The "Censorpunks" now demand that action be taken against the rantings of one "D. Lewdud," an apparent newcomer to this list! His calls for complete anonymity and even anarchy are dangerous and impermissable. He writes:

WHY DIGITAL ANONYMITY SHOULD BE UNRESTRICTED by D. Lewdud

I want net anonymity to be completely unrestrained, and anybody who thinks otherwise is an unAmerican communist censor sleazebag Puritan prude spy who should be ruthlessly exposed and stoned for the sheer criminality of their ideas.

(rest of this excellent, er, I mean "unacceptable," posting elided) Censorpunks, we cannot allow garbage like this to pollute our net! There ought to be a law! ....... But seriously, Lance Detweiler does raise some serious points. And I hope neither Lance, nor George Gleason, nor anyone else was too offended by my satire about censorship. I felt John Gilmore and others had made the "slippery slope" arguments well enough, and I would add my comments in the form of a satire (as I like to do...you ought to see some of my spoofs over on the Extropians list!). A few comments on Lance's points: Nobody has ever said the transition to crypto anarchy will be pleasant (remind me sometime to discuss how easy assassinations for pay will become, once untraceable and robust digital cash becomes possible--it'll curl your hair!). The key is that it's essentially unstoppable by simple legalistic means. New kinds of solutions, like "positive reputations," will have to evolve. (In this context, a positive reputation system means people only accept e-mail from names or digital pseudonyms they know or have reason to be interested in.) The stratagem of controlling flaky, bad, or illegal posts by cooperation of the remailers will not really work, as new digital pseudonyms will be easily generated (and only the last remailer, the one sending it to a pool or a newsgroup, has any real hope of "controlling" the content by reading the plaintext). At the risk of sounding like another satire, I could point to the obvious problems we have in free and open societies with _verbal_ abuse, threats, blackmail, lies, propaganda, and other unsavory behavior. I could then suggest that controls on free speech are needed (I can expect someone to chime in here with the chestnut about how you can't shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater...the Supreme Court justice who coined this later said he regretted ever doing so, as every censor used it to justify controls on speech). The price paid to reduce these nuisances is too high. By the way, I have some scenarios for how crypto anarchy may be fought, how it may fight back, what law enforcement may do, etc. These are from a 2.2 MB file for my still-unfinished novel on these topics. The relevant sections on crypto and crypto anarchy are about 200K. They're mostly in "MORE" format (an outliner for the Mac), and conversion to ASCII tends to produce some ugly line indentation problems (the subsections indent OK, but the following lines wrap back to the left margin). Still, perhaps I'll try to convert them into readable essays for this list, if there's any interest. -Tim May -- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: MailSafe and PGP available.