No, Mr. Busby, there is a Santa Claus.

[Tom Busby]

Hi to all in general and Jim in particular,

I don't check the list all that often at the moment, I decided to do a
keyword search after I saw your disqus comment. It's good to hear from you,
I'm a fan of Assassination Politics. It's a thought provoking work
describing a dangerous idea of the kind that has always fascinated me :)

I'll repeat what I said in my reply on the page:

https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/blog/2018/07/05/the-cypherpunks-mailing-list-archives-must-be-preserved.html
<https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/blog/2018/07/05/the-cypherpunks-mailing-list-archives-must-be-preserved.html#comment-4676616536>

Currently. Yes, the archive is basically just a clone of what's in the raw
files hosted on Ryan Lackey's venona site. I strongly, strongly suspect
that this has large amounts of missing data due to how quiet some periods
are, and also it ends in early 1999 anyway (with those emails tacked on to
the end of the 1998 archive).

I was provided with a (apparently) roughly complete archive for 2000 to
2016. This is hosted here currently:

https://github.com/cryptoanarchywiki/2000-to-2016-raw-cypherpunks-archive

I had strong ambitions of trying to index and merge all of the archives I
could get my hands on, but this is more challenging than you might think.
Determining which two emails are the same is very difficult when they
sometimes contain encoding errors, extra whitespace, differing text for
expressing the time of emails, etc (making hashing an infeasible way of
comparing them). I've also had an enormous amount of other commitments that
have preventing me working on this archive as much as I'd like (or at all
really, if I'm honest) over the past year.

The site is also a Jekyll-generated static site hosted on github. The sheer
number of pages is really approaching the limit of what's possible with
this approach. It takes over an hour to build the site currently. Adding
the 2000-2016 archive would be totally unworkable in this way. I also want
to index the messages in ElasticSearch or similar. The lack of a search
function is something that I feel is sorely lacking.

Sadly, for this reason, my attempts to synthesise all the available
incomplete archives of messages from this era have stalled :( it's there at
the back of my mind though, so I haven't lost the will to work on it, just
the time.

I hear your concerns about large numbers of missing emails, and if anyone
reading this has their own copies of the 1990s archives, I'd love to have
them. I can't make any promises about when I'll be able to work on
processing them, but rest assured I will take great care of those archive
files so that, should I fail to complete this task myself, those archives
will be collected together for someone else to attempt to finish the task.]

Whether or not those archives have willful deletions or modifications to
the data, I've no idea, to be honest. I would rely on others to notice and
report things that seem strange. Even then I'm not sure what to do about
it. When coming across two distinct versions of what appear to be the same
message, I'd probably just list both. That's all I can do really. This
project appears to be complex in a lot of ways that weren't obvious at the
start... which is a familiar story to anyone who sets out to solve a
problem I guess :)

Tom

On Sat, 2 Nov 2019 at 23:31, jim bell <jdb10987 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> No, Mr. Busby, there is a Santa Claus.
>
> Dear Mr. Busby,
>
> On the Cypherpunks Archive web page,
> https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/blog/2018/07/05/the-cypherpunks-mailing-list-archives-must-be-preserved.html
>  , you said:
>
> "I have an uneasy feeling that many of the posts from this era may
> already be irrecoverably lost. If this is true it would be a great shame
> for future generations who want to learn about this vital period of
> internet history and development. There is an argument that perhaps the
> list participants would like their privacy preserved, however I don’t think
> it is a strong one. An open-subscription mailing list is ultimately a
> public forum. Posting to it is an act of placing information into the
> public domain."
>
> No, Mr. Busby, you need not worry about that specific possibility.   There
> were clearly hundreds of people who subscribed to the CP email list, even
> as early as mid 1995.  Each of them regularly received copies of posted CP
> emails, which were presumably reliably stored onto their computers' hard
> drives, possibly floppy disks, and eventually possibly backup tapes. Those
> hard drives were occasionally retired, but when that happened many of them
> were probably put on shelves to gather dust.  Remember, at the moment they
> were retired, they were not considered totally worthless.  And shelves are
> remarkable things:  If you put something on them, perhaps in a box, that
> object generally does not simply disappear after years or even decades.
> So there was no immediate reason to throw those hard drives away, even if
> the potential value of that hardware gradually dropped.  So, in many cases,
> it can be expected that such hardware remains and is ultimately
> retrievable,
>
> (Only idiots like Razer think otherwise, apparently.)
>
> Does anybody believe that EACH AND EVERY copy of ANY specific CP email was
> totally erased, everywhere around the world it happened to be.  Including,
> for instance, the NSA and other government TLA's?    How foolish!
>
>   But what you need to do, immediately, is to worry about a far more
> omnous reality, one that I have discovered within the last 3+ days.   I was
> a heavy participant in the Cypherpunks list from perhaps March 1995
> onwards, and for a couple of years.  And, quite unlike most of the
> now-current subscribers, the large majority of whom were not on the CP list
> in 1995, I can actually REMEMBER the general events of that time frame.
>  Which is one of the main reasons I have a powerful advantage as I studied
> a specific kind of message and text that is, or at least SHOULD BE, in the
> Cypherpunks archive for 1995.
>
> You, sorting through a veritable ocean of look-sorta-alike data, are very
> unlikely to spontaneously notice what data happens to be "missing".  If you
> go into a forest, how can you notice one missing tree, or a dozen?  (Yes, a
> sawed-off stump remains an excellent clue.)  I, however, knowing that my
> name  (jim bell) and my old email adddress (jimbell at pacifier.com), and
> references to 'assassination politics' and 'AP' should be heavily present,
> have a huge advantage.  If they aren't (still) there, I will notice it.
> And they aren't. And I did.  You presumably don't notice it, at least not
> until I explain what should be present, yet isn't present.  Quite
> understandable.  But now you know.
>
> I suggest that you read my comments for the last 3 or so days on CP.   In
> some of them, I point out that the text string 'jim bell' does not seem to
> be present in the 1995 archive you are maintaining, nor in the Venona file
> for that year.  And the text string 'AP', in the limited meaning of the
> name of my 1995 essay, "Assassination Politics", which soon enough the vast
> majority of the time was shortened to merely 'AP'.  Yet, I first entered
> the CP list about March 1995, and was solidly responding to dozens, of
> messages, per day.  And other people, many dozens of them, were posting
> similar, and responding, messages back to me, and to others on the list.
> None of that seems to be present, at least not before November 2005, and
> yet it is solidly present in 2006.
>
>  And yet, mysteriously, references to me and my then-email address,
> jimbell at pacifier.com simply don't occur until November 1995.  But if you
> compare the 1996 archive, and the Venona-file equivalent, you will see that
> these text strings are subsequently heavily present that later year, 1996,
> as in fact they should also have been for more than the last half of the
> year 1995.  And in fact, there should be far more references to "AP", per
> day in mid-late 1995, than eventually would be (and, I presume, still are)
> found in 1996.
>
> (only clueless, malicious people like Razer don't comprehend this, or at
> least they pretend not to be able to figure it out.)
>
> Since you are sympathetic to the Cypherpunks cause (why else would you be
> here?), I can tell you that there is some very good news,  There is no
> reason to believe, now that I have discovered a major problem with the
> tampering, that it will be impossible to re-acquire most if not all of the
> emails making up what should be the archive.
>
> But the not-quite-so-good-news is that perhaps you ought to mentally
> re-orient yourself, shift gears a little.  Yes, I agree that making and
> maintaining an accurate Cypherpunks archive it good and important.  But you
> don't mow the grass when your house is on fire, do you?  I say we have an
> 'emergency', since I have discovered massive and deliberate tampering with
> the CP archive.  Because of your motivation to maintain an accurate list, I
> think you should also be motivated to figure out who managed to engineer
> such an abhorrent fraud,  And you will notice that these tasks heavily
> overlap.
>
> To generate an accurate archive now requires determining what material has
> been omitted.   And that is a difficult task:  Prior to this, I suppose you
> thought you were dealing only with accidental, inadvertent data omissions.
> Now, you are aware that  that there is at least one huge, deliberate,
> malicious fraud.  And just because I noticed (so far) one of them, doesn't
> mean that there are not others, ones that I haven't yet noticed.  Clearly,
> the fact that this fraud wasn't discovered until 3 days ago means that the
> "tools", and "system" that we should otherwise expect will find this sort
> of thing didn't actually work.  So, if they are not changed, there is no
> reason to believe they will begin to work in the future.  You were aware of
> some omissions, you just didn't understand what they were and how they were
> caused:
>
> "I have an uneasy feeling that many of the posts from this era may
> already be irrecoverably lost. If this is true it would be a great shame
> for future generations who want to learn about this vital period of
> internet history and development."
>
> Also, you should be aware that deliberately tampering with computer data
> is a Federal felony.
> https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/criminal-ccips/legacy/2015/01/14/ccmanual.pdf
>  The people who accomplished this forgery are in grave danger of
> prosecution, or at least they should be if the government prosecutors do
> their job.  And part of OUR task will be to expose AND publicize this
> corruption sufficiently well so as to help guarantee that the Feds don't
> have any alternative to prosecute them.  Do you think you can do that?  And
> that includes finding out the nature of the forgery, in at least enough
> detail to allow a prosecutor to bring a winning case.
>
> Are you getting excited now, Mr. Busby?  It's only going to get more
> "real" from here on in.  "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy
> night."
>                      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vEEh0GF_C8
>
>                        Jim Bell
>
>
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