Everybody note that I haven't gotten an answer to this from Ryan Lackey, nor has Declan McCullagh responded to many emails sent his way.  Tom Busby seems unusually quiet, as well:   Busby, the keeper of the Archive, should be enthusiastically working to figure out what happened that would allow the Archive to have been forged.  

The Venona files, as I recall, were dated 2003:  Is that correct?   If I had a more-efficient editor to search the CP archives, I would study the discussions of the people doing the archive to figure out who was involved, what happened, and when it happened.   Can somebody help with this?

The Wayback Machine began in 2001.  (but see the reference to 1996, below).    Were the files that went into Venona or other to-be-archived data copied onto Wayback?  http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/5/19/a-short-on-how-the-wayback-machine-stores-more-pages-than-st.html   

"How does the Wayback Machine work? Now with over 400 billion webpages indexed, allowing the Internet to be browsed all the way back to 1996, it's an even more compelling question. I've looked several times but I've never found a really good answer."

"Here's some information from a thread on Hacker News. It starts with mmagin, a former Archive employee:"

[end of quote]
                          Jim Bell


On Friday, November 22, 2019, 08:25:40 PM PST, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:


I'm going to put this response onto the Cypherpunks list, so that everybody learns what is going on.

You said, "I don’t think they were intentionally edited by anyone."    That may very well be because you haven't checked.  Would you know what to look for, if I hadn't told you?    Probably not.  

I am apparently the first person in about 16 years to have identified this problem.  And the reason I discovered it was simply that I was looking for a very specific piece of information that I knew should have been in it:  The date of the first appearance of Part 1 of my Assassination Politics essay, which as I had vaguely recalled should have been somewhere in February or March 1995.  And parts 2-6 should also have appeared in the 1995 archive.  

I didn't place it there:  It was copied by a person whose name I don't recall (maybe I never knew it...) from the Digitaliberty email list, run by Bill Frezza.  There was a huge amount of discussion of it in mid-1995.   You can even find many references in 1996, but essentially nothing in 1995.  

I looked for this, and was shocked by what I saw (or more precisely, DIDN'T see):  It is quite obvious now what happened:  With a tiny number of exceptions in November and December 1995, all messages with the strings "Jim Bell", "jimbell@pacifier.com", " AP ", and "Assassination Politics" simply didn't appear.  Someone had intentionally removed them.  The fraud had been so minutely done that any appearance of the string ' ap ' that meant "Assassination Politics" had been removed, and the very few that meant "Associated Press" remained.   Not an accident.  Quite intentional.  

I think you owe it to the other users of the Cypherpunks list (then and now)  to correct your "I don’t think they were intentionally edited by anyone." to "I agree it's obvious that 1995's archive was forged".   And "I will help you to figure out who did it."    It only takes your recognition that those strings had to appear, heavily, in the data and nevertheless they did do not.  Check for the appearance of those strings in 1996, to see what the "normal" situation should have been.   A few minutes of text searching will confirm all this.  

You could easily do this by talking to other people who were aware of what happened on the Cypherpunks list in 1995.  Declan McCullagh was one; the names of the others are obviously available in the 1995 and 1996 archive itself, including the email addresses (at least, their email addresses then) of those very people.  They will all agree that those strings, at the very least, are missing.  And you won't find an 'innocent' explanation, no matter how hard you try.  

This cannot possibly have been by accident. And you are virtually certain to have been in contact with the person who did that fraud, or at least one who knew what was going on.  You probably have archives, possibly on 'retired' hard drives.   Or the people who gave the data to you.   Eventually, we will find the answer.  

With a little searching, I can see that you work in the 'security' field.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Lackey    You are, therefore, well-qualified for this task.  And you should want to ensure that your reputation is upheld with your handling of this matter.  

           Jim Bell


On Friday, November 22, 2019, 07:33:24 PM PST, Ryan Lackey <ryan@venona.com> wrote:


The archives I have were built from source files provided by Hugh Daniel and possibly some other sources (John Young?  my own node?).  It’s entirely possible they aren’t comprehensive for a variety of reasons (nodes being out of sync, corruption, inconsistent formatting, whatever).  I don’t think they were intentionally edited by anyone.

That’s all the information I have, and sorry I can’t help you.

On Nov 22, 2019, at 23:19, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:



----- Forwarded Message -----
From: jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com>
To: "cypherpunks@lists.cpunks.org" <cypherpunks@lists.cpunks.org>; grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com>; Tom Busby <tom@busby.ninja>; rlackey@venona.com <rlackey@venona.com>; rlackey@mit.edu <rlackey@mit.edu>; rlackey@cloudflare.com <rlackey@cloudflare.com>; rlackey@hotmail.com <rlackey@hotmail.com>; rlackey@gmail.com <rlackey@gmail.com>; rlackey@cryptoseal.com <rlackey@cryptoseal.com>; declan@well.com <declan@well.com>
Sent: Friday, November 22, 2019, 10:59:03 AM PST
Subject: Re: The Cypherpunk's 1995 Archive has been forged, and what are we going to do about it? (was:Re: Could someone add news of Cypherpunks Archive...

https://rocketreach.co/ryan-lackey-email_255468

  • @mit.edu
  • @venona.com
  • @cloudflare.com
  • @hotmail.com
  • @cryptoseal.com
  • @gmail.com



I am including Ryan Lackey in this thread, since he seems to have been involved in the Cypherpunks archive during the relevant time frame.

Ryan, I have discovered extensive data omissions in (at least) the 1995 Cypherpunks data archive.  These errors or omissions seem to have existed as early as 2003.  They have been discussed for  a few weeks on the Cypherpunks list.  There is an almost total omission of emails  between the dates of about February 14, 1995, and July 10, 1995.  Furthermore, from July 11 1995 onwards to the end of 1995, there are almost no strings like this:

"jim bell",  "jimbell@pacifier.com", " AP ", "Assassination Politics".  

Yet, there are thousands of other messages.   It appears that emails containing such strings, and possibly others, have been carefully excised from the database,   Curiously, the very few (15?) instances where " AP " appears are almost entirely referring to the Associated Press, not Assassination Politics,  So, this editing could not easily have been done with a simple, blind string-search:  It probably would have had to include careful human assistance.

We'd like to hear of your recollection of the history of the Cypherpunks Archive, how it came to be, etc.  

                  Jim Bell



On Wednesday, November 20, 2019, 01:43:48 PM PST, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:


Still no response.  And, I don't see any enthusiastic efforts from others currently on CP to contact any other journalists or previous CP people to help uncover this mystery.   Will this become embarrassing?   Yes.   

               Jim Bell



On Monday, November 18, 2019, 10:42:26 AM PST, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:


Well, I sent out an email to Declan McCullagh,  declan@well.com,  and so far no reply.   At least openly, there would not appear to be any reason he should resist the idea of returning and helping us figure out what happened with the faked 1995 archive.  He apparently continues to write news articles,   https://muckrack.com/declan-mccullagh/articles , and at least from their titles they sound well-meaning.  This would certainly amount to a big story, and he certainly can't claim the subject isn't interesting given the history of his articles.  

However, his position stated to me in about March 2002 (about the time I was transferred to USP Atwater California; I had been at USP Lompoc for a few months before that) was initially that he was going to visit (because he was attending an event somewhere in the Bay area, as I recall), but after that he didn't bother to show up and it wasn't the reason he claimed:  'something came up':  In fact, he didn't even fill out and return a (necessary) Visitor's application, which would have been automatically approved.  So, evidently, Declan had decided weeks before that he had no intention of visiting me:  Without that form and routine approval, he would not have been allowed to visit.  He knew that.

So, I request that as many people as possible contact him and make this request directly.  He may feel uncomfortable, but he has a degree of responsibility, at least as a participant in the Cypherpunks list in 1995-96 and probably beyond, and as a witness, and as a person who no doubt reported the government's line during 1997-2002, but didn't bother to do anything to publicize my side of the story.  And in the end, I had done probably 12 more years in prison BECAUSE my story hadn't been told.

Declan should contact the people involved with the Cypherpunks archives, or keeping of the data.  I am confident that it wouldn't take long to figure out what happened.  

             Jim Bell