Arthur Chandler writes:

What I find odd is the number and vehemence of posts ON A LIST DEVOTED TO ENCRYPTION saying "Hey, it's a fact of life, accept it" -- even dragging out Machiavelli's profoundly mistaken "if you can't enforce it, don't prohibit it."

Oh well, it's "profoundly" mistaken, so we'd better change our tune. OK, let's prohibit it. The net sure will be wonderful once that magic wand is waved.

Of all the groups on the Internet, I would think that this one would be in a special position to say "put your digital John Hancock on your post if you want to to taken seriously."

Uhhhh... That's the *point*. It is a waste of time and energy to prohibit anonymity/pseudonymity when it's so easy to render it completely ineffective through the use of strong cryptography and digital signature technology. Note that if it weren't for the fact that humans can use sensory mechanisms to determine with some confidence the identity of a human they're talking to, we'd have been faced with the same problem for quite some time. That's one of the foundations of the whole cypherpunk concept: freedom to develop and use strong cryptosystems makes this confidence of identity possible over electronic networks. (Please pardon my presumption at speaking for the "organization"; I'm paraphrasing something Mike Godwin said at the Austin EFF Crypto meeting.) Note also that the problem *does* exist now: politicians recieve letters about hot issues from constituents---or at least they're *assumed* to be from constituents. How many votes have been changed over the years by clever miscreants sending many letters under different assumed identities? -- Mike McNally