Re: The FV Problem = A Press Problem

[vin@shore.net (Vin McLellan)]

Greg Broiles <gbroiles@darkwing.uoregon.edu> opined:

>NSB's messages have suggested, amongst the fear-mongering, that the real
>target of the card-shark publicity campaign is not Joe Consumer but bankers,
>investors, and other "big money" folks; people who care about the
>large-scale fraud rate of credit card use. <snip>

        True enough.  Of course, those are the folks who take the weight
when credit card sales go sour... or the system is victimized by widespread
automated fraud.

>While, as Vin McLellan points out, Simson Garfinkel's articles were
>technically accurate (modulo the quote from Daguio, where he's quoted as
>suggesting an "out of hand" transaction, which is likely either a typo or a
>misunderstanding - dollars to donuts he said "out of band"), they also
>appeared as part of a marketing process.

        Actually, the most striking thing about the Garfinkel articles was
the degree to which he made the First Virtual marketing/propaganda Campaign
against consumer-PC-based credit card encryptors _the focus_ of the Mercury
News articles.

        FV's attack-code demo was overtly presented as a propaganda ploy --
"a direct attack" on Netscape's security model -- by Garfinkel.  There was
nothing in the Merc text that carried the hysterial pitch of the press
release FV posted to C'punks; nothing of the pious Crusade to Save
Electronic Commerce that set everyone teeth on edge.  FV's Stein and
Borenstein were presented as competitive businessmen, out to rough up a
competitor who had been getting too much uncritical attention.  (The long
sidebars on FV's technology are what you'd expect for the Mercury News'
coverage of a local SoCal contender.)

        The Murky News' "Chief Scientist, FV" quote -- Borenstein recalling
audiences in the White House, Treasury, etc., who declared, "We thought
that only the  NSA knew how to do this." -- was absolutely priceless.
Everyone who didn't need a ten-page memo to supply the technical and
historical context got the giggle. It's the Quote of the Week in Silicon
Valley and NoHo.

        Deftly, with a straight face, Garfinkel left Nathaniel standing
there with his pants down, wondering where the draft was coming from.  (Mr.
Borenstein, no slouch on-line, has faired far better in his give and take
among the Cypherpunks -- who in their rabid majority only wanted to lynch
him.)

>....the implication of the Murky News articles, that one [FV] can be
>trusted but not the
>other.... <snip>

>It's a shame that Garfinkel didn't spend more time/column space on
>suggestions or observations from the independent people he interviewed and
>less time on the "hot news - Netscape security broken by a competitor"
>angle.... <snip>

        Your observations had me wondering if we read the same articles.
My thought: would that all  snow jobs were handled by journalists with the
same dry perspicacity!

>We should, however, learn from what FV did right - they wrote software which
>(apparently) had or can have a real political effect. (It seems to have
>worked on Garfinkel, anyway). Cypherpunks write code? FV wrote code and got
>some attention for their otherwise unexciting message.  <snip>

        Now _that's_ a useful and on-target observation.

                                Suerte,
                                                _Vin

    Vin McLellan +The Privacy Guild+ <vin@shore.net>
 53 Nichols St., Chelsea, Ma. 02150 USA Tel: (617) 884-5548
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