Rush disses anonymity

I'm sitting here listening to Rush, and he's talking about Pierre
Salanger's recent "discovery" ;-) of the anonymously posted friendly-fire
TWA800 internet message of a few months back.

In the process of discounting the story, and praising FBI pal Kalstrom, he
bemoans the anonymity of the net, calling it a "nest of kooks", (mixed in
with all the other "right thinking people", of course...).

Given this, and, of course, our own fun and games with anonymous, er,
slander, on this list, I'm frequently tempted to agree with him. After all,
if someone says something wrong about you, how do find them and punish
them? How do you know what the truth is, unless you know who said it?
(What? An appeal to authority? Moi? I'm *shocked* you would assert such a
thing...)

Until, of course, I remember that anonymity is unpreventable, and, frankly,
economically necessary for true internet commerce.

Remember what agrarianism did to try to stop industrialism (up to, and
including, socialism <he said, trolling for leftists>), and expect the
worst, folks.


Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"The cost of anything is the foregone alternative" -- Walter Johnson
The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/

Rich Graves wrote:
> Robert Hettinga wrote:
> > At 8:02 pm -0500 11/11/96, Rich Graves wrote:

[snippo]

> No. It requires both. And sometimes, technical skill. How many people
> here know enough to evaluate the data concerning, to take a notorious
> example, the Kennedy assassination? I accept the historical consensus,
> but I know there are a lot of otherwise rational people on cypherpunks
> who are convinced that there was some sort of coverup (which sort, they
> often don't know or care; but they're conviced there was one). Oliver
> Stone got some ridiculous movie made based on this non-thesis (actually
> two, counting Nixon). People growing up today are learning pseudohistory
> and pseudoscience from Oliver Stone, "The X Files," "Dark Skies," and
> "Millenium." I find that scary. The net is better than TV, because it
> allows more responses, but I'm not sure how much better.

You accept the historical consensus?  And which historical consensus is
that?  The non-consensus investigated by the prime suspect (Johnson)?
Or the consensus investigated by the people's representatives, i.e. the
House of Representatives?

Maybe you didn't know that the #2 man should be considered the primary
suspect, huh?  And a coverup, by golly!  Imagine that the U.S. government
would do such a thing?  Couldn't be, could it?

They were just hiding the Zapruder film for 12 years in our best interest,
right?  No need to show the people Kennedy's upper torso (about 100 pounds
of weight) being blown violently *backward* as a result of a frontal shot,
since "Oswald" couldn't have been in front.  Nosiree!

Next thing you're gonna say is that "Oswald" shot Tippit with his *revolver*
and then stopped to unload the spent shells by the body, yes?

And Jack Ruby was just an irate citizen who felt sorry for Jackie, huh?

I prefer not to judge people by just one posting, but like Noam Chomsky,
with his "I can't see *anyone* who would have wanted Kennedy dead"
bullshit, I just can't buy the notion that whoever wrote the above crap
about the "historical consensus" doesn't really know what's going on.

A disinformer posing as an idiot.  Go figure.

On Fri, 15 Nov 1996 18:23:17 -0800, Dale Thorn wrote:

   A disinformer posing as an idiot.  Go figure.

Nice sig...and here I was thinking you were a real idiot.

<g>

-- 
Paul Foley <mycroft@actrix.gen.nz>       ---         PGPmail preferred

	   PGP key ID 0x1CA3386D available from keyservers
    fingerprint = 4A 76 83 D8 99 BC ED 33  C5 02 81 C9 BF 7A 91 E8
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Deliberation, n.:
	The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is
buttered on.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Paul Foley wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Nov 1996 18:23:17 -0800, Dale Thorn wrote:
>    A disinformer posing as an idiot.  Go figure.
> Nice sig...and here I was thinking you were a real idiot.

I'll refrain from saying anything nasty here, since there is no info
in this posting to comment on, i.e., I don't know who you are.

However, when you decide to CC cypherpunks with a flame like you just
did, you could show *them* some consideration by leaving in some of the
material so they know what the hell you're talking about.

Dale Thorn wrote:
> 
> Paul Foley wrote:
> > On Fri, 15 Nov 1996 18:23:17 -0800, Dale Thorn wrote:
> >    A disinformer posing as an idiot.  Go figure.
> > Nice sig...and here I was thinking you were a real idiot.
> 
> I'll refrain from saying anything nasty here, since there is no info
> in this posting to comment on, i.e., I don't know who you are.
> 
> However, when you decide to CC cypherpunks with a flame like you just
> did, you could show *them* some consideration by leaving in some of
> the material so they know what the hell you're talking about.

That would be redundant. Everyone on cypherpunks receives what you send 
to the list, and thus has access to the source material, if desired. 
Paul's humor was surely appreciated by the people who have killfiled you 
and thus miss your posts unless there's a followup.

-rich

Robert Hettinga wrote:
> 
> I'm sitting here listening to Rush, and he's talking about Pierre
> Salanger's recent "discovery" ;-) of the anonymously posted 
> friendly-fire TWA800 internet message of a few months back.

I must say I was pleased (and, I'm sorry to say, surprised) not to hear 
people talking about that "conspiracy" on this list. I gave a friend at 
the Merc hell for publishing a story saying that maybe there was 
something to it because there was some web site with "details of 
possible trajectories and everything." Morons.

> In the process of discounting the story, and praising FBI pal 
> Kalstrom, he bemoans the anonymity of the net, calling it a "nest of 
> kooks", (mixed in with all the other "right thinking people", of
> course...).
> 
> Given this, and, of course, our own fun and games with anonymous, er,
> slander, on this list, I'm frequently tempted to agree with him.

You people are wimps. The only real effect of the good doctor's rants 
has been, as Mr. May indicated, to get the good doctor on the "don't 
hire" list.

> After all,
> if someone says something wrong about you, how do find them and punish
> them? How do you know what the truth is, unless you know who said it?

You get off your ass and find out directly.

How about if you know exactly who it is, but you know him to be 
judgement-proof, since he's already saddled with over $12 million in 
libel and wrongful-death suits? It's called "reputation capital."

> Until, of course, I remember that anonymity is unpreventable, and,
> frankly, economically necessary for true internet commerce.
> 
> Remember what agrarianism did to try to stop industrialism (up to, and
> including, socialism <he said, trolling for leftists>), and expect the
> worst, folks.

People are just going to have to be smarter than they've ever been. The 
Net enables sharing and verifying real information just as it enables 
disinformation. Sure disinformation will always be cheaper to produce 
and more appealing to the eye (fact is harder to accept than fiction 
because fictional plots are written to make sense), but disinformation 
tends to cancel itself out.

Work on archives, reputation control, and openness. Disinformation, to 
be truly effective, requires a monopoly on information. More speech, not 
less.

(Keep in reserve the retort that anonymity is quite big in "the 
mainstream," too. How many key stories cite "well-placed 
administration sources"?)

The opposite of the Black Unicorn approach to nym safety is the Liz 
Taylor approach: "As long as they spell my name right, I don't care."
Nobody I care about is going to listen to some crank, or if they do, 
they'll email me to check the facts, or if they don't, I have 
alternative outlets for information. As long as I live in a free country 
with a free Internet, they can't touch me.

Oh, btw, it's helped that I've resigned myself to forever working for 
decent people who don't give in to such bullshit.

-rich

The address you mailed to is no longer valid.
This is probably because the user in question was an
old Open Net subscriber. Open Net is NO LONGER an ISP,
and has not been since May 1996.

We have no redirection address for that user. Please
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This response was generated automatically.

At 9:47 pm -0500 11/14/96, Rich Graves wrote:

>Sorry for the misinterpretation. Clearly your reputation has not
>persisted in my mind with sufficent clarity since the last time I was
>involved in a cypherpunks discussion.

Now you sound like Tim. :-). An end to this dicussion is just a killfile
away. Be my guest.

>  (Or possibly this issue has
>brought together such strange bedfollows that I'm ready to believe that
>anything is possible.)

"C'mon, Kids! Be-LEIVE! Or Tinkerbell's gonna die!"

>I disagree. You're assuming that you're dealing with a rational person
>who wants to be believed. It is not difficult to come up with examples
>of pure disinformation that is just "thrown out there" and never
>supported. Keep repeating the same lie, and *nonspecialists* will assume
>that there is a "debate" going on.

I agree to disagree. The "Big Lie" only works with mass media. On a
ubiquitous geodesic network, all such bets are off.

>No, actually I meant that competing propaganda tends to kill itself --
>normal people tend just to throw up their hands and say "What the hell
>does it matter anyway" -- but your interpretation is worth talking
>about, too.

See above. When you have an avalanche of dissent from lots of different
voices, all with technically the same size "megaphone", it doesn't take a
new kind of reputation calculus (or even rocket science) to get the idea
that FUD by any other name stinks just the same...

>No. It requires both. And sometimes, technical skill. How many people
>here know enough to evaluate the data concerning, to take a notorious
>example, the Kennedy assassination? I accept the historical consensus,
>but I know there are a lot of otherwise rational people on cypherpunks
>who are convinced that there was some sort of coverup (which sort, they
>often don't know or care; but they're conviced there was one). Oliver
>Stone got some ridiculous movie made based on this non-thesis (actually
>two, counting Nixon). People growing up today are learning pseudohistory
>and pseudoscience from Oliver Stone, "The X Files," "Dark Skies," and
>"Millenium." I find that scary. The net is better than TV, because it
>allows more responses, but I'm not sure how much better.

You're citing mass media again. When you have quasimonopolistic control of
a monster-megaphone the truth tends to get drowned out, or at least
homogenized, in the same way that creationism gets homogenized with real
science for "equal time", say.

>No, I think pure disinformation is cheaper. Period. And often, it
>doesn't have to be "believed" -- you just need to raise "suspicions"
>among nonspecialists.  That is sufficent to destroy consensus and trust
>in social institutions.

Again, you're using big-think here, invoking the power of large
hierarchically organized industrial institutions.

The world don't work that way anymore. Or it won't, soon enough.

>I disagree with two of your premises. Knowing several real journalists
>(as opposed to opinion columnists), I don't consider print or broadcast
>to be particularly hierarchical. The difficulty of propagating
>disinformation depends on whether you want people to believe, or merely
>"suspect." The TWA 800 friendly-fire fiction doesn't have to be accepted
>as definitely true for it to cause trouble. The "supicion" of Richard
>Jewell doesn't have to be accepted as definitely true for it to cause
>trouble. Disinformation is more often about sowing fear, uncertainty,
>and doubt than it is about belief. Sold the right way, it can propagate
>itself; the (IMO) disinformation that the CIA is directly responsible
>for the crack-cocaine epidemic is spread by radical blacks who see it as
>a racist crime, and by radical-right conspiracy mongers who want to tie
>Clinton to the Mena story. Either way, the meme virus spreads. How many
>different kinds of groups are saying how many different groups "created"
>the AIDS virus? You don't have to "believe" that it's true for the meme
>to spread.

Whew. Actually. You're proving my point. In a hierarchically organized
media structure, you get lots of feedback loops repeating the same old shit
over and over, all done in order to keep the channel full during the slack
periods. Let's take TWA 800 frendly fire story. It's been lurking in the
same loony.news and mail groups, and most people on the net think it's a
shit-story. However, Pierre Salanger gets wind of it, puts it into the ABC
evening news as gospel, and all the sudden it's a headline. The power of
the megaphone, all over again. They don't call 'em "gatekeepers" for
nothin', bunky.

>To some extent, but not fully. There is a certain cachet in being
>recognized as someone who uses "your real name."

Reputation is reputation, biometric or otherwise. On the net, your key is
who you are, no matter what your "True Name" is... Kind of like Turing(?)
test, only with reputation, I guess.

>Pseudonymity is only perfect where artificial boundaries such as respect
>for netiquette are erected. If someone really wanted to track you down,
>they could either find you, or "out" you as a pseudonym "afraid to use
>your own name." Both can be damaging (to your reputation or otherwise).
>In order to put your life on the line for something, you need a life
>story.

Okay. Then it should be trivial for you to tell me who "Pr0duct
Cypher"(sp?) is...

Have fun.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"The cost of anything is the foregone alternative" -- Walter Johnson
The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/

Robert Hettinga wrote:
> 
> At 9:47 pm -0500 11/14/96, Rich Graves wrote:

[Lots deleted; I agree that I was unwittingly proving some of your 
points with some of mine, thanks for the lesson...]

> >Pseudonymity is only perfect where artificial boundaries such as 
> >respect for netiquette are erected. If someone really wanted to track 
> >you down, they could either find you, or "out" you as a pseudonym 
> >"afraid to use your own name." Both can be damaging (to your 
> >reputation or otherwise). In order to put your life on the line for 
> >something, you need a life story.
> 
> Okay. Then it should be trivial for you to tell me who "Pr0duct
> Cypher"(sp?) is...

Sure. I'll give you the answer in email; no need to bother the whole 
list.

But what kind of reputation does Pr0duct Cypher have, really? What has 
Pr0duct Cypher done or said that you cannot independently verify? In 
what sense do you "trust" Pr0duct Cypher? What you're trusting is 
source code, which is self-certifying. If Pr0duct Cypher tried to tell 
you about events in history or in a foreign country, or about technical 
subjects in which you had no personal competence, would you trust the 
information? Why should people who know nothing about crypto code trust 
Pr0duct Cypher's tools? (In reality the answer is: they don't. They buy 
from less technically adept companies that they can sue if things go 
wrong.)

Among specialists, collegial discussion works for establishing 
reputation. But where you need to put faith in someone or something that 
you cannot independently verify, real personal accountability is still 
useful. Why do you trust your doctor? Would you buy food or water (or a 
gun) from an anonymous source with no verifiable meatspace presence? 

-rich

Robert Hettinga wrote:
> 
> At 8:02 pm -0500 11/11/96, Rich Graves wrote:
> 
> >You people are wimps. The only real effect of the good doctor's rants
> >has been, as Mr. May indicated, to get the good doctor on the "don't
> >hire" list.
> 
> Sorry. I wasn't clear. My tongue was planted firmly in cheek there.
> I'm "frequently tempted" in the same way I'm "frequently tempted" to
> rip someone's head off and shit down their neck.

Sorry for the misinterpretation. Clearly your reputation has not 
persisted in my mind with sufficent clarity since the last time I was 
involved in a cypherpunks discussion. (Or possibly this issue has 
brought together such strange bedfollows that I'm ready to believe that 
anything is possible.)

> >People are just going to have to be smarter than they've ever been.
> >The Net enables sharing and verifying real information just as it
> >enables disinformation. Sure disinformation will always be cheaper to 
> >produce and more appealing to the eye (fact is harder to accept than 
> >fiction because fictional plots are written to make sense), but 
> >disinformation tends to cancel itself out.
> 
> I agree, but, I think that, in the long run, disinformation may cost 
> more. Lying always involves more work, and thus cost, than telling the 
> truth. In order to support a lie you have to keep weaving a coherent 
> tissue of other lies around the original lie to support it, all of 
> which makes the original lie more and more non-plausible. In other 
> words, the more "resolution" you get on a lie, the more it looks like
> a lie.

I disagree. You're assuming that you're dealing with a rational person 
who wants to be believed. It is not difficult to come up with examples 
of pure disinformation that is just "thrown out there" and never 
supported. Keep repeating the same lie, and *nonspecialists* will assume 
that there is a "debate" going on. To take an example that won't make me 
sound "politically correct," let's say the national security 
establishment tries to spread the rumor that the remailers are run by 
spooks (we've all seen the rumor; I'm not arguing and do not really 
believe that the rumor was started by spooks, but let's assume for the 
sake of argument that it was). *We* all know that this is nonsense; but 
*nonspecialists* and journalists will seize on "the controversy," and 
the perception of danger will create a real chilling effect on remailer 
use. There are still people out there who refuse to use any version of 
PGP after 2.3 because of such repeated rumors. Absolutely no one is 
trying to back them up with more complex lies; but the rumor persists.

> Maybe that's the "cancel itself out" you're talking about.

No, actually I meant that competing propaganda tends to kill itself -- 
normal people tend just to throw up their hands and say "What the hell 
does it matter anyway" -- but your interpretation is worth talking 
about, too.

> Of course, that implies critical thinking on the part of the listener,
> or at least access to critical information, which is what the net
> provides at a cheap price, like you said.

No. It requires both. And sometimes, technical skill. How many people 
here know enough to evaluate the data concerning, to take a notorious 
example, the Kennedy assassination? I accept the historical consensus, 
but I know there are a lot of otherwise rational people on cypherpunks 
who are convinced that there was some sort of coverup (which sort, they 
often don't know or care; but they're conviced there was one). Oliver 
Stone got some ridiculous movie made based on this non-thesis (actually 
two, counting Nixon). People growing up today are learning pseudohistory 
and pseudoscience from Oliver Stone, "The X Files," "Dark Skies," and 
"Millenium." I find that scary. The net is better than TV, because it 
allows more responses, but I'm not sure how much better.

> So, maybe what we're saying here is that disinformation costs more
> than information, but if disinformer has more money, or at least
> communication resources, it'll be believed.

No, I think pure disinformation is cheaper. Period. And often, it 
doesn't have to be "believed" -- you just need to raise "suspicions" 
among nonspecialists. That is sufficent to destroy consensus and trust 
in social institutions. At the risk of sounding politically correct, how 
many nonspecialists "suspect" that the accepted history of the Holocaust 
*could* be a massive propaganda plot? (Yeah, yeah, I know the "soap 
stories" and the Polich Communists' exaggeration of the non-Jewish death 
toll at Auschwitz and all that rot, but I mean the basic facts, which 
are often denied. If you want to jump on this point, take it to 
alt.revisionism, which I read closely.) Absolutely no historians believe 
that, but lots of nonspecialists do. This doesn't mean that they believe 
it to be true; it just means that there's doubt. This kind of "doubt" is 
not the same as skepticism. Skepticism is good. Skeptical inquiry means 
you decide to take the time to investigate a story. Stubborn, cynical 
doubt, especially when based on ignorance and prejudice, is something 
else entirely.

> On a geodesic network, this is much harder, because centralized
> nodes choke on their information load, and can't spread lies as 
> cheaply as they can on a hierarchically controlled communication 
> network, like broadcast, or even print, media.

I disagree with two of your premises. Knowing several real journalists 
(as opposed to opinion columnists), I don't consider print or broadcast 
to be particularly hierarchical. The difficulty of propagating 
disinformation depends on whether you want people to believe, or merely 
"suspect." The TWA 800 friendly-fire fiction doesn't have to be accepted 
as definitely true for it to cause trouble. The "supicion" of Richard 
Jewell doesn't have to be accepted as definitely true for it to cause 
trouble. Disinformation is more often about sowing fear, uncertainty, 
and doubt than it is about belief. Sold the right way, it can propagate 
itself; the (IMO) disinformation that the CIA is directly responsible 
for the crack-cocaine epidemic is spread by radical blacks who see it as 
a racist crime, and by radical-right conspiracy mongers who want to tie 
Clinton to the Mena story. Either way, the meme virus spreads. How many 
different kinds of groups are saying how many different groups "created" 
the AIDS virus? You don't have to "believe" that it's true for the meme 
to spread.

> >The opposite of the Black Unicorn approach to nym safety is the Liz
> >Taylor approach: "As long as they spell my name right, I don't care."
> >Nobody I care about is going to listen to some crank, or if they do,
> >they'll email me to check the facts, or if they don't, I have
> >alternative outlets for information. As long as I live in a free 
> >country with a free Internet, they can't touch me.
> 
> Say 'amen' somebody. Reputation is reputation, nym or not. However, 
> nyms allow something very important. Since the net enables reputation 
> to persist (functionally) forever, nyms allow you to "start over", 
> much in the same way that geographic frontiers have functioned
> historically.

To some extent, but not fully. There is a certain cachet in being 
recognized as someone who uses "your real name."

"We pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour."

"John Hancock."

> The paradox of ubiquitous network computing is it takes away privacy
> by creating persistant information accessable to anyone, while at the
> same time creating perfect pseudonymity and thus new reputation.

Pseudonymity is only perfect where artificial boundaries such as respect 
for netiquette are erected. If someone really wanted to track you down, 
they could either find you, or "out" you as a pseudonym "afraid to use 
your own name." Both can be damaging (to your reputation or otherwise). 
In order to put your life on the line for something, you need a life 
story.

-rich

At 8:02 pm -0500 11/11/96, Rich Graves wrote:
>> Given this, and, of course, our own fun and games with anonymous, er,
>> slander, on this list, I'm frequently tempted to agree with him.
>
>You people are wimps. The only real effect of the good doctor's rants
>has been, as Mr. May indicated, to get the good doctor on the "don't
>hire" list.

Sorry. I wasn't clear. My tongue was planted firmly in cheek there. I'm
"frequently tempted" in the same way I'm "frequently tempted" to rip
someone's head off and shit down their neck.

>You get off your ass and find out directly.
>
>How about if you know exactly who it is, but you know him to be
>judgement-proof, since he's already saddled with over $12 million in
>libel and wrongful-death suits? It's called "reputation capital."

See above. You're preaching to the choir here...

>People are just going to have to be smarter than they've ever been. The
>Net enables sharing and verifying real information just as it enables
>disinformation. Sure disinformation will always be cheaper to produce
>and more appealing to the eye (fact is harder to accept than fiction
>because fictional plots are written to make sense), but disinformation
>tends to cancel itself out.

I agree, but, I think that, in the long run, disinformation may cost more.
Lying always involves more work, and thus cost, than telling the truth. In
order to support a lie you have to keep weaving a coherent tissue of other
lies around the original lie to support it, all of which makes the original
lie more and more non-plausible. In other words, the more "resolution" you
get on a lie, the more it looks like a lie. Maybe that's the "cancel itself
out" you're talking about. Of course, that implies critical thinking on the
part of the listener, or at least access to critical information, which is
what the net provides at a cheap price, like you said. So, maybe what we're
saying here is that disinformation costs more than information, but if
disinformer has more money, or at least communication resources, it'll be
believed. On a geodesic network, this is much harder, because centralized
nodes choke on their information load, and can't spread lies as cheaply as
they can on a hierarchically controlled communication network, like
broadcast, or even print, media.

>Work on archives, reputation control, and openness. Disinformation, to
>be truly effective, requires a monopoly on information. More speech, not
>less.

Right.

>(Keep in reserve the retort that anonymity is quite big in "the
>mainstream," too. How many key stories cite "well-placed
>administration sources"?)
>
>The opposite of the Black Unicorn approach to nym safety is the Liz
>Taylor approach: "As long as they spell my name right, I don't care."
>Nobody I care about is going to listen to some crank, or if they do,
>they'll email me to check the facts, or if they don't, I have
>alternative outlets for information. As long as I live in a free country
>with a free Internet, they can't touch me.

Say 'amen' somebody. Reputation is reputation, nym or not. However, nyms
allow something very important. Since the net enables reputation to persist
(functionally) forever, nyms allow you to "start over", much in the same
way that geographic frontiers have functioned historically.

The paradox of ubiquitous network computing is it takes away privacy by
creating persistant information accessable to anyone, while at the same
time creating perfect pseudonymity and thus new reputation.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga


-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"The cost of anything is the foregone alternative" -- Walter Johnson
The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/