John Gilmore

Sure.

Prior to World War II, the FBI began keeping a list of people to be rounded up "in the event of a national emergency" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Index ). Some people on this index were put in concentration camps during World War II, notably people of Japanese heritage (and as Cygnus co-founder John Gilmore notes, some of these people were identified, via a legal fiction, by them filling out that they were of Japanese heritage on census forms http://www.toad.com/gnu/census.html)

World War II did not end the list, it grew. Finally, Watergate, the death of Hoover and exposure of programs like COINTELPRO led to the Church Committee and the supposed disabling of the list.

Since then, all information has been that the only thing that has changed is that the list is not officially for the detention of American citizens. Some of the people involved in Iran-Contra in the 1980s were also maneuvering for a US military invasion of Nicaragua, which they thought might necessitate putting anti-war protesters into concentration camps( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_84 ). Of course, that plan was so far out that the plan might be more nutty than scary, but then again, these are people who secretly broke the US's own arms embargo against Iran to sell Iran weapons, the money from which they used to fund a war against Nicaragua which Congress had banned.

It's kind of like that Utah Data Center ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center ) they're building to store…

You have to realize the historical context of the award. The EFF describes the prize as

> The EFF [...] is sponsoring cooperative computing awards [...] to encourage ordinary Internet users to contribute to solving huge scientific problems.

What is "cooperative computing" and what does it mean by "encourage ordinary Internet users to contribute"? You must know a bit of history to see the context here. Back in the 1970s, the NSA drafted the Data Encryption Standard, or DES, as the national standard of data encryption for sensitive data, the NIST standardized it. However, Despite the decision by IBM to use a 64-bit key and the strong criticism from academic cryptographers (most prominently Diffie and Hellman [0]) that anything shorter than 128-bit is untrustworthy, a key length of 56-bit was selected by the NSA. D&H estimated that the NSA could theoretically construct a DES cracker for $20 million in 1976.

Fast forward to the 1990s, the security of DES has become a serious problem. Just as predicted, its 56-bit key could not keep up with the progress in semiconductors and it could be broken even by a small organization at any moment. And after 1995, Internet access opened to the public, if the government mandated the use of DES (instead of replacing it by something stronger), it would create a serious threat to security and privacy to both ordinary citizens and businesses.

However, the NIST refused to acknowledge DES's insecurity due to NSA and the FBI's effort to prevent…

You both get so much of this story so utterly… /not even/ __quite__ wrong, but more importantly, leave so much detail out that, if I didn't presume better(which I do! Would seem rather paranoid if I didn't.), I'd suspect lying by omission. All of this, which includes the story to follow, makes me—and I don't say this for exaggeration purposes, it really does have an emotional impact—very sad, although it doesn't surprise me, barely anyone realizes the true technological horror lurking deep in the history of the 'Internet'.

Please, consider looking A BIT more at the history of TCP/IP:

http://rina.tssg.org/docs/DublinLostLayer140109.pdf (Slides!)

http://rina.tssg.org/docs/How_in_the_Heck_do_you_lose_a_layer.pdf Day, John - How in the Heck Do You Lose a Layer!? (2012)

Abstract:

"Recently, Alex McKenzie published an anecdote in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing on the creation of INWG 96, a proposal by IFIP WG6.1 for an international transport protocol. McKenzie concentrates on the differences between the proposals that lead to INWG 96. However, it is the similarities that are much more interesting. This has lead to some rather surprising insights into not only the subsequent course of events, but also the origins of many current problems, and where the solutions must be found. The results are more than a little surprising."

And here, a rather lengthy excerpt from later in the paper, as I suspect a lot of people might presume that the paper would go for some…

Yes, the message is totally in keeping with John's character. "Contributed to lively corporate culture" is one way of putting it! ;)

http://www.toad.com

http://www.toad.com/gnu/

Things I've Put A Lot of Energy Into

Sun Microsystems

Sun is a computer manufacturer, long a leader in the technical workstation and database markets. Many Web pages are served from a Sun server. Sun is now a multi-billion-dollar company; working there made me financially independent. It was acquired by Oracle in 2010. I was its fifth employee, and later a consultant. I handled architecture, design, implementation, and debugging of Sun Workstations. Wrote and maintained bootstrap and diagnostic ROMs for the Sun-1, Sun-2, and Sun-3. Debugged first prototypes of Sun-1 and Sun-2, working with the hardware designer. Worked on first bringup ever of Unix on Motorola 68010 and 68020. Designed and diagnosed the chip designs for the SPARCstation-1 and SPARCstation-2. Straddled the hardware and software camps to locate, explain, and solve design, implementation, and manufacturing problems. Pulled many chestnuts out of fires. Debugged Unix utilities, kernel, device drivers, and CAD software. Diagnostics. Documentation. Electronic mail maintenance, support, and enhancement. Performance and code generation improvement. General technical support. Network relations. Contributed to lively corporate culture.

This entire thread in the media is playing out exactly as I would predict. CNN is putting this story as its lead headline, but in any other context a DDOS attack on gaming networks would be a forgettable article buried a couple headlines below some others. This story is so exciting for news networks because "hacking" is on people's minds, especially after The Interview -- and xbox and sony, two companies distributing it, are hacked? CNN loves that. Pageviews!

(Hey, wasn't there another story today? About the NSA? Employees arbitrarily querying data of their neighbors? Hmmm...)

It's frustrating to watch the story develop and feel powerless, despite knowing this is going to end in legislation restricting freedom on Internet usage. I find comfort in the fact that the fundamentals of network theory will resist such an attack. In the words of John Gilmore [0], "the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Any to pass anti-Internet legislation will be an exercise in futility.

[0] http://www.toad.com/

I see references to John Gilmore being the original author of pdtar, and John Gilmore using the gnu handle, but I don't see any references to his usage of the name predating the GNU project or pdtar being referred to as gnutar before it became part of the GNU project.

I'm not saying that I disbelieve you, I just haven't been able to find any references for your claim.

ChangeLog.1 and NEWS only go back to after it was migrated to the GNU project (http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=tar.git;a=tree), his personal site, http://www.toad.com/gnu/ seems to be down but an archive (https://web.archive.org/web/20180623140434/http://www.toad.com/gnu/) just says 'In 1985 I wrote the "pdtar" program, which eventually became GNU Tar.'

He clearly uses the name "gnu", but did that usage predate the GNU project? I haven't found a reference for that.