From: szabo@netcom.com (Nick Szabo)
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 93 06:05:29 PST
To: ld231782@longs.lance.colostate.edu (L. Detweiler)
Subject: Re: The Contortions of Cypherpunks
In-Reply-To: <9311142347.AA17045@longs.lance.colostate.edu>
Message-ID: <199311151405.GAA17054@mail.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



L. Detweiler:
> Give specific evidence to support your claim or retract it. 

Uncle!  I retract my claim!  I'm not me!  My abject apologies for being 
a traitorous criminal pseudospoof, deluding even myself in the process!
(Very good VR tech they've got here!)

Detweiler, I don't know what is wrong with you, but there are
quite a few cypherpunks nearby in Colorado; many of them know
know many of us.  Several of us whom you have explicitly or strongly
implicitly accused of being "pseudospoofs" have violated their
own desire for privacy and sent you their phone numbers.  Some
post them publicly as a matter of course.  (Have you returned
the favor?  Does anybody know Detweiler's phone number?).  You
seem to lack all conception of how completely silly your accusations
look from the perspective of a Bay Area cypherpunks meeting, with
all us "tentacles of Medusa" overfilling a largish meeting room,
jokingly speculating about who will be detweiled next.

With less altruism than some fellow "tentacles", I have decided 
I don't trust you with anything more than I already give out by 
posting my True Name to the net.  In hindsight, even my True Name 
is probably too much trust with people like you in the world, who 
would subject cultural practices they do not understand to the 
extreme violent retribution consequent of something being
a crime or treason.  

If I may engage in some detweiling myself, a long overdue return 
of volleys:  The damage that can be caused by the demogaugic stalkers 
of the world is vastly greater than can be caused by swaying a few peer 
pressure prone readers here and there with "pseudospoofing".  As
if a centralized news media, politic polls, etc. don't already 
sway follow-the-crowd types to a degree vastly surpassing anybody's 
capabilities on the net.  The desire to keep track of identity may sound 
innocent enough, but behind the rhetoric of "accountability" looms
the bloody claws of violent politics, the quest to create a centralized 
identity enforcement agency, a net-based panoptic extortion racket 
with a potential for tyrrany surpassing anything the world has has 
yet seen.  Do you doubt Detweiler favors such an outcome over the 
dreaded "pseudospoofing"?  I'll be happy to forward Detweiler's posts 
in imp-interest on the matter, assuming everybody's not grown long since 
tired of these rants.  And with that bit of my own detweiling I will 
myself retire from the field, lest detweilosis be contagious.

Nick Szabo				szabo@netcom.com