Another Anti-Privacy Bigot Heard From (was: The Guilmette/Burnore deba

[owner-cypherpunks at toad.com]

Joe "We are Borg" Foster <joe at bftsi0.UUCP> wrote:

> > That was an impressive tantrum that you and Belinda just staged.  I
> > suppose you thought it would distract attention from the fact that
> > you still refuse to reveal what your motive was for harassing Jeff
> > Burchell this summer in a failed attempt to get him to turn over the
> > logs containing the names and e-mail addresses of everyone who
> > either sent or received an anonymous message through his remailer.
> 
> Et tu, dumbass? Have you forgotten the existence of the "old" Deja News
> database?

That won't work for two reasons:  First, Gary is now "cloaking" his
posts with an "X-No-Archive" header to keep them from being archived
by neutral parties such as DejaNews.  In addition, if you do a
search on his name as author in the old database, you get a bunch of
matches that say "article not available", indicating that he's
requested that such articles be removed from the archives.  Second,
how does one search for something that was never posted?  The only
thing I see in the Deja News archives is Jeff Burchell's explanation
of Burnore's $cientology-esque attack on his remailer:

-> Subject:    Re: DataBasix vs. the Remailers -- Gary Burnore's 
->             Dirty Tricks Exposed (was: Jeff's Side of the Story.)
-> From:       toxic at hotwired.com (Jeff Burchell)
-> Date:       1997/07/02
-> Message-ID: <5pc9mb$omg$1 at re.hotwired.com>
-> 
-> [...]
-> 
-> : > Mr. Burnore requested a copy of my (non-existant) logs.
-> : > I told him to get me something in writing, signed by his lawyer that
-> : > stipulated that the logs were confidential, and not to be revealed to
-> : > anyone outside of the lawyer's office.
-> :
-> : He requested the logs of the messages of *EVERYONE* using Huge
-> : Cajones?  What was his rationale for such a fishing expedition?
-> : (Cases like this are a good reason for remailers to NOT keep logs.)
-> 
-> I have no idea of his rationale.  And I don't know of any remailer
-> operator who keeps logs that would identify a user.  I had my machine
-> configured to log in a fairly standard way, but I used a different
-> sendmail configuration for the remailer, that had all logging (except
-> for certain error conditions) turned off.
-> 
-> Part of me thinks he wanted the logs so he could tell if I was going
-> to be able to identify him when he started his attacks.

Thus far, that's the best explanation I've seen for Gary Burnore's
threats and harassment.

> > If posts from "anon assholes" really offend your sensitive feelings,
> > then you might want to stay away from most of the NGs where you've
> > been posting your blather.  SUGGESTION: stick with "safe" groups
> > like comp.org.cauce where anonymous posts are banned and content is
> > censo^h^h^h^h^hmoderated to ensure an appropriate level of political
> > correctness.
> 
> Posts from assholes definitely offend me, whether they're anon or not!

True, but the chance that somone might be offensive is not
sufficient reason to censor it.  (If that were true, Usenet
references to Whitewater might be declared "pornographic" by the
Clinton administration.)  Gary Burnore keeps whining about posts
from "ANON assholes" not just "assholes" in general.  That
definitely reveals something about him.  If he were to gripe about
posts from "black assholes", one might (rightly) conclude that he
was a racist.  If he were flaming posts from "gay assholes", you'd
probably figure that he was a homophobe, right?  The fact that he
doesn't flame the CONTENT but some characteristic about the author
marks him as a bigot.

> Well, if you really think about it, just about any news post might be
> "anonymous". After all, how do you know that whoever typed all this is
> really named "Joe Foster"? You don't! Remember "Mahmud al-Hijazi"?

You've got a point there.  <g> I don't place much faith in what I
see in the From:  line, even if it appears to be a valid e-mail
address.