At 10:55 AM -0700 11/14/97, Anonymous wrote:

If you don't speak up when someone says something objectionable, you are implicitly condoning it. Silence gives consent. How many people have objected to Tim May's racist comments? Only one or two. How many objected when William Geiger suggested that more nuclear bombs should have been dropped on Japan? None. How many have objected to the notion that residents of Washington, D.C. should be killed? Hardly any.

Whomever you are, you don't sound as though you've been reading the list for as many years as many of us have. People say all sorts of things, some provocative, some politically incorrect, some even outrageous. Get used to it. I have never said "residents of Washington, D.C. should be killed." As I recall my first comment along these lines, it was, paraphrasing (as I don't feel like spending 15 minutes sifting through my archived mail), along the lines of: "I fully expect to wake up some morning and hear that some terrorist nuke has destroyed Washington, D.C. I can't say I'll be crying." Big deal. Nothing Tom Clancy hasn't talked about in his novels. (And recall Clancy's delicious description of a Japanese 747 loaded with jet fuel being crashed into the main hall of Congress during a joint session, with the President and cabinet in attendance. It was clear that Clancy was vicarious relishing this vermin removal effort. Gonna suggest that Clancy has committed a crime? No doubt Hettinga would.)

At one time the cypherpunks stood for freedom of speech and protection of privacy. Today they stand for guns, violence, threats of terrorism and murder, racism, homophobia, jingoism.

I've been here since the beginning...since before the beginning, actually. And I can tell you that the "political incorrectness" was the same in 1992-4 as now. Perhaps you recall a little thing called Waco that happened around that time? Go back and read the traffic. As for "standing" for guns, violence, racism, homophobia, etc., there is no Official Cypherpunks Position on _anything_. Individual list members make individual comments. Some humorous, some angry, some stupid, some offensive, whatever. Many of us don't "stand" for freedom of speech if it really means suppression of racist, homophobic, whatever speech, as it seems to me in many countries today. The Orwellian "freedom of speech does not mean freedom to say wrong or offensive things" is a meme that seems to be spreading. Ultimately, freedom of speech and of assembly, and privacy itself, is not something the state can ensure. Technology may.

It's ironic to see that the kind of off-topic, flaming, irrelevant posts which have caused such consternation in the past are now the norm. Reasonable people have been largely driven off the list, leaving it to supporters of violence and hate.

Perry was saying the same thing several years ago, even arguing that the very name "Cypherpunks" would send the wrong message to the suits and other responsible persons. Fine. He eventually went off and formed his own list, with Perry's Rules of Order. Sounds fair to me. But this list ain't that list. It doesn't run by _anybody's_ Rules of Order. Get used to it. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

At 12:52 pm -0500 on 11/14/97, Tim May kept shovelling it out:

Big deal. Nothing Tom Clancy hasn't talked about in his novels. (And recall Clancy's delicious description of a Japanese 747 loaded with jet fuel being crashed into the main hall of Congress during a joint session, with the President and cabinet in attendance. It was clear that Clancy was vicarious relishing this vermin removal effort. Gonna suggest that Clancy has committed a crime? No doubt Hettinga would.)

Nope. It was fiction. Jingoistic :-) fiction, but fiction nonetheless. Helps if you've sold 100 million books or something before the fact. Frankly I didn't get that far into the story, because the way Clancy planned to take Wall Street out made me laugh out loud. Blow-milk-out-your-nose funny, especially if you have even the most rudimentary financial operations experience, which is all I have. Financial science fiction written from the viewpoint of an insurance salesman is always funny, I guess, as we'll learn in a product announcement around here someday, I bet... You, on the other hand, Tim, have not sold tens of millions of books, but you did say that war was at hand, and, in the very next breath, you threatened a very specific federal judge by saying he committed a "capital" crime. Whatever "capital" means. Not that it matters, of course, after all, it's just "vermin control", right? And, no, Tim, not once have I suggested that what you did was a crime at all. In fact, I have consistantly said it could just be *treated* as one by anyone with sufficient motivation to do so, whether you were apprehended, or jailed, or tried, or convicted -- or not. And "not" in this case, as Jim Bell shows us, can be an interesting set of results... Finally, and to the point, I don't say that what you said then is immediately going to get you a stay in Club Fed somewhere, but that your continued escalation of this kind of stuff makes that a probability, and that it looked to me like you were doing it on purpose in order to provoke a confrontation of some kind, God knows why. I still believe you'd still be escalating that bizarre silliness, instead of backpedaling with all this equivocation, if I hadn't called you on it at the time. And, finally, I *don't* believe the world's going to end in some state-sponsored cataclysm, for you, for me, or for your favorite official vermin, just because the technology of strong cryptography over ubiquitous networks makes vertically integrated hierarchical entities like nation-states economically obsolete someday. Even if it happens all at once, which it can't. Even if that day is maybe sooner rather than later, which would be nice but probably not anytime soon. Even if it's the Millenium, or even Thanksgiving: a day which, of course, is ludicrously too soon for anyone's revolution anyway. :-). Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>