Selling our spin. was: Cypherpunks Press release

["Pat Farrell" <pfarrell@netcom.com>]

  Kevin L Prigge <klp@gold.tc.umn.edu>  writes:
> Does anyone know exactly how the press contact thing works? My impression
> is that a reporter/journalist stumbles on to someone who knows something
> about a particular area, and is willing to be interviewed. Then the next
> time a story comes along that deals even slightly with that subject, the
> reporter will tend to contact that person.

I think the "exact" process varies with the journalist. But you have
it generally correct. The press runs on reputations. When a writer
gets a story, they look for "reliable sources" to contact. Reputations
are based on a lot of things, including knowledge, speaking ability, looks
and the ability to emit a sound-bite that is interesting. it is a strange
process. I mean, I even got on CNN during the Morris worm.

Tim is right, there is no "we" here. We can't have an official spokesperson,
we don't agree on much. But we can work from the ground up. There
are a number of serious cryptographers on the list, or at least
friendly to the list when the S/N ratio makes sense.

With a little work, we should be able to find a fairly long list of
media contacts. We can even make it media friendly.

From people I've personally seen recently, we could have
Doug Humphrey of Digex (nice to have a security-related company President)
Bob Stratton of UU.Net (corporate security wiz)
Carl Ellison of TIS (usually on c'punks light and at all DCcp meetings)
probably others at TIS such as Ken Mendelsen or Steve Walker

For the political side, the folks at EFF, CDT, EIPC, etc.

And there are others that could be good contacts, such as
William H Murray of Delloite and Touche,
Matt Blaze of [Bellcore|BellLabs]

It might take a while to get permission for referal, but I expect that
most security consultants would consider being quoted in mainstream
press to be good advertizing.

If we make it easy, anyone would be willing to take advantage of the
resource. We should also inclue a representative sample of folks who
disagree with us. Any real list should include Dorothy Denning and other
supporters. We can simply stack the deck.

We can make sure that the mainline journalists know where to look, and
make sure that CDT, EFF, ACLU, and EPIC have references that are ready when
they are asked for referals.

Assuming my web server recovers from the mention in comp.risks, I'm
more than willing to accept suggestions and have a "security spokes-folks"
page.

Pat

Pat Farrell    Grad Student      http://www.isse.gmu.edu/students/pfarrell
Info. Systems & Software Engineering, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
PGP key available on homepage               #include <standard.disclaimer>