A remarkably bad article by Peter H. Lewis in today's Times -- front page, actually -- on anonymity on the net. He manages to confuse the "Microsoft aquires Church" spoof with problems from anonymity -- in fact, he opens his article by apparently chalking up the whole episode to anonymity rather than complete stupidity on the part of anyone believing an obvious spoof. (The original "AP" article was not anonymous -- someone just posted a satirical message to the net. The connection with anonymity is so tenuous as to be nonexistant.) Things get rapidly worse. Just to list some of the problems, he calls digital cash a way for people to open swiss bank accounts, confuses the case of that kid at MIT who was running pirate boards with a case of anonymity, spreads lots of FUD, gets lots of quotes from some alarmist professor no one has ever heard of, makes a hash of explaining why anonymous remailers are useful (and doesn't understand that forgery and anonymity are sort of inherent in the fabric of the net), makes a hash of explaining digital signatures, etc. Truly one of the worst articles I've ever seen in the New York Times on any topic of any sort -- and given the Times, thats an amazing level to have fallen to. The man seems devoid of even a basic understanding of journalism -- as one example, journalists are supposed to interview the people they are discussing to get comment (this is nearly the first rule), but he never bothered to interview a single remailer operator, it seems, even though he mentions Julf by name. Maybe sending some email to Julf would have been too much effort, or maybe it would have made the story less sensationalistic if he'd bothered to be balanced. He didn't seem to check any of his facts, either (another rule), and the whole thing reads like an editorial instead of an objective piece of reporting. I really wonder if Lewis actually lives and works on the internet, or if he's truly the amateur he seems to be. He comes of as not understanding the basic mechanics of how things operate day to day that even a non-technical person would understand. I would complain somehow to the Times, but I suspect that it would be impossible to convey properly even the rules of simple journalism that he broke, even ignoring all the technological misunderstandigs. Sadly, the editors would have no reason to listen to me, a random guy they'd never heard of. Another step in the slow disintegration of a once proud "paper of record", I'm afraid. Perry