From: Bubba Rom Dos <bubba@dev.null>
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997 15:26:11 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: InfoWar 4 (Part III of 'The True Story of the InterNet')
Message-ID: <3417988D.6FC9@dev.null>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html

Title: The True Story of the Internet Part II









The True Story of the InterNet

Part III


InfoWar

Final Frontier of the Digital Revolution

Behind the ElectroMagnetic
Curtain


by TruthMonger <tm@dev.null>




Copyright 1997 Pearl Publishing



InfoWar Table of Contents

The Rules of War 
The Rules of War (Part II)


The Rules of War


The wild-eyed, disheveled figure sat hunched over the keyboard
of his laptop, frantically seeking meaning in the words that lay
before him.

"Bubba."

Bubba furtively lowered the screen on his laptop, hiding his important
work from the prying eyes of  Priscilla.

Priscilla eyed Bubba oddly, before asking, "Do you want
me to bring you some dinner, or do you think it's time to take
a break?" She put her arms around him from behind and
gave him a peck on the neck. She was beginning to worry about
him.

"No, no. Just leave me to do my work." Bubba
snapped at her, which was totally out of character for him.

"OK, Bubba, I'll check on you later. Holler if you need
anything."
Priscilla walked away, more troubled than ever. She thought
it would be a good idea to have a talk with the Cowboy and see
if he had seen any signs that the mental and emotional energy
transfer from the Trei Transponder was having undue effect on
Bubba's psychological balance.

"No, no, of course not!" the Cowboy seemed irritated
by Priscilla's question.

Priscilla decided to leave the subject until later in the evening,
when the Cowboy had had time to relax from the long hours that
he had been putting in.
But the Cowboy continued...

"It is ridiculous to think that a mere modicum
of energy from a lunatic could have significant effect on the
psychology of highly developed, balanced individuals who have
spent a lifetime exercising rational and logical control
over their thoughts and emotions!"
The Cowboy was starting to wave his arms around, pacing as
he continued speaking in a loud, agitated voice. Priscilla was
now on the edge of terror.

"We have evidence..." the Cowboy shook a handful
of HydroCubes in her face, "evidence that the Dark
Allies have their shills positioned throughout the CypherPunks
list."

The Cowboy leaned close to whisper to Priscilla, as he noticed
Jonathan and Alexis approaching.
"People we never suspected before, but now we have proof."
the Cowboy couldn't help raising his voice in triumph.

"Proof of what, Cowboy?" Alexis was looking
at him with a puzzled expression on her face.  She instinctively
knew that something was going terribly,  terribly wrong with their
further experimentation with the Trei Transponder.

The Cowboy gave Alexis, then Jonathan, a blank stare for several
seconds, before seeming to remember who they were. Then his eyes
lit up and he rushed over to the GraphiScreen, throwing a HydroCube
up for everyone to see.
"Look at the lines!" the Cowboy said in a mysterious
whisper. 

There were hundreds of names, connected by multicolored lines
joining them together, in pairs and in various combinations.
"We didn't see it before, because we weren't using the
Crayola colors."
"The old colors!" the Cowboy whispered
to the stunned group in front of him, as he looked furtively over
his shoulders as if checking for unseen eyes looking back.

Jonathan, Alexis and Priscilla could only look on in stunned disbelief
as the Cowboy turned back to the GraphiScreen and began pointing
from line to line, outlining the basis for the great conspiracy
that was taking shape in his mind.

"Look, Iranians and Japanese, trolling for crypto information
on the CypherPunks mailing list and getting no response. Then..."
the Cowboy turned to them in wide-eyed triumph before turning
back to the GraphiScreen and pulling up a post by Nobuki Nakatuji.

"Hotmail.com." the Cowboy said, with great satisfaction,
 before noticing that his small audience was looking totally mystified.

"Don't you see?" the Cowboy said, growing
increasingly agitated. "Hotmail.com! The government supported
ISP which gave away free accounts so that they could monitor
everyone's email until they got mandatory Key Escrow legislation
passed in that era."
"And who answered him?" the Cowboy looked at the
three as if expecting an answer, and after receiving none from
the increasingly perplexed onlookers, began talking louder, as
if volume alone would make it all come clear to them.

"Igor! That's who!"
"Igor Chudov, the clever Russian who pretended to be the
voice of reason during the censorship crisis, downplaying the
suspicions and rants of the shit-disturbers on the mailing list.

"Then, when the tide turned against the fascist censors,
Igor joined in the outcry against them, and offered to host one
of the new,  distributed CypherPunks mailing lists. Then he slipped
quietly into the background, watching and listening as he worked
on his identity forgery autobot for the Dark Allies."


Alexis and Jonathan gave each other pleading glances, each hoping
that the other would think of something to say in order to break
the psychotic spell that the Cowboy was weaving in his own mind,
and which now was increasing affecting their own.
As the Cowboy looked furtively over his shoulder, once again,
they found themselves looking in the same direction, half-expecting
to see something.
Priscilla watched Alexis and Jonathan with increasing nervousness,
seeing what was taking place, but not having any idea what she
could do to stop this increasing madness, either.

"But Igor slipped up." the Cowboy pointed to
a thread of posts between the Russian and Japanese cryptographers.

"The foreign government troll, once his quest for information
was ignored, then became an instant expert in cryptography, promoting
Gao's Chaos Cryptosystem, and giving examples of source code,
in order to gain the trust of the CypherPunks. And Igor jumped
in to join the thread, hoping to draw some of the less experienced
list members into their sticky web.

Priscilla, seeing Jonathan and Alexis mesmerized by the Cowboy's
rhetoric, tried to interject a hint of reason into the situation.

"Cowboy, I don't think that really proves..."

The Cowboy cut her short, waving his arms once again.
"The proof...the proof is here!"
the Cowboy waved his hand dramatically over the recall control,
pulling up a copy of Kent Crispin's crypto contribution to the
thread.
"See? Do you see?"
"Kent Crispin known government shill, joining his
fellow conspirators in creating a diversion on the list by keeping
a thread going on crypto systems and source code. Drawing the
list member's attention away from the important issues."



"Uuhhh...Cowboy." Jonathan shook off the hypnotic
effect that the Cowboy was having on him. "The CypherPunks
mailing list is a cryptography discussion list."

"Exactly!" the Cowboy slapped Jonathan soundly
on the back, pleased that Jonathan was starting to perceive the
true depth of deviousness involved.
"That's why they can get away with it, you see?"

"Because it's a cryptography discussion list nobody
sees what they are doing! No one suspects that they are government
shills, trying to divert the list member's attention from the
important messages that our contact is sending to the list. You
know,......"
The Cowboy was trying to remember the name of their link with
the past. The man that they were in contact with through the Trei
Transponder. Why couldn't he think of it?

Priscilla was about to seize the opportunity to break into the
Cowboy's rambling soliloquy, when Bubba came bursting into the
room.

"C2Net!" he shouted. "C2Net!"

Bubba, too, paused, waiting for the small group to acknowledge
his wide ranging conclusion as to the main source of the diverse
plot involved in the Dark Allies omnipresence throughout the CypherPunks
list. Once, again...nothing.

"It all ties together." he quickly resumed his
startling revelation.

"Hettinga and Broiles. That was the key." The
Cowboy drew closer as Bubba inserted the HydroCube he had been
working with and booted it onto the GraphiScreen.
"Hettinga and Broiles, the C2Net tag-team from the censorship
crisis, attacking Tim May back to back, with Hettinga keeping
May engaged in long discussions on computers and computer history.

"Then Sameer, President of C2Net, stepping in to downplay
the importance of the Departments of Justice and Commerce being
able to make unconstitutional decisions about encryption exports,
without it being subject to judicial review."

"I was almost fooled myself," Bubba rambled on,
a wild smile forming on the edges of his lips as he described
the revelation he had received in reading the CypherPunks list
posts from the past, "but Dr. Vulis, ever vigilant, did
not let Sameer's presence go unnoticed. Once again, he exposed
him as the vile pawn of the Dark Forces working against freedom
and liberty through strong encryption."


Priscilla, seeing that Jonathan and Alexis had sat down and given
up any attempt to step into this boiling pot of lunacy, attempted
once again to provide a voice of reason.
"But didn't C2Net end-run government export restrictions
by developing strong crypto products off-shore? I thought Forbes
magazine even did an article on Sameer called "The Man Who
Wants To Overthrow the Government.
"You seem to be saying that those who succumb to government
pressure are spineless shills of the Dark Forces, and those who
appear to do well in resisting government pressure are evil pawns
in collusion with the Dark Forces."

"Exactly!" the Cowboy and Bubba cried
out in joyous unison, giving Priscilla a monstrous hug, happy
that she, too was now seeing the true depth of the evil plot once
again arising on the CypherPunks mailing list.
Priscilla shook her head in disbelief, and sat down beside Jonathan
and Alexis.

It was going to be a long, long night.


The Rules of War (Part II)


Bubba and the Cowboy sat up long after the others had retired
for the evening, comparing notes and adding more and more colored
lines linking the conspirators in the dark plot taking place on
the CypherPunks list.

"The Rules of War." Bubba said.

"What? Oh..." now the Cowboy remembered. That
was the title of the last chapter they had given to their link
to the past to...
"What's that guy's name, again, Bubba?"

"The one whose digital implant we linked to with the Trei
Transponder?" Bubba thought for a moment. "I
can't recall right now, for some reason, but we'll think of it."
Bubba assured his companion.

"We had him release that last chapter as "Rules of
War" but we forgot to lay out any guidelines for CypherPunks
and Circle of Eunuchs members who wanted to take part in the release
of Part III of 'The True Story of the InterNet.'" Cowboy
picked up where he had left off.
"Maybe it's for the best, anyway, since it has become
pretty clear that almost all members of the CypherPunks lists
are spooks or government shills of some type or another."



The Cowboy and Bubba were once again going over their list of
conspirators to see if they had left anyone out.

"Mark Hedges, running the Anonymizer server after he took
it over to allay suspicions of Sameer's monitoring of it for Gomez
and the Dark Allies. That also means that Justin Boyan is part
of the plot, since he wrote the software for it." Bubba
said, in review.

"And Lance Cottrell, running Infonex, which is connected
to C2Net and acting as apologist for the Anonymizer gang
using C2Net-style Gestapo tactics to enforce the Anonymizer trademark,
even among fellow CypherPunks." the Cowboy added.

"Yes!"  Bubba was getting increasingly excited.

"Lance Cottrell. The man largely responsible for the existence
of the mixmaster remailers." Bubba looked horrified.

"Cowboy! This means that the Dark Allies have their pawns
and shills in place in the heart of the CypherPunks technology-the
remailers."

The two of them sat stunned, as they read the quote in Cottrell's
signature file:

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra.  Suddenly

it flips over, pinning you underneath.  At night the ice 
weasels come."

                        --Nietzsche

A bold reference to the Reptilian Nazis, living under the ice
caps of Antarctica, at the South Pole! This was a devastating
revelation.

"They are everywhere!" Bubba and
the Cowboy said, in unison.

Jonathan had been lying awake, listening to the two increasingly
crazed men for quite some time. Now he got up from his cot and
walked over to join them.
Jonathan reached for the bottle of Jack Daniel's and fortified
his mind for the battle that lay ahead of him. "If you
can't lick 'em, join 'em." he thought, as he knocked
back his second shot of the cool, stinging liquid.

"Bubba, Cowboy. I think we need to proceed extremely cautiously,
here."  The two looked at him, nodding, and waited for
him to continue.

Jonathan was glad that he had been sufficiently exposed to Bubba's
tangled trail of logic in the last few years, as he knew that
he was going to have to wing it...

"It's quite obvious," Jonathan said, as he let
himself sink into their shared state of deranged paranoia just
far enough to communicate at their level, but not so far as to
become submerged in it, "that the CypherPunks list members
are not aware of most of the others being pawns and shills of
Gomez and the Dark Allies, like they themselves are."

"Equally obvious," Jonathan realized the importance
of sounding certain of himself when dealing with people who had
descended beneath reason, into the quagmire of magical thinking,
"is the fact that we can proceed with our plan, exactly
as before, since they will all have to maintain their cover stories,
and act accordingly."

"Right." Bubba said, as he and the Cowboy fell
into line with Jonathan's reasoning.

This was going to be a piece of cake...

"So we're agreed, then." 
Jonathan wasn't happy with the final outcome of their deliberations,
but at least he had gotten the two men to agree to 'acting as
if' the CypherPunks were all who they appeared to be, and thus
proceeding in a deviously normal fashion.

"The only ones we can trust are our contact..."
Jonathan couldn't remember his name, either, and this troubled
him, "...we'll call him Arnold, for now...Alec McCrackin
and Tim C. May."

"And we're not sure about Tim May." Bubba quickly
interjected, to be safe.

"Of course, Bubba. But we decided that the terrible thing
he did to Arnold at the 'Home' was probably just to allay the
suspicions of the others that he really loves and respects Arnold
for his honesty in admitting that he is a bad liar and forger."

Jonathan could still hardly believe that he had managed to
sell that bottle of snake oil to these two, no matter how many
cards had fallen out of their decks in the last couple of days.

"So we'll keep an eye on him." the Cowboy agreed,
"Just in case..."


The problem, now, was what to do about trying to put some semblance
of order into the release of Part III of 'The True Story of the
InterNet.'

There had never been much structure in the writing and dissemination
of the manuscripts, from the very beginning, and now it would
be increasingly difficult to hold the process together, given
the haphazard disorganization of the CypherPunks becoming involved.

Some were sending ideas and possible themes to them through...Arnold.
Some were working on their own chapters and sending them to Arnold
for HTML formatting. Some were preparing to write and release
their own chapters in their own ways.

And now those who had started the ball rolling, from a century
in the future, were quickly becoming candidates to join Arnold
as roommates in the "Home for the TOO Happy."

And they had already used the "Rules of War" chapter
title twice, without addressing the issue. Things were falling
apart fast.

Perhaps it was better to turn this chore over to McCrackin. Yeah,
what the hell. If this all went to shit, there was no reason for
Arnold to go down alone...


"The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre"

"WebWorld & the Mythical Circle of Eunuchs"

"InfoWar (Part III of 'The True Story of the InterNet')