From: Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 1997 01:00:50 -0700 (PDT)
To: toto@sk.sympatico.ca
Subject: Re: KC post per Alec
In-Reply-To: <1.5.4.32.19970411023901.0067fd6c@pop.mindspring.com>
Message-ID: <19970411005754.59935@bywater.songbird.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


On Thu, Apr 10, 1997 at 10:04:01PM -0600, Toto wrote:

[a piece on Tim May]

Toto, thanks for your thoughtful comments.  Your touching defense of 
Tim is interesting.

Contrary to what you might think, I really don't have anything against
Tim May, and I do go read things he (or others) have written in the
past.  But I am getting to the crusty old fart stage myself...

As to his legacy, and the legacy of cypherpunks in general, that
remains to be seen.  None of the cypherpunks are in a position to be
able to judge very well, because they are so close to their favorite
issues that of course they look very large.  But it isn't a certainty
that any of the predictions of crypto-anarchy, for example, will come
to pass.  It is possible that the surveillance state will win.  More
likely, of course, the world will go in a direction that will surprise
all of us (except that Tim will tell us he considered the possibility
in a paper he wrote back in the 1970s).  What will look portentious and 
what will look pretentious 10 years from now is hard to judge...

Personally, I am in favor of absolute personal privacy, but I don't
define that to include economic dealings -- as far as I am concerned,
business or economic privacy is at a lower level of concern than
personal privacy.  This puts me at odds with the prevailing
libertarian bent of cypherpunks, of course.  However, I was thrown off
my stride by the high level of downright hostility so common on this
list.  Like most people, I tend to respond in kind.

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html