From: Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb@nsb.fv.com>
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 95 15:03:21 PDT
To: aba@atlas.ex.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Zimmerman legal fund
In-Reply-To: <23424.9507181545@exe.dcs.exeter.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <gk5Ka3_Mc50eIssw1J@nsb.fv.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Excerpts from mail: 23-Jul-95 Re: Zimmerman legal fund
aba@dcs.exeter.ac.uk (5163)

> Anon writes:
> > Could someone in the know talk about the relationship between FV and
> > the ZLDF? I don't like to spread misinformation, so I won't answer
> > based on conjectures.

> I'd be interested to hear this too, but what I am concerned about is
> that the whole thing is too strongly tied to first virtual.

The relationship is a completely open and friendly one, without any
strings attached that I'm aware of.

What most of you probably don't know is that FV has been a supporter of
Phil Zimmerman's since long before you heard of us.  We have had Phil on
a monthly retainer since before the public rollout of our service (which
probably means since before you even *heard* of First Virtual, since we
didn't make any vaporware announcements).  We've done this in order to
get some advice on cryptography and some help with some specific needs
(pgp-telnet, for example), but mostly we've done it because we thought
he both needed and deserved our support.

Why would a startup company want to devote significant resources to
supporting Phil?  Basically, we felt it was the right thing to do,
particularly in our case.  Here's why:  like most net citizens, we
believe that the people deserve free access to cryptography.  However,
we had just invented something nobody had ever imagined before -- a way
to do reasonably safe net commerce *without* cryptography.  Now, we
thought this would be a good thing for society in its own right, for
many reasons that would be a real digression here, but we recognized
that every technology has both a good side and a bad side.  Insofar as
electronic commerce was going to be the motivating factor for permitting
universal access to cryptography, FV's technology is/was a bad thing,
because it decreases (at least somewhat) that motivation.  We believe
the positive features of our technology outweigh this negative, but we
also felt we had a moral duty to lend our support to public access to
cryptography, to try to offset any negative effect that our invention
might have in that regard.

So, FV has been a friend of Phil's for a long time.  We launched the
Yellow Ribbon campaign and the FV-based fundraising drive in that
spirit, though clearly it doesn't exactly hurt us if people sign up for
FV in order to donate to Phil.  That really wasn't our motivation,
however, and we sought to underscore that fact by making a donation to
Phil's defense fund every time people sign up for a new account
expressly in order to donate to ZLDF.  In other words, if you are a
Zimmerman supporter and you were thinking it might be nice to have an FV
account anyway, you can help Phil even more by signing up and paying
your $2 fee through the ZLDF pages.

We've had lots of discussions with Phil Z and Phil D, and any time they
expressed any discomfort with any of our ideas, we dropped them.  There
are two web sites basically because they are taking care of the
informational aspects and we're concentrating (pro bono) on the online
fundraising aspects.  If we've overly stressed FV as a collection
mechanism, I apologize, but you must bear in mind that we've been living
and breathing the FV payment system for 18 months now, and it would be
kind of hard for us not to even *mention* it.  :-)

> I mean there was the Yellow Ribbon Campaign but all URLs out of that
> page point to FV, no mention of the at least two other (more
> convenient for most people, and hence in Phil Zs interests) methods:

> a) PGPed email CC no. to Phil Dubois (Phil Zs chief legal counsel)

> b) similar PGPed email CC no. to some guy in Europe who was offering
> to collect up all of the European donations, and send them to Dubois
> in lump sums to save on currency exchange costs.

Well, only on the cypherpunks list would you be likely to find general
agreement that PGP'ed credit card numbers are "easier" than First
Virtual.  Many thousands of extremely naive net citizens are now happy
FV customers, and I seriously doubt that most of them could master PGP
without a full-day tutorial.  (We're not talking about rocket scientists
here, folks.)

Mostly, though, I felt that the FV/ZLDF association was extremely
important to defuse any potential political arguments of the form "FV
has proven that public access to crypto is unnecessary."  Such arguments
would hurt the crypto cause, and would NOT sit well with the FV team,
either.  The truth is we're completely on the same side of this issue,
folks.  No hidden agendas, I promise.  

On behalf of First Virtual, I encourage everyone to donate money to
ZLDF, using any mechanism that works.   Better yet, use them all.  --
Nathaniel
--------
Nathaniel S. Borenstein <nsb@fv.com>    |           When privacy is outlawed,
Chief Scientist, First Virtual Holdings |     only outlaws will have privacy!
FAQ & PGP key: nsb+faq@nsb.fv.com       | SUPPORT THE ZIMMERMAN DEFENSE FUND!

---VIRTUAL YELLOW RIBBON-->> zldf@clark.net (http://www.netresponse.com/zldf)