October 2001 - cypherpunks-legacy

Larry Ellison's ID card idea attracts high-level support
by Matthew Gaylor 17 Oct '01

17 Oct '01

[Note from Matthew Gaylor: Considering that the show your papers routine had already been implemented complete with yellow Star of David armbands, I'm one civil libertarian who will never "come around".] <http://www0.mercurycenter.com/local/center/id101701.htm> Posted at 10:53 p.m. PDT Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2001 ID card idea attracts high-level support Top executives, lawmakers back national identification card proposal BY ELISE ACKERMAN AND PAUL ROGERS Mercury News Silicon Valley software mogul Larry Ellison's proposal to create a national ID card has gained substantial ground -- and the interest of top Bush administration officials -- in a signal that the controversial idea may be closer to reality than ever. In an interview with the Mercury News on Tuesday night, Ellison, the chairman and CEO of Oracle, said he met with U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and officials at the CIA and FBI in Washington, D.C., over the past week to discuss the idea. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has endorsed it, other tech executives have jumped on board and even some prominent civil libertarians have said the idea is worth pursuing. [...] ``You don't give up much,'' Dershowitz said. ``Civil libertarians will come around.'' [...] ************************************************************************** Subscribe to Freematt's Alerts: Pro-Individual Rights Issues Send a blank message to: freematt(a)coil.com with the words subscribe FA on the subject line. List is private and moderated (7-30 messages per week) Matthew Gaylor, (614) 313-5722 ICQ: 106212065 Archived at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fa/ **************************************************************************

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Anonymity in America: Does National Security Preclude It?
by Steve Schear 17 Oct '01

17 Oct '01

"Anonymity in America: Does National Security Preclude It?" <http://www.cato.org/tech/tk/011011-tk.html> steve

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Re: More on "venus rising"
by Anonymous User 17 Oct '01

17 Oct '01

> On Sun, Oct 14, 2001 at 10:40:40AM -0700, Tim May wrote: > > stuff about zero point energy and perpetual motion machines. And, > > sometimes, mixed together with the usual nutcase stuff about the > > Hollow Earth theory (zeta reticulans colonizing the hollow > > earth, Greys, underground UFO bases, secret Nazi weapons, etc.). > > Righto. It's a staple of the UFO fringe. See: > > And then there was this, which I wrote 2.5 years ago. Some folks, > including I believe Tim, said at the time that I was being too > uncritical, and looking back, they was right. It's a little painful > to read; at the very least I should have reversed the order of the > article. You do realise, that this is what the ufo field is about? +Sightings And Encounters and the influence this has had on our planet. -Not free energy devices and dead alien bodies. Roswell isn't a story of a simple metal box landing, retrieval and the obvious cover-up. It's extra much more. A mind game with unknown players and an unseen goal. The stains on Monicas dress could very well be evidence of sexual conduct, but our unknown players here have some serious washing powder. You can't cover this with Politics and Technology. You can not expect Warner Brothers and Fox to be able to portray these events. But if they do, you realise that you haven't seen this in Politics and Technology and the subject matter is so not of your kin that you will consider it to be just another movie. You have my permission to investigate further, mr Corso: Then you say, this guy has been watching way too much xfiles, even though men in black and chupacabras and what have you, existed long before they were the subject of television shows. And that is one of the reasons why this thick field leads to unwarranted assumptions. We want easy answers, but we aren't getting any. Neither from the ufos nor from the government/media nor from any serious ufo thinkers. There are no easy answers in this field and does that bother you? If it does, good, because it should. You guys always speak of the sheep. Well what kind of sheep has an unknown object hovering above it while shouting look ma - Venus!

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Monty Python made be illegal in UK
by Khoder bin Hakkin 17 Oct '01

17 Oct '01

_The Life of Brian_ could be an incitement to religious hatred" under new proposed UK law... http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,59-2001361433,00.html

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advice 72
by morganmarino259＠yahoo.com 17 Oct '01

17 Oct '01

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Martial law supposedly implemented in the US
by jamesd＠echeque.com 17 Oct '01

17 Oct '01

-- According to Pravda, the US is now under martial law http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/10/08/17359.html In the newsgroups, I often encounter commies with exceedingly strange ideas about what is happening in the US. Now I know where Chomsky gets his US news from. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG wIInoy0EJHYu/mbQbGEeJaRNPwQoPl23P+iFNgWo 4890dfXDRaxJT5Cm7LFDn2eBL4pbuRwIO/IPvUby2

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Sen. Gregg changes his mind, won't introduce anti-encryption bill
by Declan McCullagh 17 Oct '01

17 Oct '01

----- Forwarded message from Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> ----- http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,47635,00.html Senator Backs Off Backdoors By Declan McCullagh (declan(a)wired.com) 2:00 a.m. Oct. 17, 2001 PDT WASHINGTON -- Sen. Judd Gregg has abruptly changed his mind and will no longer seek to insert backdoors into encryption products. A spokesman for the New Hampshire Republican said Tuesday that Gregg has "no intention" of introducing a bill to require government access to scrambled electronic or voice communications. "We are not working on an encryption bill and have no intention to," spokesman Brian Hart said in an interview. Two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Gregg strode onto the Senate floor and called for a global prohibition on data-scrambling products without backdoors for government surveillance. Gregg said that quick action was necessary "to get the information that allows us to anticipate and prevent what occurred in New York and in Washington." A few days later, Gregg told the Associated Press that he was preparing legislation "to give our law enforcement community more tools" to unscramble messages in hopes of fighting terrorists. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.mil censor$ commerc. satellite imagery
by Khoder bin Hakkin 17 Oct '01

17 Oct '01

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGA01DJ9VSC.html Military Buys Exclusive Rights to Commercial Satellite's Pictures of War Zone By John J. LumpkinAssociated Press Writer Published: Oct 16, 2001 WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. military is paying for the exclusive rights to commercial satellite imagery of Afghanistan even though its own satellites are thought to take far better pictures. This could serve two purposes: to provide an extra eye on Afghanistan, and to prevent anyone else from peeking at the war zone. The images of the Ikonos satellite, among the best available to the public, will add to those collected by military satellites and airplanes, Joan Mears, a spokeswoman for the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said. Mears declined to discuss how much the government is paying for the pictures, only saying that the agency has paid for exclusive access to the area involved in Operation Enduring Freedom, the military code name for the strikes in Afghanistan. The agency's contract with Denver-based Space Imaging Inc. began Oct. 7 and is believed to be in the multimillion-dollar range. A Space Imaging executive said the U.S. government had recently signed a large contract with his company, not only buying exclusive rights to the imagery but paying for all the time that the satellite is over the target area. This serves to prevent anyone else from using Ikonos to take pictures of the war zone. It also prevents Space Imaging from selling the pictures to anyone else, which the company does with most of its imagery. Mark Brender, executive director of government affairs and corporate communications for Space Imaging, declined to reveal the amount of the contract but said "it was a wonderful business transaction." Top-of-the-line Ikonos pictures have one-meter resolution, meaning the satellite can distinguish features on the ground one meter in size or larger. "You can count the cars in a parking lot, tell which are pickups and sedans, and tell what color they are," Brender said. Ikonos pictures can cost buyers up to $200 per square kilometer of imagery, he said. Quick turnaround costs an extra $3,000, he said. The resolution achieved by U.S. military satellites is kept secret, but it is probably about 10 times better than Ikonos can provide, said Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy analyst and intelligence expert with the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-based watchdog group. He estimated military satellites can take pictures that distinguish objects as small as 10 centimeters in size. But buying Ikonos imagery will still serve some military purpose, Aftergood said. U.S. military satellites and reconnaissance aircraft cannot be over the war zone at every instant, and Ikonos could serve as a backup. The satellite could also be used to take images where less resolution is needed, freeing up military satellites for more detailed work in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Buying exclusive rights to the pictures will keep the public - and the Taliban and bin Laden - from knowing where the U.S. military is looking. If a series of pictures of the airfield at Kandahar suddenly showed up on Space Imaging's Web site, that could provide a clue to U.S. military plans. But the government is also denying the public the use of an important tool for oversight of its activities, Aftergood said, noting the media frequently buys satellite pictures of areas of news interest. "At the moment, we're essentially dependent on the Pentagon as a sole source for battle information and damage assessment," he said. "This commercial imagery would provide one independent channel for assessing the conduct of the war." In Afghanistan, groups could also use such imagery to track the movements of refugees and better plan food supplies for them, Aftergood said.

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ChefPunks
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 17 Oct '01

17 Oct '01

ichudov(a)Algebra.Com (Igor Chudov) wrote : > >One thing I would like to buy is a pressure cooker. > I have found them to be of little use. Save some $, try a garage sale. >Another is a kind of charger that charges water with CO2, to make homemade >fizzy water insteado f buying it at stores. In Russia these things were called >syphons. Any ideas? > Apparently they're called siphons here too : http://www.williams-sonoma.com//srch/name.cfm?ftype=name&imgs=on&name=soda >igor > >> > Try your regular stove. Set it to, say, 400 degrees and pray that the papers >> > will remain legible. I'd prbobably be more likely to be attacked by meteorites >> > or abducted by aliens than be anthraxed via mail, but *if* I had to >> > sterilize mail, >> > I would use a stove. >> >> In labs an autoclave is used to sterilize everything. >> >> Autoclaves are basically pressure cookers, high pressure steam at 121 >> deg. Celsius and ~2 Bar kill everything. >> > If 121C is adequate why not use the same temperature in your oven? I doubt the absolute pressure matters. A nitrogen atmosphere might be a good thing to reduce oxidation of inks and paper. I doubt it would help your new Visa card though. Mike I use 107C in a conventional oven for ~8hours to do pork ribs. I'm considering getting a smoker to do the last hour though.

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ScienceDaily Magazine -- Conflict "Early Warning" Tool May Help Predict Crises In Places Like Afghanistan, Pakistan
by Jim Choate 17 Oct '01

17 Oct '01

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/10/011017065320.htm -- -- ____________________________________________________________________ The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion. Edmund Burke (1784) The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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