Tom Busby, Archivist for the Cypherpunks Archive:
Please tell us what you have been doing about this forgery, and what do you intend to do in the future. See the material below. I suggest contacting the people who claim to have been involved with generation and the maintenance of the material that went into the archive, and those involved in the list in the mid-late 1990's. Please respond to the Cypherpunks list.
Jim Bell'
On Friday, November 15, 2019, 05:42:36 PM PST, jim bell
this Cypherpunks Archive forgery?
As there have been too many messages over too many broken threads etc on this for anyone to digest...
What is the current state of this, exactly?
1) Venona/Cryptome has entire month sized time gaps. Have those gaps been proven malicious with evidence? If so, what is it.
2) Jim asserts, and context of some messages in Venona/Cryptome said to show, that Jim and or others seem to have been posting on AP subject during
That's an excellent question. If there were merely 5 months of a virtually-total gap, (Feb 14-July 11, 1995) a person might declare that looked like an innocent loss of data. But the problem is that during another 6 month period (July 11 -December 1995) there are thousands of messages, and yet almost none containing the strings "jim bell", "jimbell@pacifier.com", " ap ", or "assassination politics". I happen to have an advantage over people who weren't reading or posting on CP during those months: I know that there should be many hundreds and perhaps thousands of such references. So, I know that the 1995 archive was heavily forged. No mere accidental deletion of data could have achieved that outcome. And the contents of the 1996 archive clearly shows large numbers even in January 1996. Further, the very few messages with those text strings in November and December 1995 show that I was indeed on the CP list that early. Where are the huge number of "What is this AP idea anyway?" comments? Further, if you do a google search for ' "assassination politics" 1995' it is quite clear that 'everybody' realizes that AP was first publicized in 1995, not 1996. A forgery that completely removed each and every such reference in 1995 would be obviously false. Even Wikipedia says: "In April 1995, Bell authored the first part of a 10-part essay called "Assassination Politics", which described an elaborate assassination market in which anonymous benefactors could securely order the killings of government officials or others who are violating citizens' rights." | | | | | | | | | | | Assassination market Early uses of the terms "assassination market" and "market for assassinations" can be found (in both positive an... | | | Although, it cites no references in this. There are, however, many other results for the google search which clearly identify AP as beginning in 1995. those gaps, somewhere on some fora / remailer. And, of course, I've suggested that people who were active on the list be contacted and asked. Declan McCullagh is one of the more well-known people, although oddly his name and email address is also mysteriously missing from most of the 1995 archive.
Months long wholesale gaps could just be fuckups. Certainly different than say obvious erasement single scope targeting a topic / author.
So it seems you'd want to make a simple call for more independant copies of the various fora with attestations, to help form and answer any real question.
That's quite true. Surprisingly, we've seen nothing so far.
This is not to discount any questions that may exist. Only to define the current state of the questions so that people, journos, whoever, might have something precise to try answering next.
I am quite confident that the answers will be forthcoming.
People should present the current questions and any evidence again, briefly, in one nice new thread or post, so people can pick up and work on. Good idea.
Not over 10+ threads, 50+ posts comprising 100 of pages of longtalk, block quoting, top posting, HTML, sidetalk, rants, etc.
You should of course quote in that summary, any 1995 messages from people other than Jim that refer in context to any suspected missing AP messages.
It would also be interesting if say 5 people stood up each with a copy from a different remailer, and none had the suspected AP messages in them.
I think we are all awaiting the answer. Jim Bell