From: hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)
Date: Mon, 30 May 94 09:29:35 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: "lifeguard(?)": bullet tracking system???
In-Reply-To: <9405301352.AA01278@prism.poly.edu>
Message-ID: <9405301636.AA29635@ah.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


   > What's the relevance to crypto or politics of lifeguard?

Almost all of you saw this quoted statement for the first time on this
list, because I sent the original in private email.

   What's the relevance of microphones in Dunkin Donuts?  

Privacy.

   What's the relevance of Digital Telephony II?  

Privacy.

   What's the relevance of 1984?  

Privacy.

   What's the relevance
   of yet another use of technology by Uncle Sam to strenghen law enforcement
   and the millitary?

Well, it's not privacy, whatever it is.  There's precious little
speech content in a shotgun blast.

Cypherpunks is about privacy through implementations of cryptography.
Some politics intrudes perforce, since use and distribution is part of
implementation, and because bad politics can interfere with both use
and distribution.  Cypherpunks is not _about_ other topics, althought
they can and do become relevant sometimes.

The tailors of seamless garmets should go elsewhere to advocate their
views.  Cypherpunks is not for the partisan.  I don't particularly
care if you're anti-fascist or pro-fascist, if you're pro-privacy,
you're welcome here.  You don't have to be against increased power for
police acting in public to be against wiretaps.

Privacy and encryption is not the sole province of one political view
or another.  As soon as an issue becomes a partisan issue, you've
lost, because at least half the people are against it.  Linking
support for privacy and encryption to the support for any particular
partisan position, be it libertarianism, anarchism, extropianism, or
whatever, is foolish in the extreme.  The implied message is "Warning:
if you don't believe X, privacy may be inconsistent with your current
beliefs."

Those who argue that a support for privacy implies a support for some
other unrelated political view deserve, to paraphrase Tim May, the
results for their own stupidity.  But _I_ don't deserve the results of
this stupidity, and I don't want cypherpunks turned into a medium for
its propagation.

Where is the abortion-clinic-blocking Christian right on cypherpunks?
I, for one, feel that the lack of their presence is a serious flaw in
the social makeup of cypherpunks.  There _are_ members of the list who
are sympathetic to this view, but they do not have a presence,
certainly, in the same way that the libertarians do.  This is a flaw.
We need the presence of more folks who are in-your-face for privacy.
There are some in the Christian right, I'm sure.  Why are they not
here?

They and others are not here because they've been chased out by the
anti-government rhetoric.  Being against government in general
certainly leads, _a fortiori_, against government involvement in
crypto.  It is not, however, the only such reason to be against
government restrictions on crypto and government actions against
privacy.  I'm sure it feels very nice to be part of a mutual
self-congratulation anarchy, but to the extent that
self-congratulation causes the exclusion of others who share your
nominal political goals, that self-congratulation is stupidity.

There is a tendency to argue for privacy by a deduction from some
previously held political view.  That's fine for one person, but it
doesn't generalize past one's own partisans.  If you want victory, and
not just a few small gains, you have to generalize, and in order to
generalize, you have overcome your laziness to think in terms of your
own values and not in terms of those of another.  If you want to
convince someone else who doesn't agree with you in many things, you
have to dig deeper and think harder about the reasons and the desires
for privacy.

Therefore, off-topic posts like the one about gunfire location are
counterproductive.  They implicitly argue that "you, too, should be in
alignment with this in order to be pro-privacy."  Get it out of here.
A have only a little hope, but definitely some hope, in the power of
self-restraint to make a good discussion forum.  Think about what
you're saying on the list; if it's not about privacy through
cryptography and their tactics, don't say it here.

Eric