were founded on the principle of advancing freedom of speech. It is a sad and tragic irony that one of the founders of that group has descended into a despicable allegiance to violence. Long-term subscribers have seen it happen gradually over the years.
Descended hell, he's always been that way.
Well well well, long time ago that I was on the Cypherpunk list. Nothing changed there it seems! Although there were and probably are quite some interesting writers on the list I think I won't subscribe again. Problem is I'm against "absolute" anonymity, I think working on it is technically interesting but the result is nothing less than a-social and I'm not at all against democratic societies. It's easy to say so for me since I live in a pretty free country (The Netherlands) but as a whole when there is no war, we don't need anonymity as far as I see it. You can always find a journalist or someone else to tell your story to the world if you have serious problems. No information should be distributed without someone responsible for it! Anonymity like we have on the net now makes me think of the middle ages, when the cities started to come up. When you weren't a citizen you might not enter with weapons those day's. "Leave them at the entrance." Often it was even necessary to leave the city before the night... After some time (centuries) they came up with the "horrible idea" to give people identities that could be verified. They later evolved to "passports". So people from one city could operate in other cities and even countries, as long as your country more or less guaranteed your identity. What we need as soon as possible is "Digital Identity" (DI), not from commercial companies like banks, yuck(!), no our governments should add a chip to our passports. Without that chip no serious communication. Of course that wouldn't be such a very good idea for privacy, so DI without further provisions wouldn't be such a good idea. The solution is that your DI should entitle to as much virtual identities as you would like to have. Government (or a third party setup by the three main parties of the Trias Politica) should only reveal your real/absolute identity if a judge has judged so according to democratically agreed laws. +++chefren (Yes, that's my real forename exclusive enough I think, and if the absolute e-mail address works, who needs to know more?)