Everybody note that I haven't gotten an answer to this from Ryan Lackey, nor
has Declan McCullagh responded to many emails sent his way. Tom Busby seems
unusually quiet, as well: Busby, the keeper of the Archive, should be
enthusiastically working to figure out what happened that would allow the
Archive to have been forged.
The Venona files, as I recall, were dated 2003: Is that correct? If I had a
more-efficient editor to search the CP archives, I would study the discussions
of the people doing the archive to figure out who was involved, what happened,
and when it happened. Can somebody help with this?
The Wayback Machine began in 2001. (but see the reference to 1996, below).
Were the files that went into Venona or other to-be-archived data copied onto
Wayback?
http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/5/19/a-short-on-how-the-wayback-machine-stores-more-pages-than-st.html
"How does the Wayback Machine work? Now with over 400 billion webpages indexed,
allowing the Internet to be browsed all the way back to 1996, it's an even more
compelling question. I've looked several times but I've never found a really
good answer."
"Here's some information from a thread on Hacker News. It starts with mmagin, a
former Archive employee:"
[end of quote] Jim Bell
On Friday, November 22, 2019, 08:25:40 PM PST, jim bell
<[email protected]> wrote:
I'm going to put this response onto the Cypherpunks list, so that everybody
learns what is going on.
You said, "I don’t think they were intentionally edited by anyone." That may
very well be because you haven't checked. Would you know what to look for, if
I hadn't told you? Probably not.
I am apparently the first person in about 16 years to have identified this
problem. And the reason I discovered it was simply that I was looking for a
very specific piece of information that I knew should have been in it: The
date of the first appearance of Part 1 of my Assassination Politics essay,
which as I had vaguely recalled should have been somewhere in February or March
1995. And parts 2-6 should also have appeared in the 1995 archive.
I didn't place it there: It was copied by a person whose name I don't recall
(maybe I never knew it...) from the Digitaliberty email list, run by Bill
Frezza. There was a huge amount of discussion of it in mid-1995. You can
even find many references in 1996, but essentially nothing in 1995.
I looked for this, and was shocked by what I saw (or more precisely, DIDN'T
see): It is quite obvious now what happened: With a tiny number of exceptions
in November and December 1995, all messages with the strings "Jim Bell",
"[email protected]", " AP ", and "Assassination Politics" simply didn't
appear. Someone had intentionally removed them. The fraud had been so
minutely done that any appearance of the string ' ap ' that meant
"Assassination Politics" had been removed, and the very few that meant
"Associated Press" remained. Not an accident. Quite intentional.
I think you owe it to the other users of the Cypherpunks list (then and now)
to correct your "I don’t think they were intentionally edited by anyone." to "I
agree it's obvious that 1995's archive was forged". And "I will help you to
figure out who did it." It only takes your recognition that those strings
had to appear, heavily, in the data and nevertheless they did do not. Check
for the appearance of those strings in 1996, to see what the "normal" situation
should have been. A few minutes of text searching will confirm all this.
You could easily do this by talking to other people who were aware of what
happened on the Cypherpunks list in 1995. Declan McCullagh was one; the names
of the others are obviously available in the 1995 and 1996 archive itself,
including the email addresses (at least, their email addresses then) of those
very people. They will all agree that those strings, at the very least, are
missing. And you won't find an 'innocent' explanation, no matter how hard you
try.
This cannot possibly have been by accident. And you are virtually certain to
have been in contact with the person who did that fraud, or at least one who
knew what was going on. You probably have archives, possibly on 'retired' hard
drives. Or the people who gave the data to you. Eventually, we will find
the answer.
With a little searching, I can see that you work in the 'security' field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Lackey You are, therefore, well-qualified
for this task. And you should want to ensure that your reputation is upheld
with your handling of this matter.
Jim Bell
On Friday, November 22, 2019, 07:33:24 PM PST, Ryan Lackey
<[email protected]> wrote:
The archives I have were built from source files provided by Hugh Daniel and
possibly some other sources (John Young? my own node?). It’s entirely
possible they aren’t comprehensive for a variety of reasons (nodes being out of
sync, corruption, inconsistent formatting, whatever). I don’t think they were
intentionally edited by anyone.
That’s all the information I have, and sorry I can’t help you.
On Nov 22, 2019, at 23:19, jim bell <[email protected]> wrote:
----- Forwarded Message ----- From: jim bell <[email protected]>To:
"[email protected]" <[email protected]>; grarpamp
<[email protected]>; Tom Busby <[email protected]>; [email protected]
<[email protected]>; [email protected] <[email protected]>; [email protected]
<[email protected]>; [email protected] <[email protected]>;
[email protected] <[email protected]>; [email protected]
<[email protected]>; [email protected] <[email protected]>Sent: Friday,
November 22, 2019, 10:59:03 AM PSTSubject: Re: The Cypherpunk's 1995 Archive
has been forged, and what are we going to do about it? (was:Re: Could someone
add news of Cypherpunks Archive...
https://rocketreach.co/ryan-lackey-email_255468
- @mit.edu
- @venona.com
- @cloudflare.com
- @hotmail.com
- @cryptoseal.com
- @gmail.com
I am including Ryan Lackey in this thread, since he seems to have been involved
in the Cypherpunks archive during the relevant time frame.
Ryan, I have discovered extensive data omissions in (at least) the 1995
Cypherpunks data archive. These errors or omissions seem to have existed as
early as 2003. They have been discussed for a few weeks on the Cypherpunks
list. There is an almost total omission of emails between the dates of about
February 14, 1995, and July 10, 1995. Furthermore, from July 11 1995 onwards
to the end of 1995, there are almost no strings like this:
"jim bell", "[email protected]", " AP ", "Assassination Politics".
Yet, there are thousands of other messages. It appears that emails containing
such strings, and possibly others, have been carefully excised from the
database, Curiously, the very few (15?) instances where " AP " appears are
almost entirely referring to the Associated Press, not Assassination Politics,
So, this editing could not easily have been done with a simple, blind
string-search: It probably would have had to include careful human assistance.
We'd like to hear of your recollection of the history of the Cypherpunks
Archive, how it came to be, etc.
Jim Bell
On Wednesday, November 20, 2019, 01:43:48 PM PST, jim bell
<[email protected]> wrote:
Still no response. And, I don't see any enthusiastic efforts from others
currently on CP to contact any other journalists or previous CP people to help
uncover this mystery. Will this become embarrassing? Yes.
Jim Bell
On Monday, November 18, 2019, 10:42:26 AM PST, jim bell
<[email protected]> wrote:
Well, I sent out an email to Declan McCullagh, [email protected], and so far
no reply. At least openly, there would not appear to be any reason he should
resist the idea of returning and helping us figure out what happened with the
faked 1995 archive. He apparently continues to write news articles,
https://muckrack.com/declan-mccullagh/articles , and at least from their titles
they sound well-meaning. This would certainly amount to a big story, and he
certainly can't claim the subject isn't interesting given the history of his
articles.
However, his position stated to me in about March 2002 (about the time I was
transferred to USP Atwater California; I had been at USP Lompoc for a few
months before that) was initially that he was going to visit (because he was
attending an event somewhere in the Bay area, as I recall), but after that he
didn't bother to show up and it wasn't the reason he claimed: 'something came
up': In fact, he didn't even fill out and return a (necessary) Visitor's
application, which would have been automatically approved. So, evidently,
Declan had decided weeks before that he had no intention of visiting me:
Without that form and routine approval, he would not have been allowed to
visit. He knew that.
So, I request that as many people as possible contact him and make this request
directly. He may feel uncomfortable, but he has a degree of responsibility, at
least as a participant in the Cypherpunks list in 1995-96 and probably beyond,
and as a witness, and as a person who no doubt reported the government's line
during 1997-2002, but didn't bother to do anything to publicize my side of the
story. And in the end, I had done probably 12 more years in prison BECAUSE my
story hadn't been told.
Declan should contact the people involved with the Cypherpunks archives, or
keeping of the data. I am confident that it wouldn't take long to figure out
what happened.
Jim Bell
