Re: [Declan McCullagh: "A List Goes Down In Flames," from Netly]

[geeman@best.com]

The provocateurs won.
Too bad.  Seems Cpunks caved to the simplest of attacks.
Proves you don't need key-escrow or any of the rest to 
  ahem, "affect" unfettered discourse in cyberspace.




At 11:23 PM 2/13/97 -0800, you wrote:
>Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 21:24:37 -0800 (PST)
>From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
>To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu
>
>The Netly News Network
>http://netlynews.com/
>
>A List Goes Down In Flames
>by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com)
>February 12, 1997
>   
>       The plan for the cypherpunks mailing list was simple. It was to be
>   an online gathering place, an intellectual mosh pit, dedicated to the
>   free flow of ideas and personal privacy through encryption.
>   
>       Of course it caught on. From its modest beginnings connecting a
>   few friends who lived in Northern California, it quickly grew into one
>   of the most rowdy, volatile lists on the Net: Cypherpunks typically
>   piped more than 100 messages a day into the mailboxes of nearly 2,000
>   subscribers. And the list became a kind of crypto-anarchist utopia.
>   Populated by pseudonymous posters with names like Black Unicorn, it
>   was a corner of cyberspace where PGP signatures and digital cash were
>   the norm -- and there were no rules. Then yesterday came the news: The
>   list was being evicted and faced imminent shutdown.
>   
>       In an e-mail seen 'round the Net, John Gilmore, Electronic
>   Frontier Foundation cofounder and list maintainer, announced that he
>   was no longer willing to provide a virtual home for the cypherpunks.
>   In a post entitled "Put Up or Shut Up," he described how his efforts
>   to improve the list through moderation were condemned, how technical
>   problems were consuming more of his time, how pranksters had tried to
>   subscribe the entire U.S. Congress to the list. How this experiment in
>   crypto-anarchy had failed. He gave the cypherpunks 10 days to find new
>   lodgings.
>   
>       "The last straw for me was seeing the reaction of the list to
>   every attempt to improve it. It was to carp, to cut it down, to say
>   you're doing everything wrong," Gilmore told me yesterday night. One
>   of the first employees of Sun, Gilmore quit after eight years -- a
>   millionaire more interested in pursuing ideas than dollars. But his
>   experiment with the list has left him weary. "If everything I'm doing
>   is wrong, I'm clearly not the right person to host the list," he said.
>   
>       "I would like to see some other structure in which the positive
>   interactions on the list could continue. I'm not trying to create that
>   structure anymore," he added. Instead, he would try the only true
>   crypto-anarchist solution: "I'm handing it over to members to do what
>   they wish with it."
>   
>       The cypherpunks first pierced the public's consciousness when
>   Wired magazine splashed them across the cover of the second issue. The
>   Whole Earth Review and the Village Voice followed soon after. The name
>   "cypherpunk" came to be synonymous with a brash young breed of
>   digerati who were intent on derailing the White House's encryption
>   policies and conquering cyberspace. This was crypto with an attitude.
>   
>       Gilmore was typical of the breed. Monthly Bay Area meetings of the
>   'punks were held in the offices of Cygnus, a company he started to
>   provide support for the free Unix alternative, GNU.
>   
>       But the veteran cypherpunk came under heavy fire in November 1996,
>   when a loudmouthed flamer flooded the list with flame bait and ad
>   hominem attacks on various members. Finally, Gilmore, ironically, gave
>   him the boot -- and incited an all-consuming debate over what the
>   concept of censorship means in a forum devoted to opposing it. In a
>   society of crypto-anarchists, who should make the rules? The mailing
>   list melted down. By last month, it seemed, more messages complained
>   about censorship than discussed crypto.
>   
>       Indeed, for months Gilmore seemed unable to do anything right. He
>   tried moderation, which proved to be even more contentious, raising
>   the question of empowering one cypherpunk to decide what was
>   appropriate for others to read. One member of the group, in effect,
>   would be more equal than the rest. And why would members take the time
>   to write elaborate, thoughtful articles on crypto-politics if their
>   treatises might not make it past the moderator's keyboard?
>   
>       After the expulsion, some of the longtime list denizens left
>   angrily, joining the 700 subscribers who had departed since the
>   controversy began. One of those was Tim C. May, a crusty former Intel
>   engineer who prides himself as the organizer of the first cypherpunk
>   meeting in September 1992. In an essay summarizing the reasons for his
>   departure, he wrote: "The proper solution to bad speech is more
>   speech, not censorship. Censorship just makes opponents of 'speech
>   anarchy' happy -- it affirms their basic belief that censors are
>   needed."
>   
>       After all, May pointed out, the list ended up on Gilmore's
>   toad.com machine only by happenstance -- it almost was housed on a
>   workstation at the University of California at Berkeley. Ownership of
>   the computer with the database of subscribers did not mean that
>   Gilmore owned the cypherpunks. "Whatever our group once was, or still
>   is, is not dependent on having a particular mailing list running on
>   someone's home machine... and it cannot be claimed that any person
>   'owns' the cypherpunks group," May wrote.
>   
>       The cypherpunks have responded to Gilmore's eviction notice. List
>   participants generally have halted the incessant attacks on Gilmore,
>   and now the discussion has turned to how to continue this experiment
>   in online anarchy -- while preventing one person from ever again
>   having absolute control of the List. Within hours of Gilmore's
>   announcement, posters were tossing around ideas of a distributed
>   network of mailing lists that would carry the cypherpunk name, and
>   other 'punks likely will migrate to the more tightly controlled
>   coderpunks and cryptography lists.
>   
>       But for the true believers in crypto-anarchy, only one solution is
>   adequate: Usenet. "There is no 'nexus' of control, no chokepoint, no
>   precedent... for halting distribution of Usenet newsgroups," Tim May
>   wrote. That, in the end, is what defines a cypherpunk.
>   
>###
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