Missouri FreeNet Administration <sysadmin@mfn.org> wrote:

First off, let us state up front that this is an aside to the previous poster, and not totally on-point: feel free to hit the delete key, and accept our apologies if this is a problem.

About two months ago, we met the infamous Burnore & Company while defending a semi-annonymous UseNet poster calling himself "Outlaw-Frog-Raper". It seems that in classical Burnore style "OFR" found himself the sudden victim of [literally] daily TOS/SPAM complaints by Burnore and Co. for making use of UseNet to air his decidedly anti-police positions (it's odd how "pro police" Burnore is, isn't it?).

Given Gary Burnore's criminal record, he needs all the sucking up to the police he can get. In addition to his arrest and conviction for molesting his girlfriend's daughter in Santa Clara, CA, he was also arrested for unlawful assembly for his participation in Critical Mass' bicycle blockade of the streets of San Francisco during rush hour. (See: http://www.e-media.com/cm/sac.html ) And this criminal has the chutzpah to try and be a net Nazi as well. This same self-righteous individual once lectured another netizen about how it's wrong to "fight abuse with abuse".

Obviously, as defenders of this man's right to post material offensive to Burnore, we too came under attack. Fortunately, we have been with our upstream provider for a long time, and are on *very* good terms: they told Burnore to keep his complaints to himself. But I digress...

The best defense against censorious cretins like Gary Burnore is education. That's what the victims of the infamous "Rev." Steve Winter (who also lives in Raleigh, NC, BTW) had to do to counteract his abusive tactics. A "Steve Winter FAQ" was compiled and posted to Usenet as well as being published on the web. People who are the subject of his harassment tactics have something to show to their ISPs, employers, etc. when Winter makes his bogus threats.

As this "war" intensified, we attempted to determine just who in the hell this lunatic *was*, as nobody here is a regular Usenet follower (just when we have our slow periods, we'll check in with the loons to kill a couple of hours...). To our surprise, we discovered that while Burnore/Databasix/etc. are known far and wide, the actual traffic that passes between them and the rest of the Earthly population is pretty well eradicated. Here's a guy who has actually sat down and deleted (according to DejaNews) *tens of thousands* of his -own- posts! Not to mention the unknown number of posts which he has "thoughtfully taken care of for those others who forgot to do so themselves"...

This is the same Gary Burnore who cajoled an anonymous whistleblower for "hiding behind a remailer" and boasted "I have nothing to hide", although he himself attempts to gain plausible deniability for his own posts by preventing an impartial third party from archiving them, then claiming they were "forged" if he inserted his foot too far into his mouth. Not only does Gary hide his own posts behind an X-No-Archive header, but posts critical of him have a tendency to be cancelled through forgery. He screwed up once and cancelled a post critical of him that was cross-posted to one of the news.admin.net-abuse.* NGs. Unfortunately for him, an anti-cancel-bot on that NG reposted the cancelled message along with a copy of the forged cancellation message sent by ... guess who ... Gary Burnore! Oops, Gary, can you say "busted"?

The point here is that what little survives about this lunatic child molester (he has even successfully had his North Carolina Sex Offender record removed!), has almost all come through *some* annonymizer. Whether a MixMaster, or Cajones (RIP) "intentional annonymizer", or an "unintentional annonymizer" such as a large [cypherpunks] listserv with "bad headers".

By his own account, Gary Burnore spent nearly $30K getting the child molestation charge plea-bargained down to a misdemeanor. My guess is that he has no money left to carry through on his idle threats of frivolous legal action against those on his lengthy enemies list. For example, when Jeff Burchell demanded a letter from Gary's lawyer when he was demanding that Jeff turn over his remailer logs to DataBasix, what Jeff received was a letter from Gary's girlfriend Belinda Bryan <eridani@databasix.com> impersonating a lawyer. For Jeff's account of that episode, visit: http://calvo.teleco.ulpgc.es/listas/cypherpunks@infonex.com/HTML-1997-11/msg...

We submit that it only takes one successful argument, even though there be a million such arguments available, to "proof" the value of an annoymous remailer. we then extend the original Burnore story (presented in part below) in further support.

It proves that censorship need not originate with a governmental body. All it takes is a determined individual with more time available to harass than his victims do to defend against it.

Yes, I know, at least half of you are sitting here going "now why did they bother us with that?". The answer is we feel VERY strongly that if not for what [little] we were able to find as a result of A/R's, we would never have been able to figure this clown out at all. And loco though he may be, he is also a *prodigious* pain in the ass, who represents a real, true threat to what little freedoms we still have in the US. Burnore isn't a loner in the political sense: he's actually becoming pretty mainstream. If A/R's can help to keep scum like him in the light, where he can't hide his hypocrises [sp?] through a cancel or "DejaNuke", then they are one of our most important national resources, and should be defended (and *funded*) as such!

The problem is that most dissidents have a weak point somewhere where they are vulnerable, whether it be a censorious hate mail campaign to his/her ISP or employer, mail bombing, spam baiting, forged mailing list subscriptions, or one of countless other denial-of-service attacks that Gary Burnore, Belinda Bryan, Billy McClatchie (aka "Wotan"), or otther members of the DataBasix abuse factory can conjure up.

Just our [very biased] $.02 worth...

The full-time [yet totally volunteer] staff of Missouri FreeNet:

J.A. Terranson, sysadmin@mfn.org John Blau, jb214@mfn.org Beatrice Hynes, beatrice@mfn.org Frescenne "M", support@mfn.org A. Pates, support@mfn.org

</LURK ON> ---------------------------------------------------------------------

<huge brevity snippage>

Consider the episode last year with Gary Burnore and DataBasix vs. Jeff Burchell and his Mailmasher and Huge Cajones machines. Made-to-order abuse appeared right on cue to reinforce the claims that Burnore and his girlfriend Belinda Bryan had made. And now we've learned the real truth behind the whole episode. While Gary Burnore was living with another girlfriend in Santa Clara, CA, he was also molesting her teenaged daughter. An anonymous whistleblower attempted to warn the girl's mother as well as her school officials by anonymous e-mail. Burnore went ballistic and falsely claimed "harassment". But the whistleblower was ultimately vindicated when Burnore pled guilty to the molestation charge, was placed on probation, and was required to register as a sex offender. Unable to silence the whistleblower, Burnore began a campaign of harassment against the operators of the remailers that were being used to expose him. IOW, if you can't refute the message, shoot the messenger. And if you can't shoot the messenger, attempt to disable his means of communication (the remailers net).

I recounted this case history, which can be researched in various usenet archives by anyone interested, just to demonstrate that one man's "harassment" can well be another man's investigative journalism, even if the journalist or whistleblower is not in a position to expose him/herself to retaliation by the wrongdoer, which has been (coincidentally?) reported by virtually anyone who has dared to challenge Gary Burnore publicly.