Re: If you can't take the heat... (Was Re: Keep the pressure!)

[Rich Graves <llurch@networking.stanford.edu>]

On Wed, 20 Mar 1996, Jim McCoy wrote:

> What amuses me most about this series of rantings by whomever, other
> than the paranoid and baseless claims made by the anonymous poster,
> is the number of people who have been complaining about the author doing
> so anonymously through a remailer.  The irony of such a situation is
> too rich to pass up.
> 
> It seems that cypherpunks can dish it out when other newsgroups and
> mailing lists suffer such problems ("well, the remailers do nothing
> that telneting to port 25 cannot do..." or "internet identity is such
> a fiction anyway, get used to it"  seem to be common responses), but
> when the cypherpunks lists is the victim of unpleasant anonymous messages
> we fall back to the tired refrain of "if you have nothing to hide why
> are you posting anonymously."  How sad.
> 
> So, why the hypocrisy here?

I don't see this as hypocrisy. Hypocrisy would be trying to track the guy
down, or turning off the remailer, or filtering anonymous rants at
toad.com. I think it's completely legitimate, and healthy, to question
why people go anonymous while supporting their right to do so. Sometimes
anonymity is necessary, sometimes it's just for fun, sometimes its
cowardice, sometimes it's deception. 

Your point about "stop whining and write code for anonymous reputations"
is misplaced.  Such code ALREADY EXISTS. There are lots of nyms out there
with PGP keys. If you're already PGP-encrypting your message to send it
to an anonymous remailer securely, it's really no more trouble to sign it
with the key for Alice D'Anonymous. If you don't feel secure using PGP 
(and "the real Alice" did have some -- some -- valid points), then use a 
magic number or serialize your messages. It worked for the Unabomber.

-rich