From: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
Date: Tue, 4 Feb 1997 06:56:40 -0800 (PST)
To: hugh@toad.com
Subject: Moderation, Tim, Sandy, me, etc. * Strong crypto == DES?!
Message-ID: <199702041456.GAA28779@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


I'm glad we're talking about some of the real issues here.

Tim May said:
> I don't want Sandy Sandfort sitting in judgment on my
> posts, deciding what the Cypherpunks--a group I co-founded for God's
> sake!!!!--are to be allowed to read and what they may not.

Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this
month.  I'll admit I made it easy for them, but the results are
conclusive.  There are 1311 addresses in the cypherpunks list today;
42 in the unedited list; and 19 in the flames list.  Forty people
cared enough to read every posting; the other thousand either wanted
to try the experiment -- or didn't care enough to send an email
message.  Which, as we all know, is a very low threshold.

If I was a social scientist I might want to run the experiment both
ways, or six different ways.  Name it this, or name it that.  I'm not;
all I want is something that works.  The cypherpunks list was unusable
for this kind of discussion, only a month ago.  It's usable now.

I'm definitely bugged by the community's attitude toward my
"censorship".  Rather than being glad that someone, anyone, was doing
something about the major problem on the list, 99% of the reaction was
to create even more ill-considered, emotional flamage.  *I* didn't
make the signal/noise get worse at that point -- *you-all* did.

Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is
now suggesting.  "Asking the list what to do" was clearly not a useful
option.  Sandy cared enough about the community to make some concrete
suggestions to me about how to get the list back on track.  They
involved a lot more work than the previous setup.  I told him if he
was willing to do the work, we could try it.  As Dale suggests, I
wasn't about to waste my time reading the whole list in real time and
passing judgement on the postings.  Sandy was, for a month.

The element I find most lacking from the whole discussion, until
recently, has been responsibility.  In an anarchy, *everyone* is
responsible; nothing is "somebody else's job".  Sandy felt
responsible, so he proposed something.  I felt responsible, so I
helped.  But a large part of the community sat on the sidelines and
criticized, without making attempts to make things better; indeed the
volume and tone of the criticisms themselves made things worse.
Unpaid labor for a peanut gallery of spoiled children isn't very
gratifying.  You-all remind me of a passage from Booker T.
Washington's book _Up From Slavery_, describing what happened on the
night that news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the South:

    The wild rejoicing on the part of the emancipated coloured people
    lasted but for a brief period, for I noticed that by the time they
    returned to their cabins there was a change in their feelings.
    The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of
    themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their
    children, seemed to take possesion of them.  It was very much like
    suddenly turning a youth of ten or twelve years out into the world
    to provide for himself.  In a few hours the great questions with
    which the Anglo-Saxon race had been grappling for centuries had
    been thrown upon these people to be solved.  These were the
    questions of a home, a living, the rearing of children, education,
    citizenship, and the establishment and support of churches.  Was
    it any wonder that within a few hours the wild rejoicing ceased
    and a feeling of deep gloom seemed to pervade the slave quarters?
    To some it seemed that, now that they were in actual possession of
    it, freedom was a more serious thing than they had expected to
    find it.

Most of the people on the list haven't bothered to face that freedom.
Your de-facto "leaders" have faced it for you.  It is a more serious
thing than than you expect.  All it takes it hard work and judgement.
Be responsible for setting your society's privacy policy -- without
knowing whether you are right.  Face the uncertainty and build anyway.
Shall I post you an Emancipation Proclamation -- as if you needed one?
Start a mailing list on another site!  Move this list to somewhere!
Create and nurture an alt group!  Make an independent moderated list
drawn from the unedited list!  Hold meetings!  Establish for it a
home, a funding, the rearing of newbies, education, citizenship, and
the establishment and support of philosophies.  Dead simple for people
as capable as us.  Just takes work.  Who's volunteering?  Just do it!

The experiment will be over in a few weeks.  Who's going to take over
deciding how to run the list, and running it?

If you want to help organize what I'll call the `progressive crypto
community', for lack of a better term, then please do.  Otherwise, in
the immortal words of Lazarus Long, "PIPE DOWN!".

	John

PS: Can we talk about crypto too?  It's clear from the last few days
of press releases that the pro-GAK forces are again working to confuse
novices into thinking that two very different things are the same
thing.  Last time it was "public key infrastructure" and "key
recovery".  This time it's "strong crypto" and "56-bit DES".  What
should we do about this?  Educate the public?