Re: Cypherpunks Press release

At 9:09 am 9/20/95, David J. Bianco wrote:
>On Sep 20, 10:28, Dietrich J. Kappe sent the following to the NSA's mail
>archives:
>> Subject: Cypherpunks Press release
>|| -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>||
>|| We've seen the word "hacker" kicked around rather arbitrarily in the
>press.
>|| Are we to conclude that the cypherpunks are a bunch of hackers? I think
>its
>|| time for some cypherpunks spin. How about a logo *and* a press release?
>The
>|| press release would give contacts (email, phone, etc.) so that someone
>on
>|| this list would be contacted by journalists when a crypto story breaks.
>||
>|| If we get enough volunteers, we can fax blanket every newspaper,
>station,
>|| and network in the world.
>||
>
>I think it's a great idea, personally.  I think many journalists would like
>to find third party opinions about network security and other cryptography
>issues, but just don't know who to talk to about them.  By making it easy
>for them to find us, we'd be more likely to be consulted for opinions.
[elided]

I think a media contact group is a good idea too, but I think we should
handle it by having a special address <cypherpunks-press@toad.com> that
media people can send to to request information and that it should split
the incoming mail and route it to a group of volunteers who could then
respond. Question from media people are usually NOT going to be heavily
tech-oriented, and this sort of press list would give the lesser
cryptologists among us, who nevertheless have a significant amount of
knowledge about public policy issues concerning crypto, a chance to be
useful.

BTW, <pgp-help-humans@hks.net> is still operating, and the small group of
knowledgeable cypherpunks there all see the mail that comes in and cc the
list when someone asks a PGP question and gets it answered by one or more
of the volunteers. This would be a good model to expand on, imho. Everyone
learns something, people go away impressed by the quality answers, etc. :)

   dave

On Sep 22,  6:26, Dave Del Torto sent the following to the NSA's mail
archives:
> Subject: Re: Cypherpunks Press release
|| I think a media contact group is a good idea too, but I think we should
|| handle it by having a special address <cypherpunks-press@toad.com> that
|| media people can send to to request information and that it should split
|| the incoming mail and route it to a group of volunteers who could then
|| respond. Question from media people are usually NOT going to be heavily
|| tech-oriented, and this sort of press list would give the lesser
|| cryptologists among us, who nevertheless have a significant amount of
|| knowledge about public policy issues concerning crypto, a chance to be
|| useful.
||

I like this idea, too, except that it presupposes that the journalists who
want to contact cypherpunks have access to email.  Although that's a common
thing, it's not uniformly available yet.  Still, it's a useful service for
those journalists who do have access to email.  Perhaps both could be done,
with the people on the mailing list also available via conventional means
for the less techno-savvy journalists.

--
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