[109285] in Cypherpunks
Ron Guilmette, Gary Burnore, and the Remailer Net
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anonymous)
Tue Mar 16 23:48:10 1999
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 05:10:51 +0100 (CET)
From: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Reply-To: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
Ron Guilmette <rfg@monkeys.com> wrote:
> This would all be funny, if it weren't so sad.
>
> This Burnore kook flatters himself enormously to think that I have nothing
> better to do with my time than to stalk him online.
Personally, I think he knows better. Nor has it always been you.
From time to time, he's identified his anonymous critic(s) as being
Scott Dentice, too. And Belinda Bryan <eridani@databasix.com> once
threatened to find out who the "Anonymous Asshole" was and "make his
life a living hell". Why the need to "find out" if she and Gary
<gburnore@databasix.com> already "know" it's you?
> The truth, however, is that I have a great deal else to do, writing tools
> and systems to try to help people get rid of the E-mail spam we all get on a
> daily basis.
>
> One of these, the DynamicIP Spam Sources List (DSSL) is already up and
> running (see http://www.imrss.org/dssl/) and has been for some time now. I
> encourage you all to check it out. It's completely free and it zaps quite a
> lot of direct-from-dialup spam... certainly at least 99%.
>
> The other project I've been working my little ass off on is the Internet
> Mail Relay Services Survey, IMRSS. (See http://www.imrss.org.) This is a
> large/extensive catalog of open mail relays throughout the world, a la the
> old ORBS list. This project will soon be fully operational and will also be
> quite useful for stopping quite a lot of spam.
>
> I cannot help but agree that _somebody_ in the online world is indeed
> obsessed with Gary Burnore, and has been following him around for some time
> now, getting into online arguments with him and his friends, and posting
> nasty things about him via various anon remailers. All available evidence
> indicates that this is indeed the case. But whoever it is, it ain't me.
> Rather, it is apparently somebody with too much idle time on his/her hands.
Actually, there are a number of people that Burnore has pissed off,
and the vast majority of anti-Burnore postings are originating from
non-anonymous sources. (In fact, some of the anonymous postings
appear to have been planted as "straw men" for Burnore and company
to knock down. Is there a term for the logical opposite of a "sock
puppet"?) If any of them have a personal grudge against Burnore,
it's between him and them. Remailers are not a material part of the
criticism Burnore has been receiving at this point, unless he's
seeking to make it so.
Not speaking for any of Gary's other critics, therein lies my
concern. He has demonstrated, in the past, a willingness to engage
in a concerted pattern of harassment against remailers and their
volunteer operators, in an attempt to gain revenge against one or
two of their users, or to get useful features crippled or removed.
As a remailer user, that is simply not acceptable. Attacking a
remailer affects all of its users.
> Personally, I have no position on this. If someone out there has been so
> thoroughly annoyed by Burnore as to wish to while away his/her days
> following Burbore around and getting into silly, pointless, and endless
> online arguments with him, well... it's no skin off my nose, and certainly
> none of my concern. I would encourage that person however to try to take a
> broader view, and to realize that just like there are a zillion spammers
> online these days, there are also a zillion kooks. No single one of these
> people (in either of these categories) is worth spending too much time on.
> Rather, all of us who care about the future of the net (and hope that it
> still has one) have a responsibility to look at the bigger picture, to work
> to solve the problems (e.g. E-mail spam) that actually threaten the future
> of the net as a viable interpersonal communications medium, and to just let
> the lesser problems (e.g. online kooks) just roll off of us water off the
> back of a duck.
So perhaps you can understand the concern of those of us who value
privacy and anonymity in seeing that Burnore does not succeed in
harassing another remailer out of existence, as he did with Jeff
Burchell's "Huge Cajones" remailer. If you have not done so, you
might wish to familiarize yourself with Gary Burnore's tactics that
he used against Jeff:
http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/dir.97.11.13-97.11.19/msg00432.html
In that episode, Gary Burnore's objected to the use of anonymous
remailers for one of the very purposes for which they were
created. Burnore's original objection in 1997 was that someone had
sent "harassing" e-mails to one of his users at databasix.com,
anonymously, using a remailer. Gary chose to make selected details
of that PRIVATE e-mail public, accusing YOU (Ron Guilmette) of
writing it. It is he who chose to make a public issue out of it by
posting selected details to Usenet. Gary claimed that the nature of
the "harassment" was the sending of an anonymous e-mail to a
teenaged girl's mother informing her that Gary and the girl were
involved in some sort of an affair. A failed attempt to learn the
identity of the anonymous sender was the opening salvo of Burnore's
extensive campaign against the remailers.
Only last year was another piece of the puzzle revealed. Gary was
subsequently arrested and convicted in Santa Clara, CA of molesting
this girl. Thus, what Gary characterized as "harassment" turned out
to be legitimate whistle-blowing activity. If we let every
wrongdoer shut down a remailer in revenge for his activities being
exposed anonymously, then what becomes of our freedoms?
Some of us feel as strongly about privacy and anonymity as you do
about spammers. I don't know why Burnore chose to drag you into
this controversy, either originally, or more recently. You might
wish to consider legal action against him. But it's not just a case
of "ignore Gary and maybe he will go away".
