From: "Robert A. Costner" <pooh@efga.org>
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 1997 14:19:45 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Hate speech and censorship
In-Reply-To: <199712200621.HAA13824@basement.replay.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.19971221010751.0365d2c0@mail.atl.bellsouth.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 10:58 AM 12/20/97 EST, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
>I also wouldn't trust Lance Cottrell.  He's selling privacy for the $$, not
>for the ideology; he'll bend over the moment he thinks there's more $$ in
>bending over, which is usually the case.

It's nice to give away privacy for free.  Free turkey dinners at
Thanksgiving are nice as well.  But someone has to foot the bill.  Perhaps
with a Thanksgiving dinner everyone thanks you.  Of the many remailer
related phone calls I received, none of them had a "thank you" in them.
More of the "I'm calling the police, FBI, my lawyer, my friends, the Better
Business Bureau, the Attorney General, a higher up, and the SPA.  blah,
blah, blah..."

It costs money to run a remailer.  When we recently asked for $2,000 in
donations to improve the Cracker remailer, we received about $800 over two
month period.  Just as there are free ISPs, and public access ISPs like
Seattle Community Network and Virtually Wired, there are free remailers.
But this is not the business model most ISPs enjoy.  Perhaps Lance Cottrell
has come across the proper business model for running a remailer.  Have the
users pay for it.

The Cracker remailer operates mainly off of money I pulled out of my
pocket.  And I'm not really a user, or the person who runs it.  We had some
donations of course, and we've had other inkind donations, like free legal
services.  I'm still waiting to see a lawsuit on Cracker, or the police to
show up with a warrant.

I think it's great that Lance Cottrell has people pay to use his remailer.
I wish another fifty companies would spring up and do the same.  Doing it
for ideology is nice, but the phone company, nor the backbone companies, or
others really seem to like payments in ideology.  They seem to want a
legible signature on a check.


  -- Robert Costner                  Phone: (770) 512-8746
     Electronic Frontiers Georgia    mailto:pooh@efga.org  
     http://www.efga.org/            run PGP 5.0 for my public key