At 9:09 am 9/20/95, David J. Bianco wrote:

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Subject: Cypherpunks Press release || -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- || || We've seen the word "hacker" kicked around rather arbitrarily in the

On Sep 20, 10:28, Dietrich J. Kappe sent the following to the NSA's mail archives: press. || Are we to conclude that the cypherpunks are a bunch of hackers? I think its || time for some cypherpunks spin. How about a logo *and* a press release? The || press release would give contacts (email, phone, etc.) so that someone on || this list would be contacted by journalists when a crypto story breaks. || || If we get enough volunteers, we can fax blanket every newspaper, station, || and network in the world. ||

I think it's a great idea, personally. I think many journalists would like to find third party opinions about network security and other cryptography issues, but just don't know who to talk to about them. By making it easy for them to find us, we'd be more likely to be consulted for opinions. [elided]

I think a media contact group is a good idea too, but I think we should handle it by having a special address <cypherpunks-press@toad.com> that media people can send to to request information and that it should split the incoming mail and route it to a group of volunteers who could then respond. Question from media people are usually NOT going to be heavily tech-oriented, and this sort of press list would give the lesser cryptologists among us, who nevertheless have a significant amount of knowledge about public policy issues concerning crypto, a chance to be useful. BTW, <pgp-help-humans@hks.net> is still operating, and the small group of knowledgeable cypherpunks there all see the mail that comes in and cc the list when someone asks a PGP question and gets it answered by one or more of the volunteers. This would be a good model to expand on, imho. Everyone learns something, people go away impressed by the quality answers, etc. :) dave