August 2002 - cypherpunks-legacy

Invade Malaysia
by Matthew X 28 Aug '02

28 Aug '02

Its logged the shit out of it's own and it's neighbors forests,one minister wants a bounty on the last tigers in the place while another wants taxi drivers who may be lost,killed. It's an authoritarian muslim hellhole with all the mass torture,false imprisonment,deportations,etc that go with it and if all that wasn't enough...Malaysia stands by anti-sodomy law KUALA LUMPUR, June 13 - The Malaysian government firmly rejected a call by a U.S.-based human rights group to scrap a law against sodomy that underpins criminal charges against jailed former finance minister Anwar Ibrahim. "This is unthinkable," Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi was quoted in the Star newspaper as saying. "We have our traditions and values. Most importantly, all religions practised by Malaysians do not permit anal sex...

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Vigilantism on the Internet.
by Matthew X 28 Aug '02

28 Aug '02

Cartoon of "I won the AP lottery at www.antistate.com and http://news.com.com/2008-1082-955417.html?tag=fd_nc_1 newsmakers ASPEN, Colorado--The copyright wars on Capitol Hill have begun to drift into the political equivalent of trench warfare, with Hollywood and the music industry pitted against hardware makers, electronics manufacturers, and ragtag activists at nonprofit groups. Also you have no ID,get used to it. http://news.com.com/2010-1071-955441.html

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"jesus POWELL! How do you know that's not just some terrorist pulling your chain."
by Matthew X 28 Aug '02

28 Aug '02

Media Transparency The Powell Manifesto How A Prominent Lawyer's Attack Memo Changed America Jerry M. Landay POSTED AUGUST 20, 2002 -- America's Second Gilded Age has been scoured of its glitter, along with the platitudes that its town criers preached -- "too much government," "market infallibility," and "prosperity forever." The house that so-called New Conservatism built has operated on the principle that "ideas have consequences." The principal "ideas" they marketed were individual gain over public good, deregulation, big tax cuts, and privatization. For two decades, since the installation of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the radical right has run a tightly coordinated campaign to seal its hold on the organs of power, ranging from the highest law courts to the largest corporations, from the White House to Capitol Hill, from television tubes to editorial pages, and across college campuses. They have constructed a well-paid activist apparatus of idea merchants and marketeers -- scholars, writers, journalists, publishers, and critics - to sell policies whose intent was to ratchet wealth upward. They have intimidated the mainstream media, and filled the vacuum with editors, columnists, talk-show hosts, and pundits who have turned conservatism into a career tool. They have waged a culture war to reduce the rich social heritage of liberalism to a pejorative. And they have propagated a mythic set of faux-economic values that have largely served those who financed the movement in the first place They shifted the nation rightward; tilted the distribution of the nation's assets away from the middle class and the poor, the elderly, and the young; they red-penciled laws and legal precedents at the heart of American justice. They aimed to corporatize Medicare and Social Security. They marketed class values while accusing their opponents of "class warfare." They loosened or repealed the rights and protections of organized labor and the poor, voters, and minorities. They slashed the taxes of corporations and the rich, and rolled back the economic gains of the rest. They came to dominate or heavily influence centers of scholarship, law, and politics, education, and governance - or put new ones in their place. Their litigation teams nearly overthrew an elected President. And, to maintain power, proclaimed Constitutionalists on the right, to this day, wage a concerted counter- revolution against such Constitutional guarantees as free speech and separation of church and state Movement conservatism was a power tool formulated by scholars such as Irving Kristol, political organizers like the late Treasury Secretary William Simon, opinion molders and popularizers such as William F. Buckley, and a phalanx of think-tank operatives including Edwin Feulner and Paul Weyrich. A highly integrated front of activist organizations has been generously funded by the banking and oil money of the Mellon-Scaifes of Pittsburgh, the manufacturing fortunes of Lynde and Harry Bradley of Milwaukee, the energy revenues of the Koch family of Kansas, the chemical profits of John M. Olin of New York, the Vicks patent-medicine empire of the Smith Richardson family of Greensboro, N.C., and the brewing assets of the Coors dynasty of Colorado, and others. Their grants have paid for a veritable constellation of think tanks, pressure groups, special-interest foundations, litigation centers, scholarly research and funding endowments, publishing and TV production houses, media attack operations, political consultancies, polling mills, and public-relations operations. The concerted campaigns they run, also underwritten by such self-interested corporations as those in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and finance, have weakened the AARP, the Food and Drug Administration, Head Start, Medicare, and welfare programs. This has amounted to the greatest organized power grab in American political history. Astonishingly, it goes largely unreported on television, radio, and most newspapers Its media-attack tactics have largely silenced the critical attention of the mainstream press. Americans, therefore, remain largely unaware of the sweeping changes movement conservatism has wrought Few are aware of the critical role played in the political power shift rightward by a prominent Richmond attorney and community leader, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., at the very threshold of a distinguished career on the U.S. Supreme Court Jerry M. Landay has produced public-affairs programs for PBS and commentaries for NPR. He is assoc. professor emeritus in journalism at the University of Illinois, a former CBS and ABC news correspondent, and writes on national and media issues. [This is a very long, but very important article. I hope you will click through and read the entire piece. We MUST fight back. If you havent signed up to contribute the price of one movie ticket per month to support Buy Back Our Government, I hope you will do so now.Caro] And heres the memo that started it all, also posted at Media Transparency ATTACK ON AMERICAN FREE ENTERPRISE SYSTEM On August 23, 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce distributed the Powell Memorandum to its national membership of leading executives, businesses, and trade associations. The memo, published here in its entirety, constituted the entire contents of the issue of its regular publication WASHINGTON REPORT to members. It bore the headline: CONFIDENTIAL MEMO. ATTACK ON AMERICAN FREE ENTERPRISE SYSTEM.

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Is There a Copyright Law in Islam?
by Major Variola (ret) 28 Aug '02

28 Aug '02

http://www.islam-online.net/fatwaapplication/english/display.asp?hFatwaID=7… Is there a copyright law in Islam? Some people say that knowledge is a common property and it cannot be restricted. They use the Hadith of the Prophet, peace and blessing be upon him, that "Wisdom is the lost property of a believer, it is his, wherever he may find it." What do you think of making copies of computer software?

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Re: onsite service in Black Rock
by Major Variola (ret) 28 Aug '02

28 Aug '02

At 01:36 PM 8/27/02 +0000, Ryan Lackey wrote: >I'm not actually going to burningman this year, primarily due to low >remote access potential; I normally have a laptop and >cellphone/802.11b/100baseTX link with at most 15 minutes delay. A satphone is under $2K and its under $3 minute. Cost-cutting measures, eh? You'd think some enterprising yahoo local would futz around with yagi'd pringles and sell bits by the bucket. Slackers.

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Savvydata countermeasures
by Matthew X 28 Aug '02

28 Aug '02

As the notoriety of hackers and cyberterrorists grows, there's a tendency to forget about the threat to computer networks from disgruntled employees or insiders committing economic espionage or financial crimes. In recent years, corporations and governments have rushed to construct network firewalls, add antivirus software and set up intrusion detector systems, but none of those security tools can stop the determined insider from stealing company secrets or diverting funds or stock. Yet more than a third of all corporate computer crime is the result of unauthorized access by insiders, according to the 2002 survey by the Computer Security Institute/Federal Bureau of Investigation. While the percentage of computer crime committed by insiders has fallen as the attacks from outside hackers via the Internet has grown, the Computer Security Institute warns "the insider threat is still very real and very costly." A Fort Lauderdale firm, Savvydata Inc., has developed a security program, called RedAlert, specifically designed to thwart that insider with a bad attitude or a criminal bent. RedAlert can protect sensitive data in a variety of applications from being accessed, printed, e-mailed, copied or saved to a disk by unauthorized employees on the network and provide a secure audit trail. It can block any unauthorized action and send an immediate alert, either to a company's own system administrator, or to Savvydata's monitoring service, which is based in the NAP of the Americas in Miami for added security. It can also lock down data in laptops that turn up missing. If a wayward executive with full access does try to steal data, he may not be blocked, but he could still generate an alert, and will definitely leave a clear audit trail behind, which may well act as a deterrent. Each company sets its own policy for each document and each employee and can even set the hours of authorized access. Michael Nevins, chief executive officer of Savvydata, called RedAlert a type of intrusion detector software -- only from the inside out. Like most of the executives at Savvydata, Nevins comes from a law enforcement background. In 1991, he headed up Colorado's High Technologies Crime Unit, which assisted city, county and state law enforcement agencies in investigating computer crimes. He later started his own company, Millennium Investigations, which was acquired by Savvydata in 2000. RedAlert is a new product that is currently being evaluated by 22 companies around the world, from Norway to Korea, Nevins said. Savvydata recently signed on with DynTek Inc., an Irvine, Calif.-based systems integrator and technology consultant for state and local governments, to include RedAlert in the product mix it offers to customers. "RedAlert brings to the table a very specific solution at the desktop level in a market that is wide open," said J. Hansen, DynTek's national director for security services, who said his company evaluated numerous security solutions before partnering with Savvydata. "There are not a lot of competing products that do exactly what they do. It is absolutely prime for our markets." While there are other software products aimed at nabbing insiders, most take a different approach, monitoring network traffic or operating system logs. RedAlert monitors specific activity related to specific documents or files. The product is also going to be featured in a leading trade magazine, Information Security, as its September Hot Pick, according to associate editor Christine St. Pierre. But RedAlert is only one part of Savvydata, which also has an online database search division, and an investigative computer forensics division. The searches are often used for pre-employment screenings and legal cases, and the forensic investigations extract evidence from computers primarily for use in court. The company hopes to create some synergy between its RedAlert product and its data-mining capabilities. The plan is to offer a package that would investigate employees caught by RedAlert trying to breach network security policies. The profile might be set up to flag personal activities such as a recent bankruptcy or an arrest related to substance abuse. "Employees' activities are influenced by their outside lives," Nevins said. "This would add an outside perspective to internal computer security." Nevins admits the concept can be a little scary, but adds that in today's environment, it is more important than ever to protect inside information. Such profiles would be generated not across the board, but for employees whose behavior has taken them "past the point of just being suspicious," he said. The database and forensic investigations divisions of Savvydata are profitable, and are expected to produce $1 million in revenues this year, Nevins said. But the overall company, which has raised $6.2 million from angel investors and private placements since it was formed in 1997, is not. However, Nevins said there are $56 million worth of pending contracts for RedAlert, and he anticipates sales of the product by the end of the year. He said he expects Savvydata to be profitable in the fourth quarter.END. Countermeasures?

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Austin Powers cut by Dr Evil Empire.
by Matthew X 28 Aug '02

28 Aug '02

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=02/08/27/4534988 LOS ANGELES - August 26th, Federal prosecutors are indicting Sherman Austin, 19 year old founder / webmaster of Raise the Fist (http://www.RaisetheFist.com) an anarchist independent media / direct action network. Sherman is being charged with 2 felony violations of the following: 18 U.S.C. 842 (p)(2)(A): DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION RELATING TO EXPLOSIVES, DESTRUCTIVE DEVICES, AND WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION WITH THE INTENT THAT SUCH INFORMATION BE USED IN FURTHERANCE OF A FEDERAL CRIME OF VIOLENCE; 26 U.S.C. 5861(d): POSSESSION OF A FIREARM WHICH IS NOT REGISTERED TO HIM IN THE NATIONAL FIREARMS REGISTRATION AND TRANSFER RECORD. Sherman rejected a guilty plea today in court offering him 1 month in jail, 5 months in a half-way house and 3 years supervised release. If found guilty in trial, Sherman could serve a maximum of 3-4 years in prison. On January 24th, 2002, Sherman became one of the first victims of the new USA Patriot Act when 25 heavily armed FBI agents and secret service surrounded and raided his home in Los Angeles because of his anarchist web site http://www.raisethefist.com. The entire server was shut down, all computer equipment along with political literature, even protest signs were seized and loaded into a big white truck. Sherman was not arrested until a week later when he decided to attend the World Economic Forum protests in New York. He was arrested by New York police after being targeted law enforcement officials. After spending nearly 30 hours in jail, Sherman was taken into a back room in hand cuffs and interrogated by the FBI and Secret Service for several hours. 10 minutes later he was released from jail with charges dropped. Within minutes he was re-arrested by 6 FBI agents and placed in maximum security federal prison. At his bail hearing he was accused of driving 3,000 miles carry out his "plot" of mass destruction against the WEF event, and on the way back to "blow up" the Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. Even though federal agents searched his car in New York, and found absolutely nothing, and there was a blatant lack of evidence, he was denied bail and the judge ordered Sherman be transported to California with a US Marshal escort, as the judge felt "the Government has also shown by clear and convincing evidence that there is a very serious risk of danger to the community" While awaiting finial extradition to California at a "hub" for prisoners in Oklahoma. Thomas Mrozek, public affairs officer for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles said, "We have opted not to seek an indictment at this time. We are continuing to investigate the matter, but as of right now, he's off the hook." 6 months later, Sherman now faces federal felony charges as he awaits a grand jury indictment before trial. Link: http://www.raisethefist.com Comment.

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Great Offers
by s0834p51＠axmanco.com 28 Aug '02

28 Aug '02

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Bomb American.
by Matthew X 28 Aug '02

28 Aug '02

"A drive from the district to Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia will reveal a region that is light-years away from what it was 30 years ago. When Dulles opened in 1962, it was seen by many as nothing more than a white elephant-too far from Washington (26 miles) and too big to be of any real use. Dulles may still be a less con-venient alternative to the charming and ever-so-close Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, but it is one of the fastest-growing airports in the country. It has become so crowded, in fact, that the passengers rushing through Eero Saarinen's soaring terminal overwhelm the once funky but now pokey mobile lounges. The once empty Dulles Toll Road, which stretches from the airport to the gargantuan Tysons Corner office and shopping complex on the Beltway, has seen changes galore as well. Lined with tech companies of all sorts, the toll road now serves as Fairfax County's high-tech main street. AOL (now AOL Time Warner), which grew up here, now occupies a large and sprawling headquarters in neighboring Loudoun County, Va., on the west side of Dulles. Other companies with their headquarters here include Nextel Communications, Deltek Systems, KPMG Consulting, MicroStrategy, TruSecure, Software AG, and Convera. Oracle, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Computer Associates International, and VeriSign have offices in Fairfax County. The city of McLean, Va.-now the residence of choice for republican bigwigs, as opposed to the democratic Bethesda, Md.-houses the massive and showy new headquarters for Gannett as well as a large broadband solution center run by KPMG Consulting." From a 4 page article on DC at... http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/story?id=3d53ff231 Did you know the Govt employee's ratio has halved to 20%? Call off the Nuke's!

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When Feds are the Crackers
by Steve Schear 28 Aug '02

28 Aug '02

When Feds are the Crackers U.S. courts should join Russia in saying "nyet" to the FBI's lawless international hack attacks. By Mark Rasch Aug 26, 2002 In medieval times, attackers would use a bell-shaped metal grenade or "petard" to break enemy defenses. These unreliable devices frequently went off unexpectedly, destroying not only the enemy, but the attacker. As Shakespeare noted, "'tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his owne petar." That's what I thought of when the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) recently announced their plans to charge an FBI agent with hacking -- a crime that the agent committed while investigating Russian hackers. http://online.securityfocus.com/columnists/105

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