January 2001 - cypherpunks-legacy

UK: Police to get new powers on DNA testing
by anonymous＠openpgp.net 21 Jan '01

21 Jan '01

http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000114832908976&rtmo=0xGisxNq&atmo=0xGi… By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor THE prospect of routine DNA screening of the entire population drew nearer yesterday when the Government proposed to give the police the power to retain indefinitely samples taken from innocent people. Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, said he would "proceed cautiously and proportionately" on extending the law further. But the measure would allow a tripling of the existing database of one million samples. The proposal forms the centrepiece of the Criminal Justice and Police Bill, which also provides for a significant extension of police powers to control the streets and seize property. Officers will be able to issue fixed penalty notices for a long list of misdemeanours, ranging from drunkenness to throwing fireworks and making hoax 999 calls. The level of the fines has still to be fixed, but could be between £100 and £2,500. Police will also be able to enforce curfews imposed on children up to the age of 16, stop people drinking in designated public places, arrest suspected kerb crawlers and close down unruly pubs. The Bill gives the police new powers to seize documents and computer disks even if they contain privileged legal information. But the powers to retain DNA samples and fingerprints are the most controversial elements of the Bill. For the first time, police would be able to keep samples taken from volunteers, or from people later eliminated from inquiries for possible future use. At the moment, the samples must be destroyed if a suspect is not charged or not convicted. The police called for additional powers after two cases in which convictions were quashed because guilt was proved with DNA evidence that should have been destroyed. One was the case of Michael Weir, who was convicted of the murder of Leonard Harris, 79, on the basis of blood samples taken during a drugs investigation that was discontinued. As a result, his conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal, although the Law Lords said later that this was "contrary to good sense". Mr Straw said the new Bill would clarify the law in this area. He did not regard it as any more of an infringement of civil liberties than the widespread use of closed-circuit television cameras. He said: "The public are more worried about the arrest and conviction of very serious criminals and persistent offenders through the use of this kind of evidence. They will widely welcome this change because it will greatly help the police and it will cut lots of costs." Asked why he had not gone the whole way and introduced automatic screening of the population, Mr Straw said that the new measure was a "proportionate" response. He said: "You have to move cautiously in this area. I am clear that there is an overwhelming case for this change and there will be wide acceptance for it." The Home Office hopes to build the national DNA database from one million samples to 3.5 million in the next three years. As well as retaining the samples and fingerprints of all suspects, those taken from volunteers in mass screenings will also be retained, provided they give written permission. Ann Widdecombe, the shadow home secretary, said that the DNA and police seizure powers had "serious civil liberties implications". But she predicted that the legislation would run out of parliamentary time if an election were held in May. She said: "This is yet another example of Labour's obsession with spin. It is little more than an attempt to grab headlines with spot fine and curfew powers that will overburden police forces when they are already at breaking point." Simon Hughes, for the Liberal Democrats, said: "This is a typical mixture of useful reform and gimmickry. We are still to be convinced that fixed penalty notices will not turn into a bureaucratic mess."

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Fingerprints Replaces Lunch Money
by An Metet 21 Jan '01

21 Jan '01

Finger Food Q Students in Pennsylvania are giving the lunch lady the finger. JJJJA new system which uses fingerprint scanners to let kids pay for school lunches is getting raves from students and school administrators, but is making privacy advocates nervous. The scanners make stealable lunch money, lose-able swipe cards and the stigma of being known as the free-lunch kid things of the past, says Walter Curfman, superintendent of the Tussey Mountain School District in western Pennsylvania. RYou always have your finger with you, unless you cut it off,S he said. But Andrew Shen of the Electronic Privacy Information Center worries about how well the information will be protected from being spread around throughout the government. ROnce you have a collection of fingerprints starting from such an early age, I can imagine this being used for other purposes in the futureS such as law enforcement, he said. Popular System The system from Altoona, Penn.-based Food Service Solutions is currently being piloted in middle and high schools at Tussey Mountain and neighboring Penn Cambria School District in rural western Pennsylvania, and Lower Merion School District in suburban Philadelphia. So far, itUs unique to the Keystone state, FSS president Mitch Johns said. It works on a debit account system Q parents put money in, and students order food. When the account runs low, a letter goes out to the parents. Parents can also restrict studentsU shopping Ra la carteS Q buying extra food not on the dayUs set menu. Students can also choose to buy items with cash. So far, kids have taken to the new system, said Tussey Mountain cafeteria director Deb Stepisianos. Though the kids goof around a bit Q putting the wrong finger down and such Q so far only three sets of parents have opted out of the program, she said. And as TusseyUs system was a beta test, theyUve had some trouble with the software, choking up lunch lines. RWhen it works, itUs wonderful,S she said. Going Too Far? The scanning system was developed in response to a federal regulation requiring that cafeterias hide whoUs getting free or reduced-price lunches, Curfman said. But cafeterias that use swipe cards or PIN numbers and debit accounts fulfill the same requirement and are often cheaper to run, according to Dennis Waiter, national marketing director at ARAMARK, which operates cafeterias at 350 school districts across the nation. FSSU system costs Tussey Mountain about $50,000 for its four schools plus $4,000-5,000 a year for maintenance, Curfman said. A swipe card system from SNAP Systems, the nationUs largest purveyor of such systems, would cost between $28,000-60,000 for a district that size, plus about $3,000-4,000 a year for maintenance, according to Gloria Calvo of SNAP. FSS wants to expand its fingerprint system for use in attendance taking and on school door locks, as the use of biometric scanners is spreading in U.S. schools. Eagen High School in St. Paul, Minn., for instance, has been using fingerprint scanners to check out books at the school library since last academic year. Fingerprints have the stigma of criminality, privacy advocates said, and thereUs no guarantee the data wouldnUt get out to law enforcement authorities or other agencies later in the game. RAt some point my bet is, somebodyUs parents are going to file some sort of a lawsuit,S said Anne Cavoukian, data privacy commissioner for the government of Ontario in Canada. RI think youUre going to have some litigation on your hands: Twhy are you treating our children like common criminals?US StudentsU biometric data Q such as fingerprint records Q is considered a student record and falls under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a 1974 privacy law. In most cases, the law says parents have to give written permission every time a studentUs records are released to an organization other than the school system. But there are exceptions to FERPA that are different for every school district in the nation. Usually, lawyers said, schools have to give up their records if a judge or a district attorney asks. Districts differ on whether private lawyers can also grab student records for use in lawsuits, and when the police can do it. No Clear Picture Of course, thatUs if the police could even make use of the fingerprint scan data Q and whether they can is unclear. FSS uses a fingerprint scanner from Groupe Sagem, a French company. The Sagem scanner doesnUt store images of fingerprints. Instead, it records a few dozen points on a fingerprint and turns the location of those points into a number. The way the system is currently configured, itUs more than 99 percent efficient for up to 3,000 kids, said Steve Ketcham, a programmer for Food Service Solutions. You canUt recreate fingerprint images from the data in the system, but if law enforcement had a similar system, they could match up the numbers. And Ketcham said FSSU system is a Rstripped down version of the AFIS,S a fingerprint-recognition system used by law enforcement. But Johns insists the numbers produced from the finger scanners canUt be used by any other system. RI see no way for that process to be used by anybody else,S he said. Copyright ) 2001 ABC News Internet Ventures.

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Photos from George W. Bush inaugural protests, high security
by Declan McCullagh 21 Jan '01

21 Jan '01

So I covered President Bush's inauguration today, though from the streets instead of the bleachers. You can see the photos here: http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/2001-bush-inauguration-highlights.html http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/2001-bush-inauguration.html On Thursday, I walked from the Capitol building to the White House via Pennsylvania Avenue and took some shots of the inaugural parade preparations: http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/2001-bush-inauguration-setup-pa-ave.html Note the high security and planned police checkpoints earlier in the week: http://www.mccullagh.org/image/d30-5/pennsylvania-ave-setup-park.html http://www.mccullagh.org/image/d30-5/pennsylvania-ave-setup-fbi.html On Thursday, when I was standing on a sidewalk in front of the federal courthouse on Pennsylvania Ave (of Monicagate and Microsoft trial fame), a deputy U.S. Marshal told me I could not take a photo of the courthouse. It was a wide-angle shot of the front, and no people or security preparations appared to be visible. Here's him walking back to his van, which appears to have -- from another photo -- U.S. Government plate 60163: http://www.mccullagh.org/image/d30-5/pennsylvania-ave-setup-cop.html I covered the Microsoft trial in that courthouse, took photos of the exterior, and never had any problems from the marshals. Here's a photo I took from that same sidewalk last year when the atmosphere was much less tense: http://www.mccullagh.org/image/9/mike-pettit.html Photos from even earlier in the week: http://www.politechbot.com/p-01636.html I've allowed the Independent Media Center to run my photos from Saturday; you can see some highlights here: http://www.dc.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=5389 http://www.dc.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=5394 http://www.dc.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=5391 Here's one of the Capitol building setup that Wired News ran, though they apparently compressed the JPG image too much with hardly optimal results: http://www.wired.com/news/photo/0,1860,41317,00.html -Declan

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crypto
by Results＠TVEyes.com 21 Jan '01

21 Jan '01

Your keyword(s), crypto, was recently spoken on WLS during Relic Hunter. Sunday, Jan 21 2001 at 12:38 AM ......so we still have to go over avery ko and derek lloyd i recognize lloyd s name for some reason and he s the only one paris has got back to me on so far kate they can t extract anything he s protected by a crypto secret classification what ...... For details, visit http://www.TVEyes.com/database/expand.asp?ln=2838175&Key=crypto Just follow the above link to keep your account active for this keyword. For total control of your keywords, go to http://www.tveyes.com/log_in.asp Does your credit report project a positive image to prospective employers, loan officers, and landlords? Find out just what kind of image you have with your very own FREE CREDIT REPORT from ConsumerInfo.Com, powered by Equifax. http://by.advertising.com/1/c/23066/10271//10814 <a href="http://by.advertising.com/1/c/23066/10271//10814"> AOL users click here </a>

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Re:* [Returned Mail] -{Unknown}
by Barry Johnson 20 Jan '01

20 Jan '01

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Anti-Carnivore FUD or Brave New Internet?
by Secret Squirrel 20 Jan '01

20 Jan '01

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20000713.html JULY 13, 2000 Meet Eater The FBI's Plan for Digital Wiretaps Raises More Questions Than It Answers By Robert X. Cringely There is this moment toward the otherwise forgettable end of "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" when this alien creature patterned after the Wizard of Oz has even Spock convinced that it is God with a capital "G." They are just about to fire-up the Enterprise and take "God" back to Earth when Kirk -- probably hoping to avoid the military protocol involved with having a deity on the bridge -- asks a pivotal question: Why would God need a starship? Couldn't God just blink and instantly be in Times Square looking up at the NASDAQ sign, wondering why they cut windows into a video screen? This scene of the skeptical Kirk flashed in my mind this week as I read about Carnivore, the FBI's system for reading the e-mail of bad guys. Carnivore is a sealed box that is installed at the network operations center of an Internet Service Provider. It filters packets, finds e-mail going to and from identified criminals, and saves that e-mail for later decryption and analysis. What bothers the Internet Service Providers is they have no control over the Carnivore box, and no way of protecting the privacy of all the customers who aren't drug lords or escaped felons. What bothers the American Civil Liberties Union is the likelihood that individuals will not only lose their right to privacy, but lose it in a new and insidious way. What bothers me is the damned box. Why would the FBI need a box? Here's all the FBI will say about Carnivore. It sits on the network at the ISP, is PC-based, is "a kind of a sniffer," identifies and saves packets associated with suspected criminals, is installed under a court order, and doesn't itself act as a decryption device. There are supposed to be around 20 Carnivore boxes, and they have been in use since early this year. You don't need a sealed box to do any of these tasks, most of which are already being done for completely legal reasons right inside the router at every ISP. Routers look at every packet, determine what type of packet it is, where it is coming from and where it is going to, then the router delivers the packet to its intended destination. This is what routers do. Adding the Carnivore task is a simple matter of blind copying every packet to or from a bad guy to a third address at the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington, DC. It's at most a few lines of code and requires no additional hardware. So why the box? The probable reason is because cops like to be in control. They LIKE boxes, like delivering them in unmarked cars, like the satisfying click of the RJ-45 connector as it slides home. Maybe they don't know that it could all be done without a box. Heck, it IS being done without a box all the time, and that's where the ACLU is missing the point. Sniffers have been running on networks ever since Harry Saal invented the device. Every packet at every ISP already goes through a sniffer at least part of the time. An ISP could do at any time what we fear the FBI might do with Carnivore read the e-mail and follow the surfing habits of every pretty blonde customer. Good ISPs, which is to say nearly all ISPs don't do this, of course, but it happens. So why doesn't the FBI just get a court order making the ISP do the dirty work? That's what the ISPs wonder, too, especially since that's how phone taps are handled. Cops don't really climb poles and attach alligator clips to hear phone calls. That's all done at the central office by telephone company technicians. The FBI, through the use of Carnivore, is trying to grab a little more power. And by doing it themselves with Carnivore, the FBI doesn't have to reveal the identity of the bad guy or extent to which it is using the box. Yeah, right. But wait, it gets worse. There are aspects of this case that the ACLU hasn't even considered. The Carnivore boxes are what's called "co-located" at the ISP. This isn't a rare thing. Many organizations like to control their own Web or mail servers and so co-locate them at an ISP. Colocation puts your server closer to the Internet backbone, eliminates typical T-1 line costs, allows the ISP to monitor and reboot the server, and usually comes with nifty things like redundant backbone connections and diesel generators in case the power goes out. Companies in the co-location business include well-known names like AT&T, IBM, and Intel. So there are tens of thousands -- maybe hundreds of thousands -- of computers already installed just like the FBI installs its Carnivore boxes. What keeps those co-located computers from being sniffers, too? Nothing at all. For $300 per month, you too could install your own Carnivore box at the ISP of your choice. Co-location facilities don't really care what you do with your co-located server as long as you keep paying the bill. More technically astute readers may take exception to this idea of private Carnivore boxes since there are ways to isolate ISP traffic and keep one box from seeing all the packets on the ISP network. But at most ISPs, THOSE TECHNIQUES AREN'T USED. This still leaves us wondering why the FBI insists on this program that isn't really necessary to do what they say they want to do. Beyond my overzealous cop theory, the most obvious possibility is that Carnivore is actually intended to do something else, some different task than the FBI is saying. Privacy advocates and the ACLU seem fixated on the idea that the Feds will use Carnivore to eavesdrop on non-criminals. It makes sense to worry about this, given past FBI anti-privacy campaigns like the Clipper Chip fiasco of several years ago that was supposed to have made it possible for the FBI to tap up to 10 million simultaneous telephone conversations, even though there are only an average of 1500 court-ordered phone taps each year in the U.S. But I have my own theory about Carnivore. From a network architecture standpoint, the best location for Carnivore is right after the ISP's router. This puts Carnivore in the path of every packet entering or leaving the ISP. It's also a major reason why ISPs might not want to install Carnivore boxes -- it's the network's point of greatest vulnerability. In this position, Carnivore can act as a listening and recording device, OR IT CAN ACT AS A SWITCH. If we ever hear a proposal from the FBI in which it plans to install Carnivores at all 6000 ISPs in the U.S., we'll be giving the government the power to do something it can't do right now. Shut the Internet down. "We've got a Carnivore^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h ChildSavor box, we're using the case as a radio antenna, and we know that's not allowed!" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Shit Disturbing: Anarchy in the streets, Brain's Moral Compass | digital money-laundering, zero-knowledge W.A.S.T.E.D - Proud Author of| gun purchases, collapse of Federal buildings many prompt checks to the IRS| "Nuts like me give Orrin Hatch wet dreams" "When the Revolution comes, they'll start working their way through Tim's Killfiles."

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Traders Make it Happen
by soft5000＠flashmail.com 20 Jan '01

20 Jan '01

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Heise News-Ticker: Windows aus zweiter Hand bei Waibel (In German, about selling old Win licenses to 3rd parties)
by Jim Choate 20 Jan '01

20 Jan '01

There's a link over on /. where they direct you to translation services. http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/ps-19.01.01-000/ -- ____________________________________________________________________ Before a larger group can see the virtue of an idea, a smaller group must first understand it. "Stranger Suns" George Zebrowski The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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update.521 (fwd)
by Jim Choate 20 Jan '01

20 Jan '01

____________________________________________________________________ Before a larger group can see the virtue of an idea, a smaller group must first understand it. "Stranger Suns" George Zebrowski The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- -------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 11:54:57 -0500 (EST) From: AIP listserver <physnews(a)aip.org> To: physnews-mailing(a)aip.org Subject: update.521 PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 521 January 18, 2001 by Phillip F. Schewe, James Riordon, and Ben Stein AT LAST! LIGHT BROUGHT TO A HALT. For the first time, physicists in two separate laboratories have effectively brought a light pulse to a stop. In the process, physicists have accomplished another first: the non-destructive and reversible conversion of the information carried by light into a coherent atomic form. Sending a light pulse into specially prepared rubidium (Rb) vapor, a group at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics led by Ron Walsworth (617-495-7274) and Mikhail Lukin (617-496-7611) has (1) slowed the pulse's "group velocity" to zero and (2) stored its information in the form of an atomic "spin wave," a collective excitation in the Rb atoms. (A spin wave can be visualized as a collective pattern in the orientation of the atoms, which spin like tops and hence act like tiny bar magnets. "Spin" is merely the name for the tiny magnetic vector in each of the atoms.) The atomic spin wave is coherent and long-lived, which enables the researchers to store the light pulse's information and then convert it back into a light pulse with the same properties as the original pulse. This new accomplishment in a simple system increases the promise for quantum communication, which may someday be used to connect potentially ultrafast quantum computers in a large network analogous to the Internet. Usually photons (the quanta of light) are absorbed by atoms, destroying the information carried by the light. With the present method, in principle, no information in the light pulse is lost. Previous efforts to slow light (such as Hau et al., Nature, 18 February 1999) have reduced the signal speed to about 1 mph (Update 472) by using a process called electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT; see Updates 37, 344 and Stephen Harris's article in Physics Today, July 1997). Walsworth, Lukin and colleagues have gone the rest of the way to a zero light-pulse speed by using a novel technique which was recently proposed theoretically (Lukin, Yelin and Fleischhauer, Phys. Rev. Lett. 1 May 2000; Fleischhauer and Lukin, Phys. Rev. Lett. 29 May 2000). The light storage experiment begins with the Harvard- Smithsonian scientists shining a "control" laser beam into a glass cell filled with rubidium vapor (about 70-90 degrees Celsius), which puts the atoms into a conventional EIT state in which they cannot absorb light in the traditional sense. The scientists then send in a "signal" pulse of light which contains the information they want to store. As the pulse enters the rubidium cell its propagation speed is reduced to about 2,000 mph. Since the front edge of the signal pulse enters the cell (and hence is decelerated) first, the pulse experiences dramatic spatial compression: from several kilometers in free-space to a few centimeters inside the rubidium vapor. The light in the vapor cell interacts with the atoms (see figure at http://www.aip.org/physnews/graphics) changing the atoms' spin states coherently and creating a joint atom-photon system known as a polariton. (For a nice descriptions of polaritons see Phys Rev Focus, 26 April 2000: http://focus.aps.org/v5/st19.html) The light-atom interaction causes the polaritons to act as if they have an effective mass; so one way to understand the signal pulse's reduced speed is that the mixture with atoms, in the form of a polariton, effectively weighs down the otherwise massless photons. Next, the Harvard-Smithsonian scientists stop the signal pulse of light by gradually turning off the control beam, which causes more atoms to be mixed with fewer photons, thereby increasing the polariton mass and further reducing the signal pulse's speed. When the control beam is completely off the polariton is purely atomic, the light pulse is effectively halted, and no signal pulse emerges from the glass cell during the storage period. At this point there are no photons remaining in the cell. The light does not go into warming of the atoms, as is the usual case. Instead the photons are expended in the creation of the atomic spin wave. Thus, the information that the light pulse carried (all that one can know about the photons) is stored in the atomic spin wave, waiting to be released as a light pulse that is in principle identical to the incident pulse. An alternative way to understand the slowing of light is to think of the signal pulse as a wave made of many different components, each with a different frequency. The Rb atoms bend or "refract" the individual components of the light by different amounts depending on each component's frequency. The vapor cell's frequency-dependent index of refraction causes the component waves to add together in such a way that the group velocity, the velocity of the composite pulse, slows appreciably. The dimming of the control beam makes the vapor's index of refraction more sharply dependent on frequency, and this serves to reduce the group velocity further. The dimming causes the atoms to become transparent to a narrower range of frequencies. But simultaneously, the light wave (or more precisely, the combination of light wave and atomic spin wave) is continually slowing down, maintaining its shape but narrowing its range of component frequencies so that the atoms are still unable to absorb it. After a relatively long delay the control beam can be turned back on, reverting the polariton to being a light wave by coaxing the atoms to emit the exact signal light pulse that entered the medium. In brief: (1) the length of a light pulse is compressed from kilometers to centimeters in a properly-prepared rubidium vapor; (2) the information carried by the light pulse is then imprinted upon the ensemble of rubidium atoms in the form of long-lived spin waves; and (3) the light pulse can later be read out on demand. This new light storage method is robust because information is maintained in collective atomic spin states, which are much less sensitive to dissipation, losses, and quantum-computer-crashing decoherence effects than are excited electronic states in atoms. Scientists believe that the light storage method is quite general and that the simplicity of its implementation is a big advantage. They even speculate that the technique may be utilized in certain solid-state materials. The Harvard-Smithsonian demonstration experiment is exciting news for scientists worried about preserving the coherence of quantum information transfer. With further work, this technique should allow for the storage and transmission of photon quantum states useful for quantum communication and computation. (Phillips et al., Physical Review Letters, 29 January 2001.) Walsworth and Lukin say that a very similar result has been recently obtained by Lene Hau's group (Harvard/Rowland Institute of Science) in an ultra-cold atomic gas. In addition, an upcoming theory paper (Kocharavskaya et al., Phys Rev. Lett., 22 January) discusses a novel technique for making a light beam not only stop in its tracks but reverse its direction; this effect could be useful for non-linear optics applications.

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Traders on the Floor
by michael1＠emailchoice.com 20 Jan '01

20 Jan '01

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