[80553] in Cypherpunks
Re: Forgeries are your Friend
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mark Grant)
Thu May 22 19:27:43 1997
Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 09:52:18 -0700 (PDT)
From: Mark Grant <mark@unicorn.com>
To: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <v03007800afaa2d1c4b3a@[207.167.93.63]>
Reply-To: Mark Grant <mark@unicorn.com>
On Thu, 22 May 1997, Tim May wrote:
> There are some advantages to having posts and messages forged in one's name.
> Think: plausible deniability in a courtroom.
> "And can you _prove_ that the article you claim my client sent to Mr. Bell
> was actually written by him, and was not one of the many forgeries in my
> client's name?"
Yes, there certainly are advantages, though I wonder what will happen if
any of these 'junk email' laws go through. Next time someone decides to
spam with a forged unicorn.com address I could end up in court (of course
this is one of the many reasons why I'm against those laws even in the
current circumstances). At least this has givne me the incentive to set up
a proper email-filtering system even if it's wasted most of a day.
> I'm pretty glad I never started PGP-signing my posts, actually. I've
> exchanged messages at various times with various people, and the
> "non-ironclad" authorship of some of these articles may turn out to be
> useful. I can always claim an article was one of Detweiler's forgeries. Or
> one of the more sophisticated forgeries now being seen.
There's also something to be said for PGP-signing all your innocuous
posts; that could give you a greater potential for denial if you had a
history of signing and the 'dangerous' posts were unsigned.
Mark
