From: greg@ideath.goldenbear.com (Greg Broiles)
Date: Sat, 2 Apr 94 14:58:15 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Politics do not belong here
Message-ID: <m0pnEdX-0001a4C@ideath.goldenbear.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Jeremiah Blatz writes:

> I may very well be completly wrong here, but IMO there is no place for
> politics on this list. Cryptography, by its very nature, is an
> anti-political thing.

I disagree here - politics is what makes Cypherpunks different from
a sci.crypt mailing list. As Eric Hughes points out, cryptography is
economics - and politics is economics with the gloves off. Crypto is 
inherently political. ("political" doesn't have to mean liberals - v. -
conservatives.)

> All politicians who try in increase the power of
> government are against the cypherpunk agenda of increasing the use of
> encryption, it doesn't matter what party they belong to.

Be careful the way you use the word "agenda", you're gonna get Detweiler
all worked up again. I don't think there is one agenda shared by all
list subscribers. As I see it, "cypherpunks" follows the Earth First!
model of (dis/anti) organization - there are no leaders, there is no
"policy", there is no voting, there is no platform. There are folks who
do what they choose to do, and putting a name on it makes it easier to
talk about. Myself, I'm not so wound up about getting everyone on the
planet to use crypto as I am interested in making sure we all can if we
want/need to; and that's mostly useful insofar as it more clearly 
delineates a boundary to the power/ability of the state. 

> This discussion
> is simply a bunch of messages that bait people with different political
> alignments than the sender's, please take it elsewhere.

I do agree that baiting and flaming are useless. The list is interesting
because it's where folks with different interests/talents/orientations
intersect, not where we diverge. Our differences and disagreements are
significant but they can also distract us from shared goals. 


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