"Sam" <sam-001@dpinc.ml.org> wrote:

...

:That's precisely my point. And now he refuses to disclose his motives for :that demand or what he intended to do with the names and addresses contained :in those logs. Every time he's asked the question of why he attempted to :violate the privacy of hundreds or perhaps thousands of remailer users, it :elicits another tantrum that goes, "Lies! Prove it! Why are you harassing :me? What are your demands?"

You still can't answer it so you ignore it.

What is the nature of the harassment that you are complaining about? Has this anonymous individual mailbombed you? Made threatening phone calls in the middle of the night? All I see are a bunch of posts, without any profanities, that make a bunch of cogent points, and claims. Is this what you consider harassment? Is this what you call "harassment"?

That must mean that I'm harassing you as well, right?

That is exactly my objection to the tactics of Gary Burnore and the DataBasix gang. NOW Gary claims that he's not against remailers, yet his treatment of Jeff Burchell speaks for itself. In the past, he's said things like "remailers have their place, but their operators should prevent them from being used for abuse". That sounds reasonable, until you read between the lines. He calls the kind of discussion that the three of us are engaging in "harassment", and has even, upon occasion, accused posts critical of him of constituting "libel". Yet he offers no suggestion of how a remailer operator is supposed to detect and prevent "libel". He has offered no handy-dandy Perl script which will act as a "truth filter" and detect the truth or falsity of a particular post, since posting the truth about someone, as unflattering as it may be, is not "libel". Actually, Gary may unwittingly prove to be a "friend" of remailers, yet. His dealings with people who challenge him publicly should serve as an object lesson as to why people may wish to think twice before broadcasting their e-mail addresses to the world with every Usenet posts. Most people, I would suspect, would not consider it great fun to speak their mind and face retaliation by having an old state tax lien (complete with street address) dredged from the archives and posted worldwide to usenet, with the threat that unless the criticism ceases, "there's more where that came from". It's sort of hard to harass an anonymous poster in that fashion, so Gary has to settle for juvenile taunts of "anon asshole".