October 2000 - cypherpunks-legacy

CDR: Unified Cryptologic Architecture
by John Young 17 Oct '00

17 Oct '00

The bibliography of another NSA reorganization report released today lists several entries under "Unified Cryptologic Architecture" as well as a "U.S. Cryptologic Strategy - Preparing for the 21st Century." There is also a citation of "SINEWS - GCHQ Modernization and Change Program." We would appreciate leads or pointers for getting these documents. Here's the main text second report: http://cryptome.org/nsa-reorg-net.htm

1 0

CDR: Re: thanx
by John Galt 17 Oct '00

17 Oct '00

That was not rude. This is rude: it is my fervent wish that someone as stupid as yourself under no circumstances breed. To be more exact, it is my wish that you never become a "fucker" so to speak. Since you can't look in a goddamn Loompanics catalog to get the Anarchist's Cookbook, you have no hope of ever understanding it, and it would be even MORE rude of me to actually give you a copy, since a good portion of the recipies contained therein are almost certain to cause death or grave bodily injury if followed as written. I really cannot see the down side in this, but I also do not wish to have your moronic blood on my hands, even by proxy, as I fear that idiocy such as yours might have some infectious element. I have included cypherpunks in this thread again, as I'm pretty sure that your idiocy should propagate on the off chance that somebody actually wanted to send a copy of the AC to you. On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, diego wrote: > thanx fucker > goddamn rude man > -- Galt's sci-fi paradox: Stormtroopers versus Redshirts to the death. Who is John Galt? galt(a)inconnu.isu.edu, that's who!

2 1

CDR: A famine averted...
by Jim Choate 17 Oct '00

17 Oct '00

Hi, The thesis has been made that all famines are the cause of government intervention. I was asked to provide two examples. I also thought of an example where a famine was averted due to government intervention. The current hurricane in Belize. Had the government not stepped in and 'price fixed' the stores would have been depleted and cached by the few a week ago. Why in major disasters do prices go up, when it is clear this is contrary to the best interest of the market? That without price fixing the majority of people will be left without. Why is this hands-off philosophy not held accountable for its failings? I must assume that the resultant famine due to price inflation by the individual resource owners is still a result of that government interference. ;) ____________________________________________________________________ He is able who thinks he is able. Buddha The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

10 19

CDR: RE: Re: why should it be trusted?
by Kerry L. Bonin 17 Oct '00

17 Oct '00

At 10:06 AM 10/17/00 -0500, Fisher Mark wrote: >It is just a whole lot easier to do a black-bag job on a North Korean >embassy (for example) than to directly attack their crypto. That is why >defense companies do background checks, that is why some areas of military >facilities are guarded by soldiers with guns, and that is why the NSA tried >to conceal all evidence of their existence for a while. Crypto is just one >part of a unified security policy -- sometimes not a very important part at >that. I don't dispute this, my choice of words was "Sure, they devote significant resources to exploiting weaknesses in key management." "Rubber hose" and "black bag" cryptanalysis have a long history of being far more cost effective than brute force.

3 2

CDR: NSA Releases Reorg Reports
by John Young 17 Oct '00

17 Oct '00

NSA released today on its Web site two reports on its reorganization, one by an external team of 27 page, another of 76 pages by an internal team. Both are big PDF files. We have converted the first to HTML: http://cryptome.org/nsa-reorg-et.htm (77KB) Here is an excerpt: "We interviewed about one hundred people in the Agency, including most senior leaders, and asked very specific questions about the way people operate and the embedded culture. We learned the Agency is a very bureaucratic government organization, and that most of the behavior patterns were established during the 1970s and 1980s when there was plenty of money to execute its mission. NSA appears to operate like an entitlement program. Most people in the Agency are highly motivated and work very hard, but a portion does not. We also found a leadership culture that appears most interested in focusing on their positions and protecting their people's jobs at the expense of accomplishing the mission. Most of the people at NSA are hired night out of college and spend their entire lives in the Agency. Regardless of their work performance and their job responsibility, the Agency promotes people roughly at the same rate. The institution encouraged people to get deeply involved in the promotion process, to the point that civilian personnel wrote their own promotion reports, and supervisors endorsed the reports even if they did not agree, mostly to prevent animosity. However, the most critical aspect of the people and culture in the institution was the mindset related to lack of empowerment and accountability. NSA's present culture overemphasizes loyalty to a particular function and its associated senior leadership, instead of full and frank discussions of problems, issues and concerns. This has created a culture that discourages sending bad news up the chain of command. The staff knows NSA is falling behind and is not properly addressing the inherent problems of the emerging global network, and the present management infrastructure does not appear to be supporting the required changes. In addition, we are concerned the present mindset fostered a society where people were afraid to express their own thoughts. Even though people spoke to us with true candor, they always wanted to avoid attribution because of the perception that the information was going to be used against them." From: External Team Report: a Management Review for the Director, NSA, October 22, 2000 http://www.nsa.gov/releases/nsa_external_team_report.pdf (2.7MB) Second report: http://www.nsa.gov/releases/nsa_new_enterprise_team_recommendations.pdf (6.4MB)

1 0

CDR: Save your credit before its too late!!!!
by tharvey25＠melrun.org 17 Oct '00

17 Oct '00

1 0

CDR: Re: why should it be trusted?
by Kerry L. Bonin 17 Oct '00

17 Oct '00

At 08:24 AM 10/17/00 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote: > > >On Tue, 17 Oct 2000, Kerry L. Bonin wrote: > >>Extrapolate capabilities from the EFF DES crack project and you are >>somewhat closer (1536 ASIC w/ 24 cores/ASIC yielded 4.52 days/crack of 56 >>bit keyspace), then take into consideration the advantages of using more >>sophisticated semiconductor processes (ECL 15 years ago, GaAs on Sapphire >>today) and the higher clock rates that go with that (40MHz to well > 1GHz), >>and rerun your numbers. Instead of a small cabinet, fill floors of >>buildings with these machines, and you have realtime cracking farms. > >You have realtime cracking farms for *some* ciphers. I have always >figured it this way: > >They get two orders of magnitude for being "ahead of the curve" > in knowledge and technique. >They get five orders of magnitude of speed for custom hardware. >They get seven orders of magnitude for massively parallel hardware. > >That totals 14 orders of magnitude (and I think that's generous). > >So use keys that are six bytes longer than a "reasonable" opponent >could crack. problem solved. 2048-bit RSA is still way out of >their league. Unless their approach to factoring is radically different. I've seen some extremely clever ideas leak into the non-classified press, like holographic systems for realtime off-aspect optical pattern matching for targeting systems. Simple tricks that reduce the theoritical n-GFLOPS/MIPS of computing time to a few clocks. Factoring is such a fundamental operation, I can't accept that the NFS is the optimal attack. >>As for my own comments, I wrote layout and design tools used on these NSA >>custom chips in the mid 80's, certified for use with the "NSA Standard Cell >>Library" by their chip designers (they were just one of the customers of >>the CAD/CAM/CAE software I worked on back then...) > >Interesting. I thought that was the sort of thing that you could >tell the people who'd done it because they were the ones who weren't >allowed to talk about it. Under some circumstances, I guess they aren't. In my case, my employment NDA was conventional and very simple, and we regularily used our certification as a marketing point with defense contractors. In this case, I don't mind mentioning what I did, I just make sure I'm careful not to say more than we used in marketing. This doesn't violate anything I signed.

2 1

None
by Michael Arevalos 17 Oct '00

17 Oct '00

1 0

CDR: Re: Protecting Our Children
by Peter Capelli/Raleigh/Contr/IBM 17 Oct '00

17 Oct '00

Here is a link to the text: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c106:1:./temp/~c106Eno3vf:: Thanks! -p "Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin, 1759 Mac Norton <mnorton(a)cavern.uark.edu>@cyberpass.net on 10/16/2000 08:48:24 PM Please respond to Mac Norton <mnorton(a)cavern.uark.edu> Sent by: owner-cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net

2 1

CDR: another judge farts: anonymous speech
by David Honig 17 Oct '00

17 Oct '00

Anonymous Net Posting Not Protected http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Internet-Defamation.html By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 4:29 p.m. ET MIAMI (AP) -- In a ruling that challenges online anonymity, a Florida appeals court declared Monday that Internet service providers must divulge the identities of people who post defamatory messages on the Internet. Critics of the ruling say it could have a chilling effect on free expression in Internet chat rooms. The ruling comes against the efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union to protect the identity of eight individuals who posted anonymous missives on a Yahoo! financial chat room about Erik Hvide, the former CEO of Hvide Marine Inc. Hvide alleges that personal attacks against him also caused damage to the company's image. Hvide's attorney Bruce Fischman hailed the ruling, saying it would force Internet users to ``think a bit before they speak.'' The ACLU had wanted the court first to rule on whether Hyde had actually been defamed before identifying the defendants, named in court papers only as John Doe. If there was no showing of defamation, the ACLU reasoned, the critics should remain anonymous. However, on Thursday, the court dissolved a stay freezing subpoenas for the records of Yahoo! Inc. and America Online Inc., whose service was used by one of the defendants in the defamation case. Lauren Gelman, public policy director with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is concerned that other courts could follow the lead of the 3rd District Court of Appeals in approving subpoenas. ``This kind of speech happens all the time in all kinds of chat rooms,'' Gelman said. ``We don't want to see these subpoenas become regularly used to cause people to self-censor themselves.'' Both Internet companies took a back seat in the lawsuit, saying they would do whatever the judges said. Lyrissa Lidsky, who argued the case on behalf of the ACLU, called the decision a surprise and a setback. Nevertheless, she said, ``It's not a defeat for all the other John Does in the pipeline'' fighting Internet-related subpoenas because the court did not explain its legal reasoning. An appeal is being explored. ``The court had the potential to set an important precedent about the right to speak anonymously on the Internet,'' Lidsky said. ``The courts are eventually going to have to come to grips with this issue and decide how broad free speech rights are in cyberspace.'' The issue is largely untested in the nation's courts. A Virginia federal judge sided with a government subpoena request in a criminal case, but civil suits in California and Virginia have not settled the subpoena questions involving anonymous Internet users.

1 0