September 2001 - cypherpunks-legacy

Mandatory ID Cards
by Eric Cordian 20 Sep '01

20 Sep '01

MSNBC is reporting that Congress is thinking of requiring all citizens and non-citizens in the United States to carry ID cards. It looks like the anti-privacy folks are going to do an end-run around the encryption issue, and first attack anonymity. An interesting strategy, and one which we should not let go unchallenged. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

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Operation Infinite Justice
by Tim May 20 Sep '01

20 Sep '01

Not to sound like a warmonger, but an idea came to me today, upon hearing that the new military operation is now named "Infinite Justice." Take the multicolored ribbon many are using to symbolize the events of 9/11... Then turn it on its side... Complete the loop and it becomes.... The infinity symbol.... Infinite Justice --Tim May

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EarthLink rejects FBI\'s request to install Carnivore
by mean-green＠hushmail.com 20 Sep '01

20 Sep '01

EarthLink rejects FBI's request to install Carnivore ATLANTA -- Less than 24 hours after last week's terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, FBI agents visited executives in EarthLink's Atlanta headquarters. The agents, subpoenas in hand, wanted EarthLink personnel to install the FBI's controversial tracking software -- called Carnivore -- on the networks the company uses to connect customers to the Internet. The agents were looking for electronic clues, trying to retrace suspected terrorists' steps in cyberspace. http://www0.mercurycenter.com/premium/business/docs/earthlink19.htm

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WP:FBI investigating if/how terrorists used stego, crypto
by Xeni Jardin 20 Sep '01

20 Sep '01

Terrorists' Online Methods Elusive http://www.washtech.com/news/netarch/12557-1.html By Ariana Eunjung Cha and Jonathan Krim, Washington Post Staff Writers Wednesday, September 19, 2001 Government agencies are contacting computer experts for help in understanding how Osama bin Laden and his associates may have used the Internet to send encrypted electronic messages to one another to coordinate last week's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, sources said yesterday. For at least three years, federal agents had found evidence that bin Laden's group embedded secret missives in mundane e-mails and on Web sites. But efforts to track down and decipher the messages have floundered. Numerous, easy-to-download software applications are available online that enable users to protect transmissions from curious eyes and frustrate government attempts to create a systematic way to locate and screen those messages. Basic encryption tools allow people to scramble messages so that only those with a "key" can read them. An increasing number, however, go beyond this by allowing messages to be hidden inside graphics, music files or in the headers of e-mails. The technology, known as steganography, allows users to get around electronic wiretaps by piggybacking messages on seemingly innocent digital files for things such as 'N Sync songs, a posting on eBay or a pornographic picture. The proliferation of this technology, people in the security community say, is changing the rules of the intelligence game by allowing anyone to coordinate dispersed global armies quickly and cheaply. Several experts in the field said yesterday they've received calls from the government asking for their assistance. One academic researcher said he was asked to remain on standby to help try to peel the layers off of any encrypted messages the government might find. But that might be the easy part. Sources close to the investigation said the few messages investigators have intercepted in the past did not take advantage of encryption techniques. The challenge, at least in this case, has been finding the messages in the first place. Neil Johnson, associate director of the Center for Secure Information Systems at George Mason University, which receives funding from the government, said steganography is powerful because messages can effectively be hidden almost anywhere. Johnson's recent research has focused, with some success, on how to crack it by examining a site, image or data stream for signs that steganography was used, he said. Mark Loveless, a computer security consultant with BindView Development Corp., said the technology is also popular because if it's used properly it would be almost impossible to trace the author of the message and the recipient because of the random way in which files are distributed from user to user using swapping services such as Napster and Gnutella. In the wake of the attacks, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) has proposed making it mandatory that software developers give government security agents the "keys" to encryption programs when they are created, a position strongly opposed by many in the technology community who worry it could be used to invade the privacy of law-abiding computer users. Phil Zimmermann, the creator of a popular encryption technology, said he believes the answer to catching the terrorists lies in human footwork rather than more surveillance technologies: "It's not practical to frisk everyone on the planet to find the one person with a box cutter." The government has been waging war on data-scrambling technology on several fronts for more than 30 years. It has asked Congress for stricter rules on exporting the technology and has taken the developers of such technology to courts. Most recently, the NSA created a whole department to try to "leverage emerging technologies and sustain both our offensive and defensive information warfare capabilities," according to a recent document outlining its cryptography strategy. At a closed congressional hearing last year, one federal official said that U.S. intelligence is "detecting with increasing frequency the appearance and adoption of computer and Internet familiarity" in the hands of terrorist organizations. "The skills and resources of this threat group range from the merely troublesome to dangerous," the official said in a submitted statement. "As we know, Middle East terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Osama bin Laden's organization are using computerized files, e-mail and encryption to support their organizations." That view was echoed by Ben Venzke, an intelligence and cyber-security consultant in Virginia who assists several government agencies. "Groups like them are very intelligent," he said. "They are very wise in the ways of tradecraft and operational security and will make use of any tools that are available," he said. Back to Washtech.com Home ) 2001 The Washington Post Company

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Re: Mandatory ID Cards (fwd)
by Jim Choate 20 Sep '01

20 Sep '01

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Denver Post.com - Face-ID technology gains new support
by Jim Choate 20 Sep '01

20 Sep '01

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1002,53%257E151641,00.html -- -- ____________________________________________________________________ The future, as always, belongs to the dreamers. Heinz Pagels The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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They all have to rearrange their brains now -- [WTC] is the greatest work of art ever.
by Subcommander Bob 20 Sep '01

20 Sep '01

Composer creates storm describing attack on US as 'work of art' HAMBURG, Germany, Sept 18 (AFP) - Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, 73, has roused indignation in Germany for describing last week's catastrophic airplane assaults on New York as "the greatest work of art ever." The renowned contemporary composer, who was speaking to journalists in Hamburg late Sunday, immediately retracted the remark and asked them not to report it. But as a result of what he said, two concerts featuring Stockhausen which were to be given Tuesday and Wednesday were cancelled by the organisers of a music festival at the request of the local cultural authorities and festival sponsors. Hamburg's general director of music, Ingo Metzmacher, had invited the composer to stage performances of his own works at the current Hamburg music festival. The German news agency DPA said the composer had quit Hamburg, greatly upset by the affair. In a statement issued by the music festival organisers, Stockhausen said he had been asked whether characters in his work, such as Lucifer, were historical, and that he had replied "they are always contemporary, for example Lucifer in New York. "I recalled the destruction of art. Any other words outside of this context have no relation to what I meant," he insisted. Hamburg culture senator (minister) Christina Weiss said the composer's reported remark was inexcusable, given the grief and mourning in the United States. "Out of feeling for the political culture of the city and the federal republic, the concerts had to be cancelled," she said. According to DPA, the composer, who had been asked about the attacks on the United States, said: "What happened there is -- they all have to rearrange their brains now -- is the greatest work of art ever. "That characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of, that people practise madly for ten years, completely fanatically, for a concert and then die. That is the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos. "I could not do that. Against that, we, composers, are nothing." http://asia.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/entertainment/afp/article.html?s=…

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Re: chip-level randomness? (fwd)
by Jim Choate 20 Sep '01

20 Sep '01

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 13:50:53 -0700 From: John Gilmore <gnu(a)toad.com> To: Pawel Krawczyk <kravietz(a)aba.krakow.pl> Cc: Bram Cohen <bram(a)gawth.com>, cryptography(a)wasabisystems.com, gnu(a)toad.com, tytso(a)mit.edu Subject: Re: chip-level randomness? The real-RNG in the Intel chip generates something like 75 kbits/sec of processed random bits. These are merely wasted if nobody reads them before it generates 75kbits more in the next second. I suggest that if application programs don't read all of these bits out of /dev/intel-rng (or whatever it's called), and the kernel /dev/random pool isn't fully charged with entropy, then the real-RNG driver should feed some of the excess random bits into the /dev/random pool periodically. When and how it siphons off bits from the RNG is a separate issue; but can we agree that feeding otherwise-wasted bits into a depleted /dev/random would be a good idea? A better way to structure this might be for /dev/intel-rng to register with /dev/random as a source of entropy that /dev/random can call upon if it depletes its pool. /dev/random would then be making decisions about when to stir more entropy into the pool (either in response to a read on /dev/random, or to "read ahead" to increase the available pool in between such reads). Thus, when demand on /dev/random is high, it would become one of the "application programs" that would compete to read from /dev/intel-rng. Since /dev/random is the defined interface for arbitrary applications to get unpredictable bits out of the kernel, I would expect that in general, /dev/random is likely to be the MAJOR consumer of /dev/intel-rng bits. (Linux IPSEC uses /dev/random or /dev/urandom for keying material. It can easily consume many thousands of random bits per second in doing IKE's Diffie-Hellman to set up dozens of tunnels. Today this "surge demand" occurs at boot time when setting up preconfigured tunnels -- a particularly bad time since the system hasn't been collecting entropy for very long. /dev/intel-rng's high-spead stream can significantly improve the quality of this keying material, by replenishing the entropy pool almost as fast IPSEC consumes it. Over time, IPSEC's long-term demand for random bits will increase, since opportunistic encryption allows many more tunnels to be created, with much less effort per tunnel by the system administrator.) Also, the PRNG in /dev/random and /dev/urandom may someday be broken by analytical techniques. The more diverse sources of true or apparent randomness that we can feed into it, the less likely it is that a successful theoretical attack on the PRNG will be practically successful. If even a single entropy source of sufficiently high speed is feeding it, even a compromised PRNG may well be unbreakable. John --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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Aid and understanding...
by news＠mailings.advisorteam.com 20 Sep '01

20 Sep '01

<PRE> We at AdvisorTeam are horrified and saddened by the events of September 11. All of our lives, and our sense of safety and security, have been immeasurably changed. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families and friends, and with all of those people whose lives have been directly affected. We're grateful to those who are at the site contributing to the ongoing relief and rescue efforts. In an effort to help, we are sending you this special newsletter. In it, we provide information about ways you can show support, as well as some suggestions for understanding and coping with symptoms of stress and anxiety. During the days and weeks to come, it is to be expected that many of us may experience unpleasant symptoms, including those listed below. These vary with each individual and tend to diminish gradually as time passes. We believe that temperament theory is a useful source of understanding about the human condition and contains some wisdom that can help us deal with extreme situations. As you try to understand your reactions, as well as those of your loved ones, friends and others with whom you come in contact, keep in mind that we all have certain core needs. We usually speak of Artisans, Guardians, Idealists, and Rationals as if they were "four kinds of people." In reality, the temperaments are clusters of traits and needs that represent four patterns of the human experience, each of which comes to play in every one of us. It's important to remember that we're all affected by these patterns, particularly when we are jolted out of our usual routines. Our feelings of well-being are affected when we experience temporary restrictions on our freedoms; disruption of the order and structure that we take for granted in our daily lives; a shock that may have brought up questions of "meaning"; and a loss of our sense of control. You and the people around you may experience some of the following symptoms, which may or may not be connected to your conscious thoughts, opinions, or feelings about the events. At a very basic level, they are how we respond to disequilibrium - manifestations of the "flight or fight response." - Increased or decreased need for food, sex, and/or sleep - Social withdrawal or increased need for social contact - Irritability or anger - Being easily startled - Restlessness - Mood swings - Difficulty concentrating, "spacey-ness" - Preoccupation with troubling thoughts, images, or nightmares - Feelings of fear or hopelessness, or of personal responsibility - Shock or denial - Grieving Here are some things you can do to manage your anxiety: 1. Be aware that you and people around you may be affected. 2. If your symptoms are severe, speaking with a counselor or clergy member may help. 3. Be patient with yourself and with other people. 4. Acts of kindness can make a world of difference, not just to those to whom they are directed, but also to those who perform them. ------------------------------------------------------------------- For information numbers and some ways you can help, please visit: http://www.advisorteam.com/newsletter0801/howtohelp.html In support of the rescue and recovery efforts, AdvisorTeam will contribute 10% of the price of every report purchased at our site between now and September 30th. ------------------------------------------------------------------- If you would like to be removed from our e-mail list, please opt-out http://mailings.advisorteam.com/remove3/CKA_OMCAB!f7a4d6226eae6cc8. <img width=1 height=1 border=0 src="http://mailings.advisorteam.com/client3/CKA_OMCAB.gif"> <PRE>

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Re: Mandatory ID Cards
by Meyer Wolfsheim 20 Sep '01

20 Sep '01

> MSNBC is reporting that Congress is thinking of requiring all citizens > and non-citizens in the United States to carry ID cards. We're already half-way there. With our photo-id driver's licenses, and required identification before boarding airplanes, convenient travel and lack of anonymity go hand in hand. > It looks like the anti-privacy folks are going to do an end-run around > the encryption issue, and first attack anonymity. An interesting > strategy, and one which we should not let go unchallenged. This was my thought, to which I eluded in my last post the list. I don't think crypto opponents could find ways to justify banning its use. However, an anonymity crack-down is most certainly coming. And be on the look-out for RIP-USA. -MW-

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