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Benjamin Franklin’s alter egos gave him the most freedom

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Benjamin Franklin’s alter egos gave him the most freedom

#81

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

huijzer wrote: post #76
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What logic supports that Franklin was a member of Hellfire Club? From what premises can we deduct that it is unquestionably true? Or perhaps we inductively come into that conclusion based on the fact that he knew the founder, and some site on the internet - with plenty of reason to exaggerate - says so? If any source is equally valid, I can just quickly write an html-file that says Franklin was an alien from other pl…

> What logic supports that Franklin was a member of Hellfire Club? According to the book The Hellfire Clubs by Evelyn Lord (2010), "A key figure and someone who could have been a link between British hell-fire clubs and colonial America was Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was intimate with Sir Francis Dashwood and other Medmenham Friars in England, and an attack on Cotton Mather in 1721 by Benjamin’s brother James in his…

> So all in all, there seems to be no conclusive evidence

This is what I am saying. Can you provide me with conclusive evidence that you are not a member of Hell’s Angels? Because if you can’t, there’s always a doubt about your character… This is why the burden of broof is on the one making the claim.

It works the same in historical research. Basically you have hearsay and a tavern rumour, but that is hardly any evidence of anything. This is why biographers and real historians hardly discuss it. There’s no proof and besides, it kinda is not that interesting anyway. Of course Franklin could have visited every meeting, but then any proof of it has disappeared. But occam’s razor would conclude, that he probably just wasn’t interested in the whole thing.

Re: Benjamin Franklin’s alter egos gave him the most freedom

#82

Post by dannyobrien »

embedding-shape wrote: post #28
dannyobrien wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give examples of the US adding backdoors and weakening end-to-end encryption? I'll give you the almost-certain weakening of proposed crypto standards, and Clinton-era export controls, but I don't think I've seen any movement in that direction recently. The most successful attempts statutorily seem to be in the UK and the US. Also: the European Court of Human Rights, as a non-EU institution, doesn't have an…

> Could you give examples of the US adding backdoors and weakening end-to-end encryption? Do you really need examples of this? There are countless of them, some programs you cannot have missed are PRISM, STATEROOM and BULLRUN but there are more of them too.

So none of these are mandated backdoors, or weakening end-to-end encryption. They're examples of the intelligence services pursuing signals collection. Mandated backdoors would be something like the the United States' (as far as we know) failed attempts to compel companies to insert code to allow third parties to enter and read their communications, or the UK's (as far as we know) long-postponed attempts to add ghost devices to Apple and Meta's e2e communication systems.

I'm not so much asking as a gotcha, as modern examples of this kind of backdoor (or published encryption weaknesses) would be a big deal. I realise that there are many other tactics that states, especially the US, pursue that undermine privacy online. These just seemed weirdly specific to projects that the US has, in fact, failed to pull off for years: compelled insertion of code, and deliberately weakened encryption.

(ObContext: I worked at EFF during the Snowden revelations, and worked on understanding the impact of PRISM, and Bullrun specifically.)

Re: Benjamin Franklin’s alter egos gave him the most freedom

#83

Post by MisterMower »

Animats wrote: post #18

Most of the Founders published under pseudonyms, even after the Revolution. Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Franklin - all had pseudonyms for their political writings. The Federalist papers were signed "Publius". What Franklin did was in no way unusual for that group. In the US, anonymous speech is considered a core part of free expression, and is treated as a First Amendment right. That's a US perspective, stemming from US…

Anonymous speech separates ideas from the reputation of the person stating them. It forces the reader to consider the ideas themselves openly, without using the heuristic of “which party does this person belong to” or “do I like this person”. There are some ideas that are not popular but need to be heard, and anonymous speech allows those ideas to be heard without the speaker being tarred and feathered for their supposed wrongthink. Anyone who seeks to erode anonymous speech is no friend of liberty.

Re: Benjamin Franklin’s alter egos gave him the most freedom

#84

Post by IsaacL »

Gravityloss wrote: post #40
IsaacL wrote: post #12

Benajamin Franklin is a rather fascinating fellow. Most of us know him from the image that appears on biographies and in textbooks: Franklin with bald pate, round spectacles, and a grandfatherly expression on his face, dispensing homespun wisdom like "early to bed, early to rise", etc, etc. I.e., he is known as basically the ideal early American pioneer; humble, hard-working, virtuous, and a fount of practical worldl…

Thank you for this comment. It is interesting and also beautifully written with no fluff. For some reason few web pages, blogs or even tweets are written in this style.

Thank you for your kind words, I'm trying to write more these days :)

I have a couple of articles up on https://intellectualsilkroad.substack.com/ but I should get busy writing more!

Re: Benjamin Franklin’s alter egos gave him the most freedom

#85

Post by [deleted] »

dannyobrien wrote: post #82
embedding-shape wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could you give examples of the US adding backdoors and weakening end-to-end encryption? Do you really need examples of this? There are countless of them, some programs you cannot have missed are PRISM, STATEROOM and BULLRUN but there are more of them too.

So none of these are mandated backdoors, or weakening end-to-end encryption. They're examples of the intelligence services pursuing signals collection. Mandated backdoors would be something like the the United States' (as far as we know) failed attempts to compel companies to insert code to allow third parties to enter and read their communications, or the UK's (as far as we know) long-postponed attempts to add ghost…

[deleted]

Re: Benjamin Franklin’s alter egos gave him the most freedom

#86

Post by triceratops »

some_random wrote: post #51
xyzelement wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

// Yet, Canada remains independent The first step towards Canada being recognizable as its own country happened in 1867 nearly a century after Franklin's death.

Even today, every member of the Canadian military swears fealty to the King of England.

To the King of Canada, actually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_Canada#Personifica...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_Canada#Foreign_vis...

Re: Benjamin Franklin’s alter egos gave him the most freedom

#87

Post by ButlerianJihad »

some_random wrote: post #51
xyzelement wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

// Yet, Canada remains independent The first step towards Canada being recognizable as its own country happened in 1867 nearly a century after Franklin's death.

Even today, every member of the Canadian military swears fealty to the King of England.

Yeah, interestingly, even though many Americans believe in an office called "King of England", that is not actually one of his titles in the modern world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_the_United_Kingdom...

Re: Benjamin Franklin’s alter egos gave him the most freedom

#88

Post by Semaphor »

embedding-shape wrote: post #59
Semaphor wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must say I find it interesting you say "cannot have missed" as I never heard of stateroom or bullrun before

I guess not everyone read through the Snowden "revelations" back in 2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures > PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM > STATEROOM is the code name of a highly secretive signals intelligence collection program…

Thanks, I did read articles about it back then, but while PRISM was mentioned always and everywhere, none of those I read mentioned the other ones, or if they did, just as an aside.

Re: Benjamin Franklin’s alter egos gave him the most freedom

#89

Post by IAmBroom »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #81
huijzer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What logic supports that Franklin was a member of Hellfire Club? According to the book The Hellfire Clubs by Evelyn Lord (2010), "A key figure and someone who could have been a link between British hell-fire clubs and colonial America was Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was intimate with Sir Francis Dashwood and other Medmenham Friars in England, and an attack on Cotton Mather in 1721 by Benjamin’s brother James in his…

> So all in all, there seems to be no conclusive evidence This is what I am saying. Can you provide me with conclusive evidence that you are not a member of Hell’s Angels? Because if you can’t, there’s always a doubt about your character… This is why the burden of broof is on the one making the claim. It works the same in historical research. Basically you have hearsay and a tavern rumour, but that is hardly any evid…

You are repeatedly asking for proof of a negative, which can't be done, so your requests are meaningless.

You made the original claim (that Franklin was a member); now the burden of proof is on you to provide evidence.

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