Rush disses anonymity
I'm sitting here listening to Rush, and he's talking about Pierre Salanger's recent "discovery" ;-) of the anonymously posted friendly-fire TWA800 internet message of a few months back. In the process of discounting the story, and praising FBI pal Kalstrom, he bemoans the anonymity of the net, calling it a "nest of kooks", (mixed in with all the other "right thinking people", of course...). Given this, and, of course, our own fun and games with anonymous, er, slander, on this list, I'm frequently tempted to agree with him. After all, if someone says something wrong about you, how do find them and punish them? How do you know what the truth is, unless you know who said it? (What? An appeal to authority? Moi? I'm *shocked* you would assert such a thing...) Until, of course, I remember that anonymity is unpreventable, and, frankly, economically necessary for true internet commerce. Remember what agrarianism did to try to stop industrialism (up to, and including, socialism <he said, trolling for leftists>), and expect the worst, folks. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "The cost of anything is the foregone alternative" -- Walter Johnson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/
Robert Hettinga wrote:
I'm sitting here listening to Rush, and he's talking about Pierre Salanger's recent "discovery" ;-) of the anonymously posted friendly-fire TWA800 internet message of a few months back.
I must say I was pleased (and, I'm sorry to say, surprised) not to hear people talking about that "conspiracy" on this list. I gave a friend at the Merc hell for publishing a story saying that maybe there was something to it because there was some web site with "details of possible trajectories and everything." Morons.
In the process of discounting the story, and praising FBI pal Kalstrom, he bemoans the anonymity of the net, calling it a "nest of kooks", (mixed in with all the other "right thinking people", of course...).
Given this, and, of course, our own fun and games with anonymous, er, slander, on this list, I'm frequently tempted to agree with him.
You people are wimps. The only real effect of the good doctor's rants has been, as Mr. May indicated, to get the good doctor on the "don't hire" list.
After all, if someone says something wrong about you, how do find them and punish them? How do you know what the truth is, unless you know who said it?
You get off your ass and find out directly. How about if you know exactly who it is, but you know him to be judgement-proof, since he's already saddled with over $12 million in libel and wrongful-death suits? It's called "reputation capital."
Until, of course, I remember that anonymity is unpreventable, and, frankly, economically necessary for true internet commerce.
Remember what agrarianism did to try to stop industrialism (up to, and including, socialism <he said, trolling for leftists>), and expect the worst, folks.
People are just going to have to be smarter than they've ever been. The Net enables sharing and verifying real information just as it enables disinformation. Sure disinformation will always be cheaper to produce and more appealing to the eye (fact is harder to accept than fiction because fictional plots are written to make sense), but disinformation tends to cancel itself out. Work on archives, reputation control, and openness. Disinformation, to be truly effective, requires a monopoly on information. More speech, not less. (Keep in reserve the retort that anonymity is quite big in "the mainstream," too. How many key stories cite "well-placed administration sources"?) The opposite of the Black Unicorn approach to nym safety is the Liz Taylor approach: "As long as they spell my name right, I don't care." Nobody I care about is going to listen to some crank, or if they do, they'll email me to check the facts, or if they don't, I have alternative outlets for information. As long as I live in a free country with a free Internet, they can't touch me. Oh, btw, it's helped that I've resigned myself to forever working for decent people who don't give in to such bullshit. -rich
Robert Hettinga wrote:
At 8:02 pm -0500 11/11/96, Rich Graves wrote:
You people are wimps. The only real effect of the good doctor's rants has been, as Mr. May indicated, to get the good doctor on the "don't hire" list.
Sorry. I wasn't clear. My tongue was planted firmly in cheek there. I'm "frequently tempted" in the same way I'm "frequently tempted" to rip someone's head off and shit down their neck.
Sorry for the misinterpretation. Clearly your reputation has not persisted in my mind with sufficent clarity since the last time I was involved in a cypherpunks discussion. (Or possibly this issue has brought together such strange bedfollows that I'm ready to believe that anything is possible.)
People are just going to have to be smarter than they've ever been. The Net enables sharing and verifying real information just as it enables disinformation. Sure disinformation will always be cheaper to produce and more appealing to the eye (fact is harder to accept than fiction because fictional plots are written to make sense), but disinformation tends to cancel itself out.
I agree, but, I think that, in the long run, disinformation may cost more. Lying always involves more work, and thus cost, than telling the truth. In order to support a lie you have to keep weaving a coherent tissue of other lies around the original lie to support it, all of which makes the original lie more and more non-plausible. In other words, the more "resolution" you get on a lie, the more it looks like a lie.
I disagree. You're assuming that you're dealing with a rational person who wants to be believed. It is not difficult to come up with examples of pure disinformation that is just "thrown out there" and never supported. Keep repeating the same lie, and *nonspecialists* will assume that there is a "debate" going on. To take an example that won't make me sound "politically correct," let's say the national security establishment tries to spread the rumor that the remailers are run by spooks (we've all seen the rumor; I'm not arguing and do not really believe that the rumor was started by spooks, but let's assume for the sake of argument that it was). *We* all know that this is nonsense; but *nonspecialists* and journalists will seize on "the controversy," and the perception of danger will create a real chilling effect on remailer use. There are still people out there who refuse to use any version of PGP after 2.3 because of such repeated rumors. Absolutely no one is trying to back them up with more complex lies; but the rumor persists.
Maybe that's the "cancel itself out" you're talking about.
No, actually I meant that competing propaganda tends to kill itself -- normal people tend just to throw up their hands and say "What the hell does it matter anyway" -- but your interpretation is worth talking about, too.
Of course, that implies critical thinking on the part of the listener, or at least access to critical information, which is what the net provides at a cheap price, like you said.
No. It requires both. And sometimes, technical skill. How many people here know enough to evaluate the data concerning, to take a notorious example, the Kennedy assassination? I accept the historical consensus, but I know there are a lot of otherwise rational people on cypherpunks who are convinced that there was some sort of coverup (which sort, they often don't know or care; but they're conviced there was one). Oliver Stone got some ridiculous movie made based on this non-thesis (actually two, counting Nixon). People growing up today are learning pseudohistory and pseudoscience from Oliver Stone, "The X Files," "Dark Skies," and "Millenium." I find that scary. The net is better than TV, because it allows more responses, but I'm not sure how much better.
So, maybe what we're saying here is that disinformation costs more than information, but if disinformer has more money, or at least communication resources, it'll be believed.
No, I think pure disinformation is cheaper. Period. And often, it doesn't have to be "believed" -- you just need to raise "suspicions" among nonspecialists. That is sufficent to destroy consensus and trust in social institutions. At the risk of sounding politically correct, how many nonspecialists "suspect" that the accepted history of the Holocaust *could* be a massive propaganda plot? (Yeah, yeah, I know the "soap stories" and the Polich Communists' exaggeration of the non-Jewish death toll at Auschwitz and all that rot, but I mean the basic facts, which are often denied. If you want to jump on this point, take it to alt.revisionism, which I read closely.) Absolutely no historians believe that, but lots of nonspecialists do. This doesn't mean that they believe it to be true; it just means that there's doubt. This kind of "doubt" is not the same as skepticism. Skepticism is good. Skeptical inquiry means you decide to take the time to investigate a story. Stubborn, cynical doubt, especially when based on ignorance and prejudice, is something else entirely.
On a geodesic network, this is much harder, because centralized nodes choke on their information load, and can't spread lies as cheaply as they can on a hierarchically controlled communication network, like broadcast, or even print, media.
I disagree with two of your premises. Knowing several real journalists (as opposed to opinion columnists), I don't consider print or broadcast to be particularly hierarchical. The difficulty of propagating disinformation depends on whether you want people to believe, or merely "suspect." The TWA 800 friendly-fire fiction doesn't have to be accepted as definitely true for it to cause trouble. The "supicion" of Richard Jewell doesn't have to be accepted as definitely true for it to cause trouble. Disinformation is more often about sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt than it is about belief. Sold the right way, it can propagate itself; the (IMO) disinformation that the CIA is directly responsible for the crack-cocaine epidemic is spread by radical blacks who see it as a racist crime, and by radical-right conspiracy mongers who want to tie Clinton to the Mena story. Either way, the meme virus spreads. How many different kinds of groups are saying how many different groups "created" the AIDS virus? You don't have to "believe" that it's true for the meme to spread.
The opposite of the Black Unicorn approach to nym safety is the Liz Taylor approach: "As long as they spell my name right, I don't care." Nobody I care about is going to listen to some crank, or if they do, they'll email me to check the facts, or if they don't, I have alternative outlets for information. As long as I live in a free country with a free Internet, they can't touch me.
Say 'amen' somebody. Reputation is reputation, nym or not. However, nyms allow something very important. Since the net enables reputation to persist (functionally) forever, nyms allow you to "start over", much in the same way that geographic frontiers have functioned historically.
To some extent, but not fully. There is a certain cachet in being recognized as someone who uses "your real name." "We pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour." "John Hancock."
The paradox of ubiquitous network computing is it takes away privacy by creating persistant information accessable to anyone, while at the same time creating perfect pseudonymity and thus new reputation.
Pseudonymity is only perfect where artificial boundaries such as respect for netiquette are erected. If someone really wanted to track you down, they could either find you, or "out" you as a pseudonym "afraid to use your own name." Both can be damaging (to your reputation or otherwise). In order to put your life on the line for something, you need a life story. -rich
At 9:47 pm -0500 11/14/96, Rich Graves wrote:
Sorry for the misinterpretation. Clearly your reputation has not persisted in my mind with sufficent clarity since the last time I was involved in a cypherpunks discussion.
Now you sound like Tim. :-). An end to this dicussion is just a killfile away. Be my guest.
(Or possibly this issue has brought together such strange bedfollows that I'm ready to believe that anything is possible.)
"C'mon, Kids! Be-LEIVE! Or Tinkerbell's gonna die!"
I disagree. You're assuming that you're dealing with a rational person who wants to be believed. It is not difficult to come up with examples of pure disinformation that is just "thrown out there" and never supported. Keep repeating the same lie, and *nonspecialists* will assume that there is a "debate" going on.
I agree to disagree. The "Big Lie" only works with mass media. On a ubiquitous geodesic network, all such bets are off.
No, actually I meant that competing propaganda tends to kill itself -- normal people tend just to throw up their hands and say "What the hell does it matter anyway" -- but your interpretation is worth talking about, too.
See above. When you have an avalanche of dissent from lots of different voices, all with technically the same size "megaphone", it doesn't take a new kind of reputation calculus (or even rocket science) to get the idea that FUD by any other name stinks just the same...
No. It requires both. And sometimes, technical skill. How many people here know enough to evaluate the data concerning, to take a notorious example, the Kennedy assassination? I accept the historical consensus, but I know there are a lot of otherwise rational people on cypherpunks who are convinced that there was some sort of coverup (which sort, they often don't know or care; but they're conviced there was one). Oliver Stone got some ridiculous movie made based on this non-thesis (actually two, counting Nixon). People growing up today are learning pseudohistory and pseudoscience from Oliver Stone, "The X Files," "Dark Skies," and "Millenium." I find that scary. The net is better than TV, because it allows more responses, but I'm not sure how much better.
You're citing mass media again. When you have quasimonopolistic control of a monster-megaphone the truth tends to get drowned out, or at least homogenized, in the same way that creationism gets homogenized with real science for "equal time", say.
No, I think pure disinformation is cheaper. Period. And often, it doesn't have to be "believed" -- you just need to raise "suspicions" among nonspecialists. That is sufficent to destroy consensus and trust in social institutions.
Again, you're using big-think here, invoking the power of large hierarchically organized industrial institutions. The world don't work that way anymore. Or it won't, soon enough.
I disagree with two of your premises. Knowing several real journalists (as opposed to opinion columnists), I don't consider print or broadcast to be particularly hierarchical. The difficulty of propagating disinformation depends on whether you want people to believe, or merely "suspect." The TWA 800 friendly-fire fiction doesn't have to be accepted as definitely true for it to cause trouble. The "supicion" of Richard Jewell doesn't have to be accepted as definitely true for it to cause trouble. Disinformation is more often about sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt than it is about belief. Sold the right way, it can propagate itself; the (IMO) disinformation that the CIA is directly responsible for the crack-cocaine epidemic is spread by radical blacks who see it as a racist crime, and by radical-right conspiracy mongers who want to tie Clinton to the Mena story. Either way, the meme virus spreads. How many different kinds of groups are saying how many different groups "created" the AIDS virus? You don't have to "believe" that it's true for the meme to spread.
Whew. Actually. You're proving my point. In a hierarchically organized media structure, you get lots of feedback loops repeating the same old shit over and over, all done in order to keep the channel full during the slack periods. Let's take TWA 800 frendly fire story. It's been lurking in the same loony.news and mail groups, and most people on the net think it's a shit-story. However, Pierre Salanger gets wind of it, puts it into the ABC evening news as gospel, and all the sudden it's a headline. The power of the megaphone, all over again. They don't call 'em "gatekeepers" for nothin', bunky.
To some extent, but not fully. There is a certain cachet in being recognized as someone who uses "your real name."
Reputation is reputation, biometric or otherwise. On the net, your key is who you are, no matter what your "True Name" is... Kind of like Turing(?) test, only with reputation, I guess.
Pseudonymity is only perfect where artificial boundaries such as respect for netiquette are erected. If someone really wanted to track you down, they could either find you, or "out" you as a pseudonym "afraid to use your own name." Both can be damaging (to your reputation or otherwise). In order to put your life on the line for something, you need a life story.
Okay. Then it should be trivial for you to tell me who "Pr0duct Cypher"(sp?) is... Have fun. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "The cost of anything is the foregone alternative" -- Walter Johnson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/
Robert Hettinga wrote:
At 9:47 pm -0500 11/14/96, Rich Graves wrote:
[Lots deleted; I agree that I was unwittingly proving some of your points with some of mine, thanks for the lesson...]
Pseudonymity is only perfect where artificial boundaries such as respect for netiquette are erected. If someone really wanted to track you down, they could either find you, or "out" you as a pseudonym "afraid to use your own name." Both can be damaging (to your reputation or otherwise). In order to put your life on the line for something, you need a life story.
Okay. Then it should be trivial for you to tell me who "Pr0duct Cypher"(sp?) is...
Sure. I'll give you the answer in email; no need to bother the whole list. But what kind of reputation does Pr0duct Cypher have, really? What has Pr0duct Cypher done or said that you cannot independently verify? In what sense do you "trust" Pr0duct Cypher? What you're trusting is source code, which is self-certifying. If Pr0duct Cypher tried to tell you about events in history or in a foreign country, or about technical subjects in which you had no personal competence, would you trust the information? Why should people who know nothing about crypto code trust Pr0duct Cypher's tools? (In reality the answer is: they don't. They buy from less technically adept companies that they can sue if things go wrong.) Among specialists, collegial discussion works for establishing reputation. But where you need to put faith in someone or something that you cannot independently verify, real personal accountability is still useful. Why do you trust your doctor? Would you buy food or water (or a gun) from an anonymous source with no verifiable meatspace presence? -rich
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At 8:02 pm -0500 11/11/96, Rich Graves wrote:
Given this, and, of course, our own fun and games with anonymous, er, slander, on this list, I'm frequently tempted to agree with him.
You people are wimps. The only real effect of the good doctor's rants has been, as Mr. May indicated, to get the good doctor on the "don't hire" list.
Sorry. I wasn't clear. My tongue was planted firmly in cheek there. I'm "frequently tempted" in the same way I'm "frequently tempted" to rip someone's head off and shit down their neck.
You get off your ass and find out directly.
How about if you know exactly who it is, but you know him to be judgement-proof, since he's already saddled with over $12 million in libel and wrongful-death suits? It's called "reputation capital."
See above. You're preaching to the choir here...
People are just going to have to be smarter than they've ever been. The Net enables sharing and verifying real information just as it enables disinformation. Sure disinformation will always be cheaper to produce and more appealing to the eye (fact is harder to accept than fiction because fictional plots are written to make sense), but disinformation tends to cancel itself out.
I agree, but, I think that, in the long run, disinformation may cost more. Lying always involves more work, and thus cost, than telling the truth. In order to support a lie you have to keep weaving a coherent tissue of other lies around the original lie to support it, all of which makes the original lie more and more non-plausible. In other words, the more "resolution" you get on a lie, the more it looks like a lie. Maybe that's the "cancel itself out" you're talking about. Of course, that implies critical thinking on the part of the listener, or at least access to critical information, which is what the net provides at a cheap price, like you said. So, maybe what we're saying here is that disinformation costs more than information, but if disinformer has more money, or at least communication resources, it'll be believed. On a geodesic network, this is much harder, because centralized nodes choke on their information load, and can't spread lies as cheaply as they can on a hierarchically controlled communication network, like broadcast, or even print, media.
Work on archives, reputation control, and openness. Disinformation, to be truly effective, requires a monopoly on information. More speech, not less.
Right.
(Keep in reserve the retort that anonymity is quite big in "the mainstream," too. How many key stories cite "well-placed administration sources"?)
The opposite of the Black Unicorn approach to nym safety is the Liz Taylor approach: "As long as they spell my name right, I don't care." Nobody I care about is going to listen to some crank, or if they do, they'll email me to check the facts, or if they don't, I have alternative outlets for information. As long as I live in a free country with a free Internet, they can't touch me.
Say 'amen' somebody. Reputation is reputation, nym or not. However, nyms allow something very important. Since the net enables reputation to persist (functionally) forever, nyms allow you to "start over", much in the same way that geographic frontiers have functioned historically. The paradox of ubiquitous network computing is it takes away privacy by creating persistant information accessable to anyone, while at the same time creating perfect pseudonymity and thus new reputation. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "The cost of anything is the foregone alternative" -- Walter Johnson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/
Rich Graves wrote:
Robert Hettinga wrote:
At 8:02 pm -0500 11/11/96, Rich Graves wrote:
[snippo]
No. It requires both. And sometimes, technical skill. How many people here know enough to evaluate the data concerning, to take a notorious example, the Kennedy assassination? I accept the historical consensus, but I know there are a lot of otherwise rational people on cypherpunks who are convinced that there was some sort of coverup (which sort, they often don't know or care; but they're conviced there was one). Oliver Stone got some ridiculous movie made based on this non-thesis (actually two, counting Nixon). People growing up today are learning pseudohistory and pseudoscience from Oliver Stone, "The X Files," "Dark Skies," and "Millenium." I find that scary. The net is better than TV, because it allows more responses, but I'm not sure how much better.
You accept the historical consensus? And which historical consensus is that? The non-consensus investigated by the prime suspect (Johnson)? Or the consensus investigated by the people's representatives, i.e. the House of Representatives? Maybe you didn't know that the #2 man should be considered the primary suspect, huh? And a coverup, by golly! Imagine that the U.S. government would do such a thing? Couldn't be, could it? They were just hiding the Zapruder film for 12 years in our best interest, right? No need to show the people Kennedy's upper torso (about 100 pounds of weight) being blown violently *backward* as a result of a frontal shot, since "Oswald" couldn't have been in front. Nosiree! Next thing you're gonna say is that "Oswald" shot Tippit with his *revolver* and then stopped to unload the spent shells by the body, yes? And Jack Ruby was just an irate citizen who felt sorry for Jackie, huh? I prefer not to judge people by just one posting, but like Noam Chomsky, with his "I can't see *anyone* who would have wanted Kennedy dead" bullshit, I just can't buy the notion that whoever wrote the above crap about the "historical consensus" doesn't really know what's going on. A disinformer posing as an idiot. Go figure.
On Fri, 15 Nov 1996 18:23:17 -0800, Dale Thorn wrote: A disinformer posing as an idiot. Go figure. Nice sig...and here I was thinking you were a real idiot. <g> -- Paul Foley <mycroft@actrix.gen.nz> --- PGPmail preferred PGP key ID 0x1CA3386D available from keyservers fingerprint = 4A 76 83 D8 99 BC ED 33 C5 02 81 C9 BF 7A 91 E8 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Deliberation, n.: The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Paul Foley wrote:
On Fri, 15 Nov 1996 18:23:17 -0800, Dale Thorn wrote: A disinformer posing as an idiot. Go figure. Nice sig...and here I was thinking you were a real idiot.
I'll refrain from saying anything nasty here, since there is no info in this posting to comment on, i.e., I don't know who you are. However, when you decide to CC cypherpunks with a flame like you just did, you could show *them* some consideration by leaving in some of the material so they know what the hell you're talking about.
Dale Thorn wrote:
Paul Foley wrote:
On Fri, 15 Nov 1996 18:23:17 -0800, Dale Thorn wrote: A disinformer posing as an idiot. Go figure. Nice sig...and here I was thinking you were a real idiot.
I'll refrain from saying anything nasty here, since there is no info in this posting to comment on, i.e., I don't know who you are.
However, when you decide to CC cypherpunks with a flame like you just did, you could show *them* some consideration by leaving in some of the material so they know what the hell you're talking about.
That would be redundant. Everyone on cypherpunks receives what you send to the list, and thus has access to the source material, if desired. Paul's humor was surely appreciated by the people who have killfiled you and thus miss your posts unless there's a followup. -rich
participants (5)
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Dale Thorn -
Open Net Postmaster -
Paul Foley -
Rich Graves -
Robert Hettinga