No, Mr. Busby, there is a Santa Claus. Dear Mr. Busby, On the Cypherpunks Archive web page, https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/blog/2018/07/05/the-cypherpunks-mailing-list-archives-must-be-preserved.html , you said: "I have an uneasy feeling that many of the posts from this era may already be irrecoverably lost. If this is true it would be a great shame for future generations who want to learn about this vital period of internet history and development. There is an argument that perhaps the list participants would like their privacy preserved, however I don’t think it is a strong one. An open-subscription mailing list is ultimately a public forum. Posting to it is an act of placing information into the public domain."
No, Mr. Busby, you need not worry about that specific possibility. There were clearly hundreds of people who subscribed to the CP email list, even as early as mid 1995. Each of them regularly received copies of posted CP emails, which were presumably reliably stored onto their computers' hard drives, possibly floppy disks, and eventually possibly backup tapes. Those hard drives were occasionally retired, but when that happened many of them were probably put on shelves to gather dust. Remember, at the moment they were retired, they were not considered totally worthless. And shelves are remarkable things: If you put something on them, perhaps in a box, that object generally does not simply disappear after years or even decades. So there was no immediate reason to throw those hard drives away, even if the potential value of that hardware gradually dropped. So, in many cases, it can be expected that such hardware remains and is ultimately retrievable, (Only idiots like Razer think otherwise, apparently.) Does anybody believe that EACH AND EVERY copy of ANY specific CP email was totally erased, everywhere around the world it happened to be. Including, for instance, the NSA and other government TLA's? How foolish! But what you need to do, immediately, is to worry about a far more omnous reality, one that I have discovered within the last 3+ days. I was a heavy participant in the Cypherpunks list from perhaps March 1995 onwards, and for a couple of years. And, quite unlike most of the now-current subscribers, the large majority of whom were not on the CP list in 1995, I can actually REMEMBER the general events of that time frame. Which is one of the main reasons I have a powerful advantage as I studied a specific kind of message and text that is, or at least SHOULD BE, in the Cypherpunks archive for 1995. You, sorting through a veritable ocean of look-sorta-alike data, are very unlikely to spontaneously notice what data happens to be "missing". If you go into a forest, how can you notice one missing tree, or a dozen? (Yes, a sawed-off stump remains an excellent clue.) I, however, knowing that my name (jim bell) and my old email adddress ([email protected]), and references to 'assassination politics' and 'AP' should be heavily present, have a huge advantage. If they aren't (still) there, I will notice it. And they aren't. And I did. You presumably don't notice it, at least not until I explain what should be present, yet isn't present. Quite understandable. But now you know. I suggest that you read my comments for the last 3 or so days on CP. In some of them, I point out that the text string 'jim bell' does not seem to be present in the 1995 archive you are maintaining, nor in the Venona file for that year. And the text string 'AP', in the limited meaning of the name of my 1995 essay, "Assassination Politics", which soon enough the vast majority of the time was shortened to merely 'AP'. Yet, I first entered the CP list about March 1995, and was solidly responding to dozens, of messages, per day. And other people, many dozens of them, were posting similar, and responding, messages back to me, and to others on the list. None of that seems to be present, at least not before November 2005, and yet it is solidly present in 2006. And yet, mysteriously, references to me and my then-email address, [email protected] simply don't occur until November 1995. But if you compare the 1996 archive, and the Venona-file equivalent, you will see that these text strings are subsequently heavily present that later year, 1996, as in fact they should also have been for more than the last half of the year 1995. And in fact, there should be far more references to "AP", per day in mid-late 1995, than eventually would be (and, I presume, still are) found in 1996. (only clueless, malicious people like Razer don't comprehend this, or at least they pretend not to be able to figure it out.) Since you are sympathetic to the Cypherpunks cause (why else would you be here?), I can tell you that there is some very good news, There is no reason to believe, now that I have discovered a major problem with the tampering, that it will be impossible to re-acquire most if not all of the emails making up what should be the archive. But the not-quite-so-good-news is that perhaps you ought to mentally re-orient yourself, shift gears a little. Yes, I agree that making and maintaining an accurate Cypherpunks archive it good and important. But you don't mow the grass when your house is on fire, do you? I say we have an 'emergency', since I have discovered massive and deliberate tampering with the CP archive. Because of your motivation to maintain an accurate list, I think you should also be motivated to figure out who managed to engineer such an abhorrent fraud, And you will notice that these tasks heavily overlap. To generate an accurate archive now requires determining what material has been omitted. And that is a difficult task: Prior to this, I suppose you thought you were dealing only with accidental, inadvertent data omissions. Now, you are aware that that there is at least one huge, deliberate, malicious fraud. And just because I noticed (so far) one of them, doesn't mean that there are not others, ones that I haven't yet noticed. Clearly, the fact that this fraud wasn't discovered until 3 days ago means that the "tools", and "system" that we should otherwise expect will find this sort of thing didn't actually work. So, if they are not changed, there is no reason to believe they will begin to work in the future. You were aware of some omissions, you just didn't understand what they were and how they were caused: "I have an uneasy feeling that many of the posts from this era may already be irrecoverably lost. If this is true it would be a great shame for future generations who want to learn about this vital period of internet history and development." Also, you should be aware that deliberately tampering with computer data is a Federal felony. https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/criminal-ccips/legacy/2015/01/14/ccmanual.pdf The people who accomplished this forgery are in grave danger of prosecution, or at least they should be if the government prosecutors do their job. And part of OUR task will be to expose AND publicize this corruption sufficiently well so as to help guarantee that the Feds don't have any alternative to prosecute them. Do you think you can do that? And that includes finding out the nature of the forgery, in at least enough detail to allow a prosecutor to bring a winning case. Are you getting excited now, Mr. Busby? It's only going to get more "real" from here on in. "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vEEh0GF_C8 Jim Bell
