Re: Respect for privacy != Re: exposure=deterence?

[jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind)]

At 9:03 PM 01/19/96, Rich Graves wrote:

>I'll certainly grant you that there is a conspiracy and a secret
>government (broadly defined), but not everyone paid by the government is
>in on it, and not everyone involved is in the government.

Nah, many conspiracies.  Lots of government folks doing their own secret,
non-secret, and semi-secret stuff in cooperation with other government
folks and non-government folks.  Adam Smith either said, or is frequently
misquoted as saying, that whenever two business people of the same
profession meet, it's a conspiracy.  That goes double for two government
agents.  [What's a double conspiracy?  You'd know if you were in on it.]

>Gratuitous use of pseudonymity can be counterproductive. Now nobody's
>going to be able to use your "bar-coded garbage" essay without being
>suspected of being you, which I doubt is what you want.
>
>Is anyone going to quote you in the future, as you quote Patrick Henry?

Or as everyone quotes Publius?  Who is Publius anyway?  Alexander Hamilton
or Tom Jefferson, or someone like that, I forget.   Would they quote
Publius if they never figured out who "really" wrote Publius' stuff?  I
dunno. Maybe eventually we'll know who We Jurgar Din "really" is.  But
probably not, becuase we won't even remember what he wrote, let alone be
interested in who he "really" is.

And I guess everyone doesn't quote Publius anyway.  But every American
Constitutional Law textbook probably does, and most American History
textbooks.  Maybe future American Bar Code textbooks will quote We Jurgar
Din.  Somehow I doubt it, though.