January 1993 - cypherpunks-legacy

privacy vs. public servants
by deboni＠diego.llnl.gov 21 Jan '93

21 Jan '93

This is a very interesting thread. But should university academicians working for state-supported institutions be subject to the same constraints on privacy and freedom from arbitrary search and seizure in their email and computer files as high federal governmental officials? I submit that the amount of (real or potential) oversight should be somehow proportional to the potential for harm or abuse of power available to the individual involved. Surely Ollie North or Richard Nixon had much greater abilities to subvert the democratic process or otherwise break the law than Professor Smith of the Chemistry Dept. of State U. Tom DeBoni (a state and federal employee with no power whatsoever)

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Re: random remailers
by Eric Messick 21 Jan '93

21 Jan '93

>> Has anyone thought about the consequence of randomly picking a >> remailing path instead of using the same one? > >what if the remailer flips a coin, choosing between final delivery >and remailing through another of its ilk. "message delivery with >probability one ..." The problem with this is that every site along the way has to know the final delivery address, at least of this subset of the address chain. Better to just send it directly, and add some load balancing traffic. -eric messick

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Re: Communications Policy (fwd)
by tcmay＠netcom.com 21 Jan '93

21 Jan '93

After sending the attached message to Johan Helsingius, I decided it might be of general interest to the Cypherpunks list. It's a message I sent out in December, originally, and which got debated. Johan's concern about my "accusations" suggests there may be enought newcomers to the list to justify republication of posts. --Tim From: tcmay (Timothy C. May) Subject: Re: Communications Policy To: julf(a)penet.FI (Johan Helsingius) Date: Thu, 21 Jan 93 9:49:00 PST > > e-mail system kept by sysadmins. Sort of like the archives being kept > > by some of the so-called anonymous remailers!) > > Hmmmm.... I find the accusation about anonymous remailers pretty strong. > If you have proof of stuff like that happening, or even reasonable cause > for suspicions, I feel the accusations and names of the sites should be > published as widely as possible. That is the only way we can stop > such unethical behavior. Johan, Attached below is the message I sent to the Cypherpunks list in December, about remailers keeping logs. As I said in my message today to the list, there was a debate about this, and an admission by several remailers that they keep archives. From: tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. May) Message-Id: <9212140649.AA12228(a)netcom.netcom.com> Subject: A minor experimental result To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Date: Sun, 13 Dec 92 22:49:45 PST One of the purposes of setting up remailers is to experiment with them, see what kind of emergent behavior appears, see what kind of flaws and obstacles arise, see how they break, etc. Here's one: the compromise of my "anonymity" by one of the folks running a remailer. (Who and where don't matter, just the phenomenon itself.) I used a single bounce without any encryption to send a message and got a query from the owner of the remailer saying "I couldn't help looking through my remailer archives and noticing...." and requesting more information from me!! Hoist by my own petard! Several lessons: * Multiple bounces help, even without encryption, as then the remailer sysop can't be sure who originated the message. * Encryption is of course even more desirable, though a hassle (especially for Mac users). * Remailer sysops should make a point to _not_ look at their remailer archives. In fact, they should discard them immediately (for their own legal protection, and for slightly greater trust amongst users, though this is a hazy area...). (Recall that the "mix" on which our software-based remailers are loosely patterned are "memoryless," i.e., the tamper-resistant modules that implement the receive-decrypt-store-forward protocol have no memory of the mapping between incoming and outgoing messages. In fact, the outside world cannot possibly compromise the protocols to get at this information.) So, my laziness in using only a single bounce, combined with the curiosity of a remailer sysop, breaks the anonymity. Neither surprising nor profound, but I thought you folks would like to know. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | PGP Public Key: by arrangement.

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Re: possible solution to the anonymous h
by Hal 21 Jan '93

21 Jan '93

I have to agree with Peter Honeyman that Marc Horowitz's proposal that remailers reveal message sources under certain conditions wouldn't work well. Remailer users will prefer remailers which won't do this. So reputations and such will tend to push things in the opposite direction. Also, I'd point out that the Pax remailer actually did maintain a database of anonymous addresses with the corresponding real addresses. So it already worked much as Marc suggested. You can actually send mail to someone who posts anonymously through Pax just as easily as you could send to someone who posted non-anonymously. So if you want to complain about some offensive posting or email to the person who did it, you still could with Pax. These features didn't stop Pax from getting shut down. Marc's suggestion that commercial users could run remailers without pressure from NSF sounds good in theory, but it's not clear how well it would work in practice. I don't think Cypherpunks could run such a remailer, even if Marc is right and it would cost $10 per Cypherpunks reader per month. I doubt that many people would be willing to make this charitable contribution for what would be a public good - a remailer that anyone could use. Even if it could be done, one remailer isn't enough. We need many remailers so that no one remailer can expose users. I think the best bet would be a commercial site which has a connection for other reasons, and which is willing to run a remailer on the side. I don't know what kinds of sites use these commercial connections. The commercial Internet access that I am aware of is through companies like Compuserve, Portal, Netcom, the WELL, and so on, and I think they all have to abide by the NSF acceptable use policies. At least, I had to agree to those on Portal and I think on Compuserve. What would be an example of a site with commercial Internet access which would be free of NSF pressure? One other point I'd make with regard to Marc's message is that if PGP itself is the problem, there's no reason the remailers can't use RIPEM. That's legal in the U.S., so the legality issue would not arise. This might be a good approach to take in broaching the subject with administrators. I haven't looked at RIPEM much but I'm sure the remailers could use it just as easily as PGP. Even non-encrypting remailers can provide basic anonymous posting and mail, if those would be more acceptable. A final point is that forwarding mail for another person can hardly be made illegal in general. If I receive a message from person A asking me to forward it on to person B, and I do so, this is clearly a legitimate email message that I choose to send. To try to disallow this would be to put intolerable restrictions on email content. So, if this is allowed, it seems to me that I should be able to write a program to do what I am allowed to do manually. If these remailers could be made widespread, with tens of thousands of people running them as a routine service, I think a crackdown would be much more difficult. I think we need to educate users about the value of privacy and anonymity in order to encourage more people to run remailing software. Can anyone suggest a newsgroup where these kinds of discussions would be appropriate? Hal Finney 74076.1041(a)compuserve.com

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RIPEM vs PEM
by Hal 21 Jan '93

21 Jan '93

There is a little confusion here between RIPEM and PEM. PEM is the "official" Internet standard for Privacy Enhanced Mail. An implementation is in beta test right now, and uses a centralized certificate hierarchy for all keys. Everyone has to have their keys signed by an agency which is authorized by RSADSI (at least according to the Internet drafts I have, which are several months old). Typically, that agency would be your company or your school, because they are in a position to vouch for your identity. There is a provision, though, for pseudonymous keys to be issued, although they would be clearly marked as such. RIPEM is Mark Riordan's public-key program. It is similar to PEM, but does not use the PEM certificates and therefore does not require people to have their keys signed by an agency. It is not really PEM compatible. It does use the RSAREF public-domain encryption package, so it is legal for non- commercial use in the U.S. and Canada. What I suggested was the use of RIPEM since it is available now, is legal, and is free. Note, though, that whether RIPEM or PGP is used, they are only for non- commercial use. A remailer that wanted to charge, such as the ones that Eric Messick is discussing, would probably have to license the technology from PKP directly to be legal. (I'm not sure whether PEM also is limited to non-commercial use.) Hal Finney 74076.1041(a)compuserve.com

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random remailers
by tribble＠xanadu.com 21 Jan '93

21 Jan '93

Has anyone thought about the consequence of randomly picking a remailing path instead of using the same one? It occurred to me yesterday that randomly picked paths could reveal more information to the remailer sites so that they could figure out the connection between a pseudonym and the eventual destination pretty well. It's just an intuition at this point, though. dean

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Re: Communications Policy
by Eric Fogleman 21 Jan '93

21 Jan '93

Responding to the following from Norm Hardy: > I hear concern over privacy and also over erasure of White House tapes. > I pose the following question: Should an institution have the right > to private communication? Is the White House an institution? > Notice that I say "should" not "does". > Which sort of world would you rather live in. I have mixed feelings. > If we say that all computer communications should be accessible to courts > then the effect will be to displace some communications from computers. Institutions -- individuals, groups of individuals, companies -- should have the right to private communication. (In terms of e-mail, this means that one knows where all copies of their letters are and has the power to erase them?) The right of government employees to private communication is limited by one important factor: many of these individuals are empowered to use force against citizens, and they responsibile for justifying the use of this force. (Examples of what I mean by force: arresting and putting people in jail, searching, seizing, impounding, levying taxes, wiretapping, shooting alleged criminals). Anyone given this kind of power has a heavy burden of proof and had better be able to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that their actions are justified. The burden should not be on individuals to constantly be open to scrutiny to demonstrate their innocence, but on those with the power to suspend individual rights. =================================================================== Eric Fogleman eric.fogleman(a)analog.com Analog Devices Semiconductor Voice: (617) 937-2275 804 Woburn Street Fax: (617) 937-2024 Wilmington, MA 01887-3462 ===================================================================

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ILF Brings You Gilmore in Sci Am
by nobody＠pmantis.berkeley.edu 20 Jan '93

20 Jan '93

The Information Liberation Front brings you this article from the February, 1993 "Scientific American." Electronic Envelopes? The uncertainty of keeping e-mail private Recent legislative efforts to mandate remote wiretapping attachments for every telephone system and computer network in the U.S. may have been the best thing that ever happened for encryption software. "We have mostly the FBI to thank," says John Gilmore of Cygnus Support in Palo Alto, Calif. Gilmore is an entrepreneur, hacker and electronic civil libertarian who helped to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). He is now watching closely the development of two competing techniques for keeping electronic mail private. As matters now stand, computers transmit messages from one user to another in plain text. If a geneticist m Boston sends e-mail to a molecular biologist in San Diego, any of the half a dozen or so intermediary machines that forward the letter could siphon off a copy- -and so could any of the dozens of workstations that might be attached to the local-area network at the sender's or recipient's university or company. The Electronic Privacy Act of 1986 prohibits snooping by public e- mail carriers or law-enforcement officials, except by court order. Nevertheless, many people are becoming uncomfortable with the electronic equivalent of mailing all their correspondence on postcards and relying on people to refrain from reading it. They are turning to public-key encryption, which allows anyone to encode a message but only the recipient to decode it. Each user has a public key, which is made widely available, and a closely guarded secret key. Messages encrypted with one key can be decrypted only with the other, thus also making it possible to "sign" messages by encrypting them with the private key [see "Achieving Electronic Privacy," by David Chaum; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, August 1992]. Two programs--and two almost diametrically opposed viewpoints embodied in them--are competing for acceptance. Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) is the long-awaited culmination of years of international standard setting by computer scientists. Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is a possibly illegal work of "guerrilla freeware" originally written by software consultant Philip Zimmermann. The philosophies of PEM and PGP differ most visibly with respect to. key management, the crucial task of ensuring that the public keys that encode messages actually belong to the intended recipient rather than a malevolent third party. PEM relies on a rigid hierarchy of trusted companies, universities and other institutions to certify public keys, which are then stored on a "key server" accessible over the Internet. To send private mail, one asks the key server for the public key of the addressee, which has been signed by the appropriate certification authorities. PGP, in contrast, operates on what Zimmermann calls "a web of trust": people who wish to correspond privately can exchange keys directly or through trusted intermediaries. The intermediaries sign the keys that they pass on, thus certifying their authenticity. PGP's decentralized approach has gained a wide following since its initial release in June 1991, according to Hugh E. Miller of Loyola University in Chicago, who maintains an electronic mailing list for discussion among PGP users. His personal "keyring" file contains public keys for about 100 correspondents, and others have keyrings containing far more. As of the end of 1992, meanwhile, a final version of PEM had not been officially released. Gilmore, who subscribes to the electronic mailing list for PEM developers, says he has seen "only five or 10" messages actually encrypted using the software. Although PGP's purchase price is right--it is freely available over the Internet and on electronic bulletin boards throughout the world--it does carry two liabilities that could frighten away potential users. First, U.S. law defines cryptographic hardware and software as "munitions." So anyone who is caught making a copy of the program could run afoul of export-control laws. Miller calls this situation "absurd," citing the availability of high-quality cryptographic software on the streets of Moscow. Worse yet, RSA Data Security in Redwood City, Calif., holds rights to a U.S. patent on the public-key encryption algorithm, and D. James Bidzos, the company's president, asserts that anyone using or distributing PGP could be sued for infringement. The company has licensed public-key software to corporations and sells its own encrypted-mail package (the algorithm was developed with federal support, and so the government has a royalty-free license). When Bidzos's attorneys warned Zimmermann that he faced a suit for developing PGP, he gave up further work on the program. Instead PGP's ongoing improvements are in the hands of an international team of software developers who take advice from Zimmermann by e-mail. The U.S. is the only nation that permits the patenting of mathematical algorithms, and so programmers in the Netherlands or New Zealand apparently have little to fear. U.S. residents who import the program could still face legal action, although repeated warnings broadcast in cryptography discussion groups on computer networks have yet to be superseded by legal filings. Meanwhile, Gilmore says, the only substantive effect of the patent threat is that development and use of cryptographic tools have been driven out of the U.S. into less restrictive countries. --Paul Wallich --

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Digital cash legality...
by Hal 20 Jan '93

20 Jan '93

Continuing my research on the legality of digital cash... I found something interesting. As I posted before, one of the obstacles to free printing of private bank notes is a 10% per year tax on the circulation of bank notes from state-chartered banks. This law took effect on July 1, 1866. According to "Monetary Decisions of the Supreme Court", by Dunne, "The tax has become a permanent fixture in federal law. Its latest form is sections 4881-4886 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954." That book is a little old, so I went tonight to look up these sections of the 1992 IRC. They don't exist. There is a note saying: "Prior sections 4881 to 4886, Act Aug. 16, 1954, c. 736, 68A Stat. 587-589, imposed a tax on the circulation of banks. "Repeal effective on the first day of the first month which begins more than 90 days after Oct. 4, 1976." So, it appears that these provisions have been repealed! It's possible that the same requirement has been re-enacted in some other form, but I looked around a bit in the index and contents and although there are many unusual taxes I could not find anything similar to this. ----- I also got an email suggestion to look up the codes related to barter exchanges. It does appear that many of these suggestions for digital cash could be construed to be covered by such laws. Here is an excerpt from the Code of Federal Regulations, 1.6045-1(f5): "(i) A credit is an amount on the books of the barter exchange that is transferable from one member or client of the barter exchange to another such member or client, or to the barter exchange, in payment for property or services; "(ii) Scrip is a token issued by the barter exchange that is transferable from one member or client of the barter exchange to another such member or client, or to the barter exchange, in payment for property or services; and "(iii) Property does not include a credit or scrip." The "credit" provision seems to cover "digital checking accounts", and the "scrip" definition seems to cover digital cash. A barter exchange itself is defined in 1.6045-1(a): "(4) The term 'barter exchange' means any person with members or clients that contract either with each other or with such person to trade or barter property or services either directly or through such person. The term does not include arrangements that provide solely for the informal exchange of similar services on a noncommercial basis." Even though the crypto banker/money-changer may not be trading property or services (just exchanging scrip for dollars), the larger system composed of the banker and the users of digital cash (who presumably are buying and selling property and services from each other using the cash/scrip) seems to match this definition pretty closely. I noticed the exception for noncommercial use, but the only example they give is for people in a carpool, who exchange the service of driving each other to work. It's not clear whether a digital cash money exchange, even if not operated for profit, would qualify. If you are a barter exchange, and there are more than 100 transactions occuring per year, you have to keep the taxpayer ID number of all the customers on file, and send them all a form 1099 describing their transactions and the market value of the transfers, as well sending information directly to the IRS. This doesn't sound like it will lead to much anonymity, crypto or otherwise. Hal 74076.1041(a)compuserve.com

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Who Me? Paranoid? Naaaah...
by deltorto＠aol.com 20 Jan '93

20 Jan '93

Hmmmm... I'm beginning to wonder if we shouldn't someday be able to run public email in a sort of "parallel universe," an entirely separate mail system complete with built-in RSA encryption on every piece of mail. That way, we would no longer rely on the Internet, which, unless I am completely off the mark, basically still exists at the pleasure of ARPA and could be completely infiltrated and controlled by the NSA for all we know. Along similar lines, has anyone heard the latest status on the gigabytes of email generated by the Bush White House which are currently in danger of being erased before anyone can get a peek at them? Imagine the damning evidence that exists in those documents! I had heard something about a voluntary freeze on the erasure until the matter can be decided in some Federal Court, but that strikes me like suing your local City Government in Municipal Court after being hit by a Municipal Bus - Bush's cronies will probably invoke some executive priviledge and weasel off with 'em. I wonder if such stuff will ever be released under the Freedom of Information Act (probably not in our lifetimes, but just the threat would make me happy)? Hey, a guy can _dream_ can't he? dave

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