Detweiler's Back--comments in talk.politics.crypto

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Cyphertentacles,

I apologize for mentioning the name "Detweiler" here, but I just spent
a fair amount of time composing this attached article for
talk.politics.crypto, and thought it relevant enough to Cypherpunks to
forward here.

Many of you apparently missed Detweiler's harassment of our list (with
fantasies that several list members were actually "Tentacles" of
myself and Eric Hughes and others, etc.), for which you should
consider yourself blessed.

He has a nasty habit of popping up, though. Tonight, shortly after
reading his post where he asked "have you fixed the cypherpunks
remailers yet?," I saw that huge list of numbers appear from an
anonymous site....and of course I thought "He's baaaaack!"

--Tim


Newsgroups: alt.security.pgp,talk.politics.crypto
Path: netcom.com!tcmay
From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
Subject: Re: RSA Data Security Inc. and Pretty Good Privacy...some comments
Message-ID: <tcmayCp9qJ9.7r3@netcom.com>
Followup-To: alt.security.pgp,talk.politics.crypto
Date: Wed, 4 May 1994 08:06:45 GMT

L. Detweiler (tmp@netcom.com) wrote:

(commenting on a post of mine)

: actually, something I have observed is that you never respond to 
: ad hominem attacks the way e.g. Sternlight does. If someone calls
: you a slimy cryptoanarchist, you don't bother to defend yourself.

That's right. I see no point in answering such nonsense, as it wastes
my time and wastes the group's time. I'm only commenting here because
you've made an accurate observation here...ad hominem arguments are
rarely persuasive.

: Which is something of a pity, because IMHO all the fun of Usenet
: is namecalling. What else is it good for? any medium that does not
: reward excellence in posting (the good and the bad scroll off
: in the same pace) is asking for mediocrity. 

Talk.politics.crypto should be, in my opinion, concerning itself with
the vital and fascinating questions about crypto policy, the laws of
other countries besides the U.S., Clipper, Digital Telephony, and so
forth, not with endless acrimony about who said what, who called whom
a liar, and who's sleazier.

If someone calls me a fool, or a dupe, or a Nazi babykiller, I take
satisfaction in letting their words speak to their own reputation.
Further, anyone _taken in_ by such idle charges almost certainly
_deserves_ to be taken in! A kind of filter, as it were.

Most people are pretty reasonable, and learn quickly enough to
separate out casual charges and idle assertions from the truth. This
is why free speech "works."

(When Detweiler begain to attach my name and (non-digital) sig block
to his posts, and then to post pro-Nazi rants in soc.culture.jewish
and soc.culture.german, with my name at the bottom, then I took the
step of letting his site admin know I was pissed off. Eventually,
after LD mailbombed more than a hundred newsgroups--before it was
stopped at his site--his account was yanked. He's now posting as
"tmp.netcom.com," out of the Denver site.)

: also, it appears that you are loathe to post any insult under your
: True Name but feel free to do so under all the `others' <g>. It appears

Yes, I dislike posting insults....even for people I disagree with.
(I'm not perfect...I've lost my temper on the Net more than once...)

And a lot of times I just see no point in refuting an obviously flawed
argument someone makes. The Clipper arguments have gone around and
around and most people in this group, not to mention 80% of Americans,
dislike the Clipper concept. (As I've said so many times, beginning 5
months _before_ Clipper was announced, my real concern is that the
groundwork is being laid for some kind of ban on unapproved crypto
use. This has always been the focus of my efforts, including the
technical and public relations efforts now underway to undermine key
escrow, not the relatively trivial issue of what kind of secure phones
the government buys for itself and tells its contractors to buy. Too
many issues here to discuss now.)


However, as I told you beginning last summer when you started to
pester me about my "Tentacles" and my "Pseudopods," I don't post to
this or any other group under any name or account name other than my
own name, tcmay@netcom.com. And I haven't used a reamiler or anonymous
posting service for many months (and then it was mostly for
experiments, with posts going to the Cypherpunks mailing list). The
same cannot be said of yourself, you having posted under the various
names of S. Boxx, The Executioner, Pablo Escobar, Jim Riverman, T.C.
Hughes, Eric May, Adolf Hitler, etc., via the anon.penet.fi remailer
site. And you've even posted with _my name_ attached to your posts. (A
good argument for digital signatures, save that I run RSA's MailSafe
and MacPGP on my home machine, and uploading to Netcom is an extra set
of steps I don't relish.)

: that the cryptoanarchist ideology that `true names' are meaningless
: is itself meaningless. Well, I think you should consider that you 
: are really missing out on something. A world where there is no
: strong condemnation of evil is an invitation to moral relativism
: and fascism (or, maybe that is your point).

Condemnation of evil doesn't happen by ad hominem arguments, by
anonymous posts, by prattle about the "spawn of Satan" and
"sodomites." Nothing to be gained by mindlessly demonizing David
Sternlight, Grady Ward, Dorothy Denning, or any other such
folks.

If there is a developing collision between "privacy" and the putative
need for the government to inspect the insides of ones computer files,
filing cabinets, business receipts, housekeeper interview logs, etc.
(all of these inspections are ostensibly needed for small
businesses--and many of us are becoming small businessmen, courtesy of
at home consulting, businesses--to allow taxation, detection of
money-laundering, etc.), then this collision needs to be discussed.

I don't impute evil to the NSA or NIST, or to folks like Dorothy
Denning and David Sternlight. I just disagree with them and think the
new technologies favor (and "empower") the individual over any
particular nation and its band of tax collectors, censors, and
authority figures. There are good aspects and bad aspects to this kind
of "crypto anarchy" (my term since 1988), but the genie's already out
of the bottle. 

Instead of arguing pointlessly here, in this group, over 700 mostly
like-minded (though I don't speak for others) folks are racing to get
strong crypto and its related technologies deployed as quickly and as
widely as we can. Just to get the genie even _further_ out of the
bottle. (Our band of folks, and others, may lack the sheer power of
the Agency, but it is _ever so much easier_ to encrypt strongly, to
provide untraceable message routing, than it is to break ciphers and
track all messages. 

The old saw, repeated recently by Philip Elmer-Dewitt in an otherwise
fine McNeil-Lehrer piece, that the NSA "has never met a code it
couldn't crack," is actually almost completely bogus. In fact, most
modern ciphers have been uncrackable, for reasons of computational
complexity, and there have been few major cipher or code crackings in
the last 20 years...the Walker spy case was so serious because key
material was being supplied to the Soviets, the kind of black-bag
cryptanalysis which works where brute-force methods fail. 

Fortunately for us, public key cryptosystems have much less key
material to protect, and the Agency can't do a black-bag job on very
many of us. This is why they're understandably worried, and why
Clipper, Capstone, and Digital Telephony are their attempts at
solutions.

: the delight of Usenet is the back-and-forth. That's why Sternlight
: is famous and T.C.May is just a lurking shadow. The latter has mastered
: the thrust but not the parry.

And? So?

In the big scheme of things, it doesn't matter much to me that David
Sternlight is much better known than I am. Or that you, L. Detweiler,
rate your very own section in the "Legends" guide in alt.usenet.kooks.

: hee, hee, T.C.May apologizes to Dorothy Denning. Mr. May, it is clear
: that you can't decide whether you want to be a guerilla cryptoanarchist
: or the sweet, nice boy next door who brings cookies for the neighbor
: Aunt Dorothy.

: I'll stop now.

Thanks. That's my cue to stop as well.

: pseudonymously yours,
: tmp@netcom.com

--Tim May


-- 
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409           | knowledge, reputations, information markets, 
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA  | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."