From: Mixmaster <mixmaster@remail.obscura.com>
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 01:01:41 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Why Does the CAUCE Oppose Privacy and Anonymity? (was: Re: RESULT: com
Message-ID: <199711191631.IAA12085@sirius.infonex.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



krueger@cs.umn.edu (Alan Krueger) wrote:

> >>ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home) writes:
> >>
> >>>Anonymity has value that is greater than the value of CAUCE.
> >
> >Could someone help a rookie here?  What's CAUCE and how does
> >it relate to anonymity.
>  
> It doesn't, per se, but a number of people choose to believe that.  CAUCE
> is the Coalition Against Unsolicted Commercial Email and supports the
> banning of such unsolicited advertisements.  See their web page at
> http://www.cauce.org/ for more information.  
>  
> The yelling is about the proposed (now ratified) robo-moderation policy
> for the *newsgroup* to discuss CAUCE issues, comp.org.cauce, which requires
> that you post with a deliverable email address.  This was supposed to
> keep belligerant spammers and trolls from posting to the group without
> having some kind of valid contact address.  This was not supposed to be
> anti-privacy, anti-munging, or anti-anonymity, though that is what seems
> to be the big issue many people were having with it.

That makes about as much sense as holding a rally to protest auto theft and
requiring that each attendee leave his car UNLOCKED in the parking lot while
attending.  In this case, the price of admission to this "anti-UCE party" is
to contribute one's e-mail address to the UCErs' mailing lists!

And what, exactly, is the point of requiring "belligerant spammers and 
trolls" to post with a valid e-mail address?  Unless they're planning to
spam or mailbomb each other, they are the ones who have the least to fear
from publicly broadcasting their e-mail addresses on a worldwide NG for the
address harvesters to collect and exploit.