At 5:57 PM 8/10/95, John Young wrote:

I respect the view that sound crypto requires skeptical review and testing outside closed rooms. Conspiracies live or die by the same process. Crypto would die if there was no belief in conspiracies.

Conspiracy theory drives the cypherpunk agenda, I surmised from the welcoming statement. Note the caution about "S1," and any other crypto offering.

I think a better, and less loaded, tern than "conspiracies" is "threat models." It has always been important to many of us that the policies and plans of potential threats be discussed, analyzed, etc. Thus, our recurring focus on the activities of the NSA, GCHQ, FinCEN, and so on. For example, all folks on this list should almost certainly read "The Puzzle Palace," even though it does not _directly_ help with the latest project in writing code. And like Orlin Grabbe, whose "End of Money" article I posted a pointer to last winter, I closely follow the recent developments involving the intelligence agencies, the plans to limit crypto, etc. (By the way, it was my close following of the NSA and related organizations, and my monitoring of what Dorothy Denning was saying, that led to my "A Trial Balloon to Ban Crypto?" article in this group and in sci.crypt three years ago. This warning, which generated much discussion on sci.crypt and here, prepared us for the Clipper announcement six months later.) Is this wasted time? Shouldn't I be using my time to write Trumpet Winsocks--whatever they are!--for WinCypherHyperPhone? Well, we all decide what our interests are, and exhortations by others that we are not working on what is "really" important are not very useful. There are probably a dozen different sorts of interests here, ranging from a bunch of folks interested in popularizing crypto to several law professors and lawyers interested in legal aspects to Internet programming experts. Even some pure mathematicians. Even some novices.

Perry's sharp statements on the urgent need for crypto deployment are motivated, it seems to me, by a view of a believable, if not wholly proveable, threat that crypto is believed to counter. I choose to believe him; Orlin's got my skeptical interest -- put up or shut up -- and he's not out of line.

Perry is Perry. He has certainly written his share of rants and "off-topic" posts, as have we all. Literally thousands of his posts over the past 3 years reside on my disk drives, and certainly until recently most of them were not about writing code. Ironically, just a few weeks ago, Perry was sharply criticizing me for my "Crisis Overload" post and was urging me to join him in a serious lobbying effort to undermine the Grassley bill. I declined, thinking it unlikely to succeed and preferring to concentrate on my other project (including a new release of SmalltalkAgents, just arrived). When I preferred to work on more technical things than launching a grassroots political campaign, he got abusive and insulting in e-mail and I told him I would no longer accept this sort of abuse. You may recall he chose to post this private message here in public, without of course the messages that preceeded this (and without my permission, needless to say). Again, Perry is Perry. People work on what interests them. It is nice for Perry, and maybe for all of us if his efforts work out, that he has thrown himself into this new programming project, but it is wrong for him to automatically dismiss the interests and efforts of others. There's also a certain "control freak" attitude that creeps into this list (and other lists, of course) at times, wherein people say that their current interest is vastly more important than anything else and that anyone who does not drop their frivolous other interests and begin work immediately on the One True Project are fools and knaves, and are probably secretly working for the NSA! (:-}). People should write about what interests them. Those who wish to program, should program. Those who wish to explore number theory, should explore number theory. And so on. Attempting to control what gets posted on this list is pointless. If you don't like a particular topic, or an author, use filters and kill files. This can be done in many ways, including mail programs, procmail, and even the "MailWeir" service that Harry Hawk offers. And many people dump the list traffic into local newsgroups, allowing threadified reading. Also, various digestified versions of the list exist--Eric Blossom has one. Insulting people as "ciphergroupies" because they are not working on one's current interest seems needlessly counterproductive. Just my views. If you don't like 'em, ignore them or filter them. That's the Cypherpunk way of doing things. --Tim May Special note: My ISP has changed its domain name from "sensemedia.net" to "got.net" (as in "got milk?"), so I have to again ask you all to bear with me and use my new e-mail address, "tcmay@got.net". ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net (Got net?) | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-728-0152 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Corralitos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."