From: "L. Detweiler" <ld231782@longs.lance.colostate.edu>
Date: Sat, 27 Nov 93 23:00:39 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Long Litanies of Lies
Message-ID: <9311280659.AA23613@longs.lance.colostate.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Hello again. I just wanted to talk about the idea of pseudospoofing
`crossings'. It seems to me that people who are rampant pseudospoofers
have built up a life of fear and paranoia. They are always posing the
question, What if I say this? Will it reveal my identity? There is so
much information that we have flitting through our brains, and it is
impossible to track where it originated from. It invariably blurs! I
mean, if I talk to someone with my tentacle, and he says that he is
proud that his wife is going to have a baby, and then I meet him in
person and say `Congratulations' out of good wishes, he says, `how did
you know I was going to have a baby?' and the pseudospoofer has to work
himself out of another uncomfortable rock-and-hard place. Imagine
having to hesitate like a liar to say *anything* or answer *any*
question you are ever asked. What pernicious, sweaty, hellish torture!

I have information from G.Broiles (a tentacle? hee, hee) and others
that top cypherpunks, E.Hughes in particular, have developed
pseudospoofing and style analysis software. If so, I think this is
somewhat pathetic. I  mean, think of all the time they are wasting
trying to keep track of who said what, and what who knows about what,
and what they can and can't say at a given time. Good lord! If everyone
had to do this all the time, we would collapse in a nervous breakdown.
It's really pathetic that anyone would call so much extra overhead
baggage `Liberating'.  Why would anyone go through so much trouble to
promote a lie? The answer is that they are not honest! `Power over their victims'

I mean, is this really Communication? Respect for one's peers and
colleages? Seems more like AntiCommunication to me. It's interesting
that the idea `community' and `communication' have the same root. No
coincidence there! If you don't have one, you don't have the other! But
many psychopunks recognize this already, and this is why they
continually searingly rant against any kind of Community, like a
Government or a Democracy or a Meeting.

Pseudospoofing reminds me of the way that criminals justify their
crimes in the face of every clue and signal that is screaming at them
at the top of its lungs to stop betraying themselves and their friends
and cease with their depravity. A heroin junkie could have an arm full
of collapsed veins, lost his home, his family, his honesty, his money, 
his dignity, his sanity, his life. And to the end he will say I Must Have My Heroin.

But pseudospoofers are masters at their kind of systematic
manipulation. They enjoy it, they thrive on it, it is their vicarious
sexual thrill. It is like a chess game involving different pieces and
scenarios and positions and attacks and countermeasures and feints and
.... What does my opponent know about this tentacle? Does he really
trust it? I think every pseudospoofer is something of a pathological
liar at heart. He enjoys weaving complex scenarios and keeping track of
what he said to who, and how to make sure that no one walks into each
other or any of his long litany lies collide with each other in a `crossing'. 

But My Gosh, Cyberspace is inherently unconducive to concealing the
truth where people want to find it. There are just too many myriads of
possibilities for arbitrary crossings between independent identities
and opportunities for honest people to discover the truth in the face
of lies. Who is Inside? Who is Outside? A conspiracy will always
collapse under its own weight. The only question is, who will be
crushed beneath it? (That reminds me of that story about the Zen of
Cyberspace, where a corrupt king dies and a platform carried by his
sycophants crushes them. I have it somewhere in my extensive archives
if anyone is interested.)

It is like the RSA key spoofing trick -- you might be able to send
someone a fake key, but then they go to communicate with their party
over a random line anywhere in cyberspace (the IP protocol means that
different packets may take different paths at different times, the
beauty of robust fault-tolerant routing) and suddenly the recipient
realizes from the gibberish that he has been pseudospoofed. You might
be able to keep up a deception at first, but suddenly some independent
channel is touched by your target that you have no control over, and
the whole illusion collapses.

The biggest problem with pseudospoofing, deception, and lies in
Cyberspace is when a climate arises wherein people are not skeptical by
nature, even though they claim they are. For example, many people have
told me that they are sure they have never signed a fake key, or used
one, of a person that does not exist. But my own experience with others
and the key server design would seem to contradict this. Top developers
seem to defend, even delight and revel in the `toxic waste' in the PGP
Web of Trust. Today's key servers are quite corrupted with fake keys,
many of them from the Cypherpunk pseudospoofer cultists. So people
think that this `web of trust' is actually trustworthy when it is just
a `web of lies'. The problem is that they do nothing *actively* to seek
out fake identities and corruptions in the Web, even when encouraged to
do so. If everyone passively accepts a Lie, and someone actively
continues to orchestrate it, the Lie Stands. Once again, a great new
technology exposes the human weakness that lay largely obscured before
its invention, in this case the inherent laziness and gullibility of people. 

This Cypherpunks list is a classic case where people can continue to
believe in a lie despite many signs that there is a deception going on.
It involves the magnetic, powerful effect of peer pressure. If all your
friends do drugs, you believe it is a Liberating Experience
unequivocally. Faith replaces Knowledge. If your eminent leaders say
that pseudospoofing is a Liberating Experience, you believe it. After
all, they were profiled in NYT and Wired! Who are we to question their
authority? In an environment (the Internet) where the default
expectation should be that *everyone* is a tentacle, because nothing
prevents it, everyone to the contrary believes that everyone is real!

This illusion of reality in cyberspace is very hard to dispell, even
though people claim they cannot ever be fooled! The problem is that
lies can sometimes pick up their own destructive momentum, like a
snowball rolling down a hill. People can begin to believe in fantasies,
like a meme-virus propagating like a toppled line of dominos, like a
crowd that turns riotous with a few circulating shouts. However,
sometimes the Truth erupts amidst the lies in the same way!

By the way, I still haven't heard anything from J.Gilmore, E.Hughes, or
T.C.May on their personal knowledge of pseudospoofing on the
Cypherpunks list. E.Hughes wrote something in RISKS but it seems
evasive to me (more on this later). I would appreciate if you guys or
someone else could send me your public statement on pseudoanonymity in
email. Many people have been talking about all the anarchy, dischord
and disunity on the list lately, and maybe a public statement by a
cypherpunk `official' would help stop all the rampant speculation and
fingerpointing. That is usually the respectable approach among any
professional organization! (That reminds me of P.Metzger complaining
that `Cypherpunks' was just too darn subversive sounding as a name!
ROFL) I have to wonder what you guys are really trying to accomplish
without public announcements, and why one has been so long
unforthcoming! Kind of reminds me of a big conspiracy or hoax! If you
flinch and cower every time your leadership and `movement' are subject
to scrutiny people will think you're nothing but a batch of liars, or
pseudospoofers (the difference is not great).

 In fact, maybe a ban against pseudospoofing might rescue the list from
the hellish ulterior grouchiness and atmosphere of noise and
frustration that it has always had in the past and scared away a lot of
respectable people (for example, Markoff). But that's an awful lot to
hope for. On the other hand, the CryptoAnarchists have always come out
in favor of Anarchy, of course, and maybe the recent violent seizures
on the list, the continual tick-tick-ticking torture of the time bomb,
are what they have in mind.