From: geeman@best.com
To: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
Message Hash: 506191db9c71bfbdabb437191466ff7372b24c153b6b636dfde1cbaf41d07e8f
Message ID: <3.0.32.19970213082845.006c9298@best.com>
Reply To: N/A
UTC Datetime: 1997-02-14 16:12:02 UTC
Raw Date: Fri, 14 Feb 1997 08:12:02 -0800 (PST)
From: geeman@best.com
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 1997 08:12:02 -0800 (PST)
To: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
Subject: Re: [Declan McCullagh: "A List Goes Down In Flames," from Netly]
Message-ID: <3.0.32.19970213082845.006c9298@best.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
The provocateurs won.
Too bad. Seems Cpunks caved to the simplest of attacks.
Proves you don't need key-escrow or any of the rest to
ahem, "affect" unfettered discourse in cyberspace.
At 11:23 PM 2/13/97 -0800, you wrote:
>Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 21:24:37 -0800 (PST)
>From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
>To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu
>
>The Netly News Network
>http://netlynews.com/
>
>A List Goes Down In Flames
>by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com)
>February 12, 1997
>
> The plan for the cypherpunks mailing list was simple. It was to be
> an online gathering place, an intellectual mosh pit, dedicated to the
> free flow of ideas and personal privacy through encryption.
>
> Of course it caught on. From its modest beginnings connecting a
> few friends who lived in Northern California, it quickly grew into one
> of the most rowdy, volatile lists on the Net: Cypherpunks typically
> piped more than 100 messages a day into the mailboxes of nearly 2,000
> subscribers. And the list became a kind of crypto-anarchist utopia.
> Populated by pseudonymous posters with names like Black Unicorn, it
> was a corner of cyberspace where PGP signatures and digital cash were
> the norm -- and there were no rules. Then yesterday came the news: The
> list was being evicted and faced imminent shutdown.
>
> In an e-mail seen 'round the Net, John Gilmore, Electronic
> Frontier Foundation cofounder and list maintainer, announced that he
> was no longer willing to provide a virtual home for the cypherpunks.
> In a post entitled "Put Up or Shut Up," he described how his efforts
> to improve the list through moderation were condemned, how technical
> problems were consuming more of his time, how pranksters had tried to
> subscribe the entire U.S. Congress to the list. How this experiment in
> crypto-anarchy had failed. He gave the cypherpunks 10 days to find new
> lodgings.
>
> "The last straw for me was seeing the reaction of the list to
> every attempt to improve it. It was to carp, to cut it down, to say
> you're doing everything wrong," Gilmore told me yesterday night. One
> of the first employees of Sun, Gilmore quit after eight years -- a
> millionaire more interested in pursuing ideas than dollars. But his
> experiment with the list has left him weary. "If everything I'm doing
> is wrong, I'm clearly not the right person to host the list," he said.
>
> "I would like to see some other structure in which the positive
> interactions on the list could continue. I'm not trying to create that
> structure anymore," he added. Instead, he would try the only true
> crypto-anarchist solution: "I'm handing it over to members to do what
> they wish with it."
>
> The cypherpunks first pierced the public's consciousness when
> Wired magazine splashed them across the cover of the second issue. The
> Whole Earth Review and the Village Voice followed soon after. The name
> "cypherpunk" came to be synonymous with a brash young breed of
> digerati who were intent on derailing the White House's encryption
> policies and conquering cyberspace. This was crypto with an attitude.
>
> Gilmore was typical of the breed. Monthly Bay Area meetings of the
> 'punks were held in the offices of Cygnus, a company he started to
> provide support for the free Unix alternative, GNU.
>
> But the veteran cypherpunk came under heavy fire in November 1996,
> when a loudmouthed flamer flooded the list with flame bait and ad
> hominem attacks on various members. Finally, Gilmore, ironically, gave
> him the boot -- and incited an all-consuming debate over what the
> concept of censorship means in a forum devoted to opposing it. In a
> society of crypto-anarchists, who should make the rules? The mailing
> list melted down. By last month, it seemed, more messages complained
> about censorship than discussed crypto.
>
> Indeed, for months Gilmore seemed unable to do anything right. He
> tried moderation, which proved to be even more contentious, raising
> the question of empowering one cypherpunk to decide what was
> appropriate for others to read. One member of the group, in effect,
> would be more equal than the rest. And why would members take the time
> to write elaborate, thoughtful articles on crypto-politics if their
> treatises might not make it past the moderator's keyboard?
>
> After the expulsion, some of the longtime list denizens left
> angrily, joining the 700 subscribers who had departed since the
> controversy began. One of those was Tim C. May, a crusty former Intel
> engineer who prides himself as the organizer of the first cypherpunk
> meeting in September 1992. In an essay summarizing the reasons for his
> departure, he wrote: "The proper solution to bad speech is more
> speech, not censorship. Censorship just makes opponents of 'speech
> anarchy' happy -- it affirms their basic belief that censors are
> needed."
>
> After all, May pointed out, the list ended up on Gilmore's
> toad.com machine only by happenstance -- it almost was housed on a
> workstation at the University of California at Berkeley. Ownership of
> the computer with the database of subscribers did not mean that
> Gilmore owned the cypherpunks. "Whatever our group once was, or still
> is, is not dependent on having a particular mailing list running on
> someone's home machine... and it cannot be claimed that any person
> 'owns' the cypherpunks group," May wrote.
>
> The cypherpunks have responded to Gilmore's eviction notice. List
> participants generally have halted the incessant attacks on Gilmore,
> and now the discussion has turned to how to continue this experiment
> in online anarchy -- while preventing one person from ever again
> having absolute control of the List. Within hours of Gilmore's
> announcement, posters were tossing around ideas of a distributed
> network of mailing lists that would carry the cypherpunk name, and
> other 'punks likely will migrate to the more tightly controlled
> coderpunks and cryptography lists.
>
> But for the true believers in crypto-anarchy, only one solution is
> adequate: Usenet. "There is no 'nexus' of control, no chokepoint, no
> precedent... for halting distribution of Usenet newsgroups," Tim May
> wrote. That, in the end, is what defines a cypherpunk.
>
>###
>
>
>
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1997-02-14 (Fri, 14 Feb 1997 08:12:02 -0800 (PST)) - Re: [Declan McCullagh: “A List Goes Down In Flames,” from Netly] - geeman@best.com