August 2001 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Borders UK and privacy
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 31 Aug '01

31 Aug '01

Duncan Frissell <frissell(a)panix.com> >On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Bill Stewart wrote: > >> David Brin's book "The Transparent Society" suggests that you >> might as well get used to it. Technological change driven by >> the Moore's Law effects in computing power are making >> video cameras and computer image processing get cheaper rapidly, >> so the marginal benefit of using them doesn't have to be very high >> to outweigh the marginal cost. The real issues are still getting data, > >On the other hand, the technology of disguise and the public taste for >radical body modification and active clothing all suggest that many of us >will soon be denying a useful image to the opposition. Then we won't have >to worry until genetic sniffers become popular. > >Genetic sniffers, however can probably be defeated by devices that give >off clouds of genetically random human biological material. > Didn't John Young note that a large portion of the waste removed from the London underground was human hair and skin flakes? Waste not want not. >Offense and defense back and forth forever. > >DCF >---- >Marshal de Vaubin -- No stronghold be ever invested stood. No position he >ever defended fell.

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Re: The Privacy/Untraceability Sweet Spot
by Fisher Mark 31 Aug '01

31 Aug '01

>When you were asked where were all the supposed wealthy freedom fighters >in communist controlled regimes, you came back with Osama bin Laden. Tim's point, which many seem to have missed, is that by design a tool that enforces the privacy, anonymity, and pseudonymity of a women striving for equal rights in Afghanistan can also be used by the Taliban in their quest to track down and kill Afghans who converted to Christianity and are now preaching the Word. Tools are tools -- the uses are what we make of them. If you don't want to create tools that can be used for evil, then you must forgo the making of tools. Crypto anarchy is coming -- we had best prepare for it, lest it overwhelm us. In the end, I believe that it will result in more freedom for more people, by restraining those in government from doing any silly thing they like to us. Although I see many people complain about the excesses of corporations, in about every case I can think of the harm they did was enabled by the collusion of government officials. If you can restrain the actions of government (by crypto anarchy, voting "the rascals out of office", or whatever), you will generally improve the amount of freedom people have to live their lives. =============================================== Mark Leighton Fisher fisherm(a)tce.com Thomson multimedia, Inc. Indianapolis IN "Display some adaptability." -- Doug Shaftoe, _Cryptonomicon_

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The Tim May Question
by A. Melon 31 Aug '01

31 Aug '01

In another message Tim wrote: >On Sunday, August 26, 2001, at 12:11 AM, Reese wrote: >> It's easy to stay on topic, or on a topic, it's another thing to be >> appropriate. Tim is good, but easy improvement is within reach, as >> you sort of noted. > > Fuck off. I'll take constructive criticism from people who are > better writers than I, or at least in the same ballpark. > > But not from those who have left no lasting impression. I'm not sure if Reese was replying to one of my messages, but this obsession less productive posters have with Tim is peculiar. Looked at as an engineering problem, one tends to look at the underperforming components. Let's say you are running a steel mill, and the average uptime of your blast furnaces is 10%. One is 95%. Nobody would spend their time trying to get the last 5% out of the best furnace. Anybody would look at it and figure out how to get the other furnaces performing. So, some other force is at work. One candidate is the usual tedious resentment that some people feel towards people they see as smarter, more knowledgeable, and more creative than themselves. This sort of behavior is deeply repugnant to me, much more so than occasional political incorrectness. Another candidate is that certain people see Tim as somehow their leader (or something), therefore making him accountable in some way. Given that Tim is not anybody's leader and doesn't seem to want to be, this is less repugnant than it is ridiculous.

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Re: The Tim May Question
by Reese 31 Aug '01

31 Aug '01

4 hours later, this hasn't gotten back to me, my guess is that lne didn't accept because I'm not subscribed to that node - there went the neighborhood. Apologies if lne is having a problem and this hits the list twice - I couldn't resist adding to it a little.

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RE: speech + action
by Fisher Mark 31 Aug '01

31 Aug '01

>Look at how AP was used. Mike, the main reason the Jim Bell prosecution started was his actions, not his words. Some of us on the list (myself included) would be majorly upset if a stink bomb strong enough to make us vomit was used on us (upset enough to want someone to take action against Jim Bell). Had Jim Bell restrained himself to speech, prosecution would have been much more difficult to start. Not impossible, but much more difficult. No government is going to be perfect, as they all must rely on us imperfect humans for implementation. However, the tradition in the United States has been to restrain the government from doing any old thing it likes. This doesn't mean that our government will always be fair and just -- it just means the tendency is strongly that way. Most other nations are not nearly so fortunate. Just because we as a nation have suffered through injustices like Ruby Ridge does not necessarily mean that we on the downward spiral to where such cases are the norm. It does mean, as it always has, that the fight for justice and right must be made anew by each generation. =============================================== Mark Leighton Fisher fisherm(a)tce.com Thomson Consumer Electronics Indianapolis IN "Display some adaptability." -- Doug Shaftoe, _Cryptonomicon_

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Re: "U.S. May Help Chinese Evade Net Censorship"
by Tim May 31 Aug '01

31 Aug '01

On Thursday, August 30, 2001, at 02:11 PM, Faustine wrote: > True, of course they do. "Technology is morally neutral," sure, > whatever. > Yay capitalism. I still think handing over your security product beta > on a > silver platter in exchange for a nice fat government contract is a > stupid, > stupid idea. And since software is infinitely replicable, all the NSA would have to do if ZKS refused to sell to them is to get a copy anywhere else: from an employee who orders it sent to his home address, from a contractor, off the shelf at Fry's or Circuit City (someday, maybe not today), and so on. Much more importantly, modern crypto relies to avoiding "security through obscurity." As outlined by Kirchoff in the 19th century, the security of a cipher ultimately depends only on the _key_, not the algorithm used to process the key. (Phrased in more modern terms, figuring out the algorithm is an "easy" problem, presumably solvable in polynomial time, while discovering the key is either provably impossible (except by guessing) or in the case of RSA is believed to be "hard" (not yet proven, and textbooks will tell you all kinds of stuff about what "hard" means). Now Freedom is not a cipher, but a system. And no doubt supplying an attacker with the program would help him to design an attack. Supplying him with the source code and detailed specs would help him even more. But, as with Kirchoff's point, the attacker is going to get the design eventually. But not the keys. In any case, NSA probably had it from their buddies in Canada, who either got it by arrangement with ZKS or snarfed it in one of several ways. The security of Freedom should not depend on even having access to the source code, else ZKS would be lying when they claim that even they cannot trace a message back to the sender. (Something which some may doubt...) > > Either way, the prospects for "dissident-grade untraceability" are > fairly > bleak. You pontificate as if you know something about our field, when you clearly know very little. Get some education if you plan to pontificate like this. A mixnet of the N extant remailers offers pretty damned good untraceability. Needs some work on getting remailers more robust, but the underlying nested encryption looks to be a formidable challenge for Shin Bet to crack. --Tim May

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Secret firearms regulation, social science meeting in DC today
by Declan McCullagh 31 Aug '01

31 Aug '01

HEALTH Institute of Medicine's Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education Committee on Law and Justice Committee to Improve Research Information and Data on Firearms meeting, August 30-31. Highlights: 8:30 a.m. - Closed session with summary posted after meeting Location: National Academy of Sciences Building, 2100 C St., NW. 8:30 a.m. Contact: Lecia Quarles, 202-334-1844, lquarles(a)nas.edu

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Exporing Military encryption to China
by Malcolm Idaho 31 Aug '01

31 Aug '01

Customs halts export to China, charges 2 By Jerry Seper THE WASHINGTON TIMES Two men, one a naturalized U.S. citizen and the other a permanent resident alien, were arrested yesterday by the U.S. Customs Service on charges of attempting to export military encryption technology to China. Top Stories Bush to invest in defense 12 Democrats do not regret role in tax cut Military seeks means to save force structure Construction set for N. Korea nuclear plant Schools gird for fights over Indian names Firetrucks dispatched to wrong locations Eugene You Tsai Hsu of Blue Springs, Mo., and David Tzu Wvi Yang of Temple City, Calif., were taken into custody by undercover Customs Service agents following a four-month investigation by the agency's Baltimore field office. Mr. Hsu, who became a U.S. citizen in 1999, and Mr. Yang, a Taiwan native who is a resident alien, were accused in an affidavit of attempting to export to China encryption devices used to safeguard classified communications, in violation of the Arms Export Act. A third man, identified as Charlson Ho, also was named in the conspiracy and is believed to be in Singapore. Mr. Hsu was arrested at his Missouri home. Mr. Yang was taken into custody at his office in Compton, Calif. "The technology that these individuals were attempting to export to China is among the most sensitive items on the U.S. munitions list," said Agent Allan Doby, who heads the Baltimore office. "The sale of these units is so tightly controlled that the National Security Agency must approve it." According to an affidavit by Customs Service Agent Mary Hamman, the agency was notified May 2 by the Defense Security Service that Mr. Hsu was attempting to purchase KIV-7HS encryption devices and user manuals for export to China. The devices, authorized for government use only, are designed to secure classified communications. Ms. Hamman, in the affidavit, said Mr. Hsu sought to buy the equipment from Mykotronx Inc., a private company located in Columbia, Md. Officials at Mykotronx called the Customs Service office in Baltimore, which told the firm to direct Mr. Hsu to an "intermediary representative." That representative, an undercover Customs agent, later engaged in what the affidavit said was a series of telephone conversations between May 2 and Aug. 18 with Mr. Hsu, Mr. Yang and Mr. Ho, which were tape-recorded. The telephone conversations showed that the men were working for a Singapore firm, Wei Soon Loong Private Ltd., that wanted to buy the encryption devices. During the conversations, according to the affidavit, Mr. Hsu confirmed that the end user of the encryption devices was located in China. The affidavit does not elaborate. Ms. Hamman wrote that Mr. Hsu, after being told that the purchase of the equipment would be illegal and that permits to send the devices to China could not be obtained, said he wanted to proceed anyway, suggesting to the undercover agent that "everyone will just keep their mouths shut." The affidavit said Mr. Hsu then suggested that the agent talk directly with his buyer in Singapore, who would receive the equipment and forward it to China. The agent them spoke with Mr. Ho, who also confirmed that the equipment was bound for China. In one conversation, the affidavit said, Mr. Ho told the undercover agent the Chinese buyers "don't want too many people to know" about the deal. The document said Mr. Hsu later suggested that instead of a check or wire transfer as payment for the encryption equipment, cash would be better "so there's no trail." In a conversation with Mr. Yang, the affidavit said, the undercover agent was told by Mr. Yang that he had agreed to "move the merchandise" for Mr. Hsu and Mr. Ho, and that he "fully understands the whole situation." "I've been doing this business for more than 20 years, I know how to handle these problems," Mr. Yang is quoted as saying. The affidavit said Mr. Yang told the agent the encryption equipment would be shipped from Los Angeles through Taiwan to Singapore, where it would then be forwarded "to the end user in China." Mr. Hsu and Mr. Yang were not available yesterday. Wei Soon Loong, the Singapore company, did not return calls for comment. The maximum sentence for smuggling sensitive technology is 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine for each violation. Customs spokesman Dean Boyd said people or companies engaged in the export of items included on the U.S. Munitions List to all foreign countries, except Canada, must be registered with the State Department. In addition, he said, persons or companies must obtain a license from the department for each item on the list before it can be exported.

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RE: The Privacy/Untraceability Sweet Spot
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 31 Aug '01

31 Aug '01

"Aimee Farr" <aimee.farr(a)pobox.com> wrote : > GH wrote: > > > Nomen Nescio wrote: > > [snip] > > >The answers it gives depends on the questions you ask. If your questions > > >are simple enough (untraceability good?) then your chart will answer > > >them. If your questions are more interesting (what technologies can > > >be practically implemented and make a positive difference in the world) > > >then you need a better chart. > > > > You (and Aimee) make the mistake of assuming that all of us believe that > > we are living in the best of all possible worlds. > > *sigh* > Am I wrong or is there a latent idea here that the list members are in a position to choose whether or not these ( yes, Virginia, they're morality neutral ) privacy enhancing technolgies come to be? While the participants here may represent a large portion of those interested and capable of producing PETs they aren't the whole club. If there is a privacy and untraceability sweet spot why suppose that it is not already exploited by those with large financial gains to be made from it? Were a major drug cartel ( or a large corporation ) to decide that developing communications systems was a key factor in their continuing success it seems to me that the resources to do so would be easy to come by. Hell, they were making a pretty decent sized submarine not so long ago. I think a SW/HW product effort would be far easier to hide. There's probably a shop full of busy Russian engineers somehwere in SA right now. I don't believe that a whole battalion of Gordons could ever stop them. All that you can choose is whether you participate in creating PETs or not. <chop> > So, now, it's... > > "BlackNet; Case History of a Practically Untraceable System for Buying and > Selling Corporate and National Secrets.... to foreign adversaries, and to > spur the collapse of governments." > > Just out of curiosity, how many of you would sign on to a project like that? > Would you please post a statement of interest, and detail how you would > contribute to such a project? > > ~Aimee > Have the GRU list-watchers ( your handlers! ) demonstrated their power adequately by shtomping a few punk heads? Has speech here been sufficiently chilled that nobody will answer? Or is it just a dumb question? Create a real project with real rewards ( both financial and idealogical but mostly financial ) and see what kind of response you get. Why should anyone answer a dishonest question for free? Mike

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The Register - Security software: blind lead blind
by Jim Choate 31 Aug '01

31 Aug '01

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/21384.html -- -- ____________________________________________________________________ natsugusa ya...tsuwamonodomo ga...yume no ato summer grass...those mighty warriors'...dream-tracks Matsuo Basho The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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