Thank you for your reply, I will answer inline: Jim Bell
On Monday, November 4, 2019, 01:17:58 PM PST, Tom Busby <[email protected]>
wrote:
>Hi to all in general and Jim in particular,
>I don't check the list all that often at the moment, I decided to do a keyword
>search after I saw your disqus comment. It's good to hear from you, I'm a fan
>of Assassination Politics. It's a thought provoking work describing a
>dangerous idea of the kind that has always fascinated me :)
>I'll repeat what I said in my reply on the page:
>https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/blog/2018/07/05/the-cypherpunks-mailing-list-archives-must-be-preserved.html
>Currently. Yes, the archive is basically just a clone of what's in the raw
>files hosted on Ryan Lackey's venona site. I strongly, strongly suspect that
>this has large amounts of missing data due to how quiet some periods are, and
>also it ends in early 1999 anyway (with those emails tacked on to the end of
>the 1998 archive).
While that would be an entirely plausible possibility in the general case, and
over many years, I can assure you that the then-current almost-total data void
from February 14 1995 through about mid-July 1995 have nothing at all to do
with that idea. I was there at least during March 1995 through nearly half of
1997. My very existence, and that of references to "AP" and "Assassination
Politics", was almost perfectly erased...except that it wasnt, in the 1996
archive. Even when emails were listed July 1995-December 1995, I was
seemingly almost entirely 'erased', Even people today on CP see that the list
must have been "sanitized" to within an inch of its life.
>I was provided with a (apparently) roughly complete archive for 2000 to 2016.
>This is hosted here currently:
cryptoanarchywiki/2000-to-2016-raw-cypherpunks-archive
>I had strong ambitions of trying to index and merge all of the archives I
>could get my hands on, but this is more challenging than you might think.
>Determining which two emails are the same is very difficult when they
>sometimes contain encoding errors, extra whitespace, differing text for
>expressing the time of emails, etc (making hashing an infeasible way of
>comparing them). I've also had an enormous amount of other commitments that
>have preventing me working on this archive as much as I'd like (or at all
>really, if I'm honest) over the past year.
Well, I think finding out what happened to the data archived into the 1995 will
be much simpler than re-generating the full, correct archive. And no doubt this
recently-discovered fraud will induce many more people to be interested in
fixing the archive. So, you shouldn't worry that you will be faced with an
ocean of work.
>The site is also a Jekyll-generated static site hosted on github. The sheer
>number of pages is really approaching the limit of what's possible with this
>approach. It takes over an hour to build the site currently. Adding the
>2000-2016 archive would be totally unworkable in this way. I also want to
>index the messages in ElasticSearch or similar. The lack of a search function
>is something that I feel is sorely lacking.
>Sadly, for this reason, my attempts to synthesise all the available incomplete
>archives of messages from this era have stalled :( it's there at the back of
>my mind though, so I haven't lost the will to work on it, just the time.
Okay, I think things will change dramatically, and you will get help on this
project, I am sure,
>I hear your concerns about large numbers of missing emails, and if anyone
>reading this has their own copies of the 1990s archives, I'd love to have
>them. I can't make any promises about when I'll be able to work on processing
>them, but rest assured I will take great care of those archive files so that,
>should I fail to complete this task myself, those archives will be collected
>together for someone else to attempt to finish the task.]
Understand my opinion that "finishing the archive", while remaining a worthy
goal, should not be considered the highest priority now, As I said quite
recently, you don't mow the grass when your house is burning down.I think this
needs to be extremely well-publicized, to attract the attention of Cypherpunks
who frequented the list in the mid-1995s. We have their names, probably most
of them, as they remain (in part?) in the archive. And most of their
subsequent email addresses probably appear in later archive years. They may
have archives of their own; now, they may have no idea that this old data is
needed.
>Whether or not those archives have willful deletions or modifications to the
>data, I've no idea, to be honest.
Well, having examined and scanned the archive for 1995, I _do_ have an idea.
Due to the essentially complete absence of an extremely peculiar pattern of
data strings, such as "Jim Bell", "[email protected]", "ap", and
"assassination politics", yet a few examples of ' ap ' in about 15 examples but
only where it doesn't mean "assassination politics" " ap" meaning Associated
Press, "killer ap", all this is an extremely specific 'fingerprint' pointing
to not merely an automatic search-and-replace, but in fact a careful and
precise manipulation of the data.I am reminded of a quotation that I heard
about 45 years ago, by Henry David Thoreau:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/125881-it-s-circumstantial-evidence-like-finding-a-trout-in-the-milk
“It's circumstantial evidence, like finding a trout in the milk.”
"I would rely on others to notice and report things that seem strange."
But I'm sure you understand that unless such a person possesses specific
knowledge about what happened during 1995 on the CP list, he is very unlikely
to spontaneously notice the meaning behind the data as it now appears to be.
Viewed in complete isolation, the virtually-complete data absence from February
14 to mid-July 1995 might 'look like" a simple omission of data, but the later
absence of the strings above from July-December 1995 are far more unambiguous.
Put simply, everybody who sees what is pointed out as the outcome will agree
there must have been an amazing fraud perpetrated. I again express my
well-educated opinion that the fraudster(s) very likely didn't actually forge
any messages; rather he/they simply deleted threads and messages that contained
references to me, my AP essay, and my then-current email address. The pattern
is quite clear,.
"Even then I'm not sure what to do about it."
While it could be laughingly said that _I_, too, am not "sure" what to do about
it, in extreme detail, I am quite confident that this is what constitutes
approximately an "emergency". Let's see if anybody disagrees, I have already
made many suggestions.
>When coming across two distinct versions of what appear to be the same
message, I'd probably just list both. That's all I can do really. This project
appears to be complex in a lot of ways that weren't obvious at the start...
which is a familiar story to anyone who sets out to solve a problem I guess :)
Well, now you know enough about the truth that you can entirely change your
point of view about this matter. More eyes need to be brought in to this
matter, including ones who have actual memories of the CP events of 1995.
Tom
On Sat, 2 Nov 2019 at 23:31, jim bell <[email protected]> wrote:
No, Mr. Busby, there is a Santa Claus.
Dear Mr. Busby,
On the Cypherpunks Archive web page, The Cypherpunks Mailing List archives
must be preserved
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The Cypherpunks Mailing List archives must be preserved
cryptoanarchy.wiki
Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!
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, 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
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