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The True Story of the InterNet
Part III
InfoWar
Final Frontier of the Digital Revolution
Behind the ElectroMagnetic Curtain
by TruthMonger <tm(a)dev.null>
Copyright 1997 Pearl Publishing
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InfoWar Table of Contents
* Epilogue
* M$ Cowboy
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Epilogue
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The Criminalization of Poverty in Capitalist America by Jalil Abdul Muntaqim
(Excerpts)
An anonymous poet in the 1700's wrote about crime: "The law will punish a
man or woman who steals the goose from the hillside, but lets the greater
robber loose who steals the hillside from the goose."
If you steal $5 you're a thief, but if you steal $5 million-you're a
financier .
In the dictionary, the word "crime" means "an act which is against the law."
Crime applies particularly to an act that breaks a law that has been made
for public good. Crime in one country, the dictionary continued, "may be
entirely overlooked by the law in another country or may not apply at all in
a different historical period."
That was interesting. What that really said was that concepts of "crime" are
not eternal. The very nature of crime is sociopsychological and defined by
time and place and those who have the power to make definitions.
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"The language of the prevailing Law and Order, validated by the courts and
by the police, is not only the voice but also the deed of suppression. This
language not only defines and condemns the Enemy, it also creates him; and
this creation is not the Enemy as he really is but rather as he must be in
order to perform his function for the Establishment..."
-Herbert Marcuse
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Hence the power to define is an awesome power. It is the power of
propaganda. It is the ability to manipulate our ideas, to limit our agenda,
to mold how we see, and to shape what we look at. It is the power to
interpret the picture we see when we look at the world Â…
It is the power to place the picture we see when we look at the world. It is
the power to place a frame around the picture, to define where it begins and
ends. It is, in fact, the power to define where our vision begins and ends,
the power to create our collective consciousness.
That kind of social propaganda is not only tremendously powerful, but it is
also mostly invisible.
{We can't fight what we don't see. Most people accept the images and
definitions that we have been taught as true, neutral, self-evident, and for
always.}
The power to paint the future, to define what is right and wrong, what is
lawful and what is criminal, is really the power to win the battle for our
minds.
{And to win it without ever having to fight it. Simply said, it is hard to
fight an enemy who has an outpost in our minds.}
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Since 1977, when California had 19,000 inmates in its prison system, the
California Legislature has passed more than 1,000 bills lengthening
sentences or defining new crimes, often in response to high-profile
offenders such as Davis. The result has been a more-than-sixfold increase to
today's population of 126,000. Between 1852 and 1984, California built 12
prisons. Since just 1984, California has constructed an additional 16
prisons.
But during the decade and a half that imprisonment was soaring, the crime
rate in California has stubbornly refused to budge, hovering today at
approximately the 1977 rate. Indeed, during 1993 and the first half of 1994,
the rate of both violent and property crime actually fell while public fear
of crime inexplicably rose.
A study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C.,
suggests one possible reason for such a paradox. The study shows that, while
the murder rate nationally remained stable between 1992 and 1993, the number
of homicides reported on the evening news of the nation's three major
networks tripled. Not surprisingly, the report continues, from May 1992 to
February 1993, there was a sixfold increase in the number of Americans who
rated crime as the country's most important problem.
-Three Strikes
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The Social Dynamics of Crime
In the March 12, 1993, issue of the Wall Street Journal an article entitled
"Common Criminals-Just About Everyone Violates Some Laws, Even Model
Citizens," byline by Stephen J. Adler and Wade Lambert stated:
"We are a nation of lawbreakers. We exaggerate tax-deductible expenses, lie
to customs officials, bet on card games and sports events, disregard jury
notices, drive while intoxicated --and hire illegal childcare workers."
The last of these was recently the crime of the moment, and Janet Reno
wouldn't have been in the position to be confirmed unanimously as attorney
general yesterday if Zoe Baird had obeyed the much-flouted immigration and
tax laws.
But the crime of the moment could have been something else, and next time
probably will be.
This is because nearly all people violate some laws, and many people run
afoul of dozens without ever being considered, or considering themselves,
criminals.
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An estimated 1,585,400 persons were incarcerated in the United States in
1995. Correctional authorities held in the Nation's prisons and jails 600
persons per 100,000 U.S. residents.
Prisoners in the custody of the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and the
Federal Government accounted for two-thirds of the incarcerated population
(1,078,357 inmates). The other third was held in local jails (507,044
inmates).
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In America, in the l990s, as was the case in England in the 1800s, it is a
crime to be poor. The poorer you are, the more criminal you are. If you are
so poor that you have no place to live, and you live on the pavement or
sleep in a car or in a park, you have committed a crime. It's against the
law to sleep on the streets or in a park. If we have no home, it's against
the law to sleep anywhere.
The Prison-Industrial Complex
Crime is big Business
The political decisions of the bankers are decisions about who will be poor.
Corporate decisions made in the late '50s to remove industry from
communities of color were about who would be unemployed. Decisions by
developers and bankers about redevelopment (redlining and gentrification)
are decisions about who will be homeless. Such decisions affect everyone,
but people have no say in the matter. Generally people, especially the poor,
have no say in most social and economic decisions that affect their lives.
Somehow that is not part of the democratic method of government, and because
people have no say in the process, creating homelessness is not criminal,
but being homeless is.
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"Membership in the class of people known as 'law-breakers' is not
distributed according to economic or social status, but membership in the
class 'criminals' is distributed according to social or economic status..."
- Professor Theodore Sarbin
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Hunger and homelessness are deliberately imposed socioeconomic conditions of
the disenfranchised large numbers of the American population. This is
especially significant when consideration is given to the method and means
by which the malfeasance of the powers that be operate to ensure that such
conditions stay the same. Thus such pathology ensures the rich get richer,
while the poor get prison and early death.
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* Since 1985 the total number of inmates in the custody of State
and Federal prisons and local jails has more than doubled to
nearly 1.6 million -- an increase of 113%.
* * On average, the incarcerated population has grown 7.9% annually
since 1985. The State and Federal prison population has grown
8.3% annually, while the local jail population has grown 7.0%.
* * Over the 10-year period correctional authorities have found
beds for nearly 841,200 additional inmates or the equivalent of
almost 1,618 inmates per week.
* * At yearend 1985, 1 in every 320 United States residents were
incarcerated. By yearend 1995 that ratio had increased to 1 in
every 167.
-PIAP
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Max Weber held that social stratification depends on the distribution of
three resources: wealth (economic resources), power (political resources),
and prestige (social resources).
We are able to determine the social and racial implications of certain
classes, then, having a vested interest in crime. It can be argued that
because an elite class of criminals is in charge, they commit capital
crimes, crimes against society and humanity. The jails are overflowing, but
that doesn't seem to help --because the real criminals aren't in jail.
They're in the board rooms and in the White House. They are the social
policy makers that run this country. And today, they are increasing social
repression by building more prisons, creating harsher legal sanctions (i.e.
52 death penalty laws, three strikes you're out), and becoming ever more
heedless to the social implications of poverty as an impetus to committing
crime.
Under their misleadership, over five million people are homeless, 37 million
have no health insurance, 30 million are illiterate, 30 million more are
functionally illiterate, one million are incarcerated, and 60 million live
in poverty and are struggling day to day.
Crime is big business in America. Annually the laws are changed to ensure
profitability in the industry of crime. Social conditions that serve to
maintain levels of poverty, feed the industry of crime, also put stress on
the social stratification's of society.
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Within the current processes of economic globalization, the establishment of
the Joint Venture Program has opened California prisoners to be used as a
new labor supply and to be manipulated within the world economy to meet the
interests of transnational corporations. Within the global economy, the
United States is becoming an increasingly service-based economy, and many of
the manufacturing and textile jobs prisoners are supposedly being trained
for don't even exist here anymore. Economic globalization has completely
altered the relationship between capital and labor that existed within the
economy of this capitalist nation-state, where massive increases in
incarceration directed at working-class communities and communities of color
would formerly have interfered with the interest of many corporations by
diminishing the labor pool. The hypermobility of capital has created an
economic setting that allows for mass incarceration, because there is no
longer a strong economic need for a large, free, unskilled, unemployed
population of workers in this country. [27] Capital can easily expand its
supply of labor to include any exploitable population of workers throughout
the world, including incarcerated workers.
The Labor of Doing Time
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Given the fact that America is a nation of criminals as elucidated in the
Wall Street Journal article, social conflict is inevitable. It then becomes
a matter of identifying the real culprits of crime, and seeking the means to
have them become accountable for their criminal behavior. This may very well
include the redistribution of their wealth, and the reorganization of the
social contract between the government and the governed.
In response to the stratification outlined above, it requires revolutionary
nationalist and socialist efforts to formulate a national political agenda
and policy that will challenge the prevailing social contract between the
oppressed and the oppressor nation. This means revolutionary nationalists
and socialists must have a clear and concise mass-line and political program
that identifies and explains the nature of poor peoples' oppression, and how
they are to be organized to confront their oppression.
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"There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of
laws.
Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: 'Death to Tyrants!'"
-Timothy C. May
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M$ Cowboy
[Estevan Mercury, Oct 22, 1997] It's just like advancing to the NHL of the
computer world.
That was the comparison used by Jeff Sandquist to describe his new job with
Microsoft, one of the giants of the computer industry, right in their
Redmond, Washington campus headquarters.
Sandquist will be leaving his position at SRI Homes (Shelter-Regent
Industries) where he has been a design technologist for the past four years,
and will hook up with like-minded individuals in Redmond to serve big
industry.
"I guess I am now a developer support engineer," he said with a chuckle.
"I wanted this job because I get to work with cool stuff a year before the
public gets to see it." Sandquist said with another laugh.
He said one of his teammates is the author of the Inside Active Server
Pages, one of the more recent bibles of computerdom. Sandquist explained
that active server technology is relatively new to industry and the public.
"I can't believe I'm getting this shot," he said.
Sandquist starts work at Microsoft on November 3. He'll believe it then.
(by NORM PARK of The Mercury)
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CJ brought Shelter into the 'Wonderful World of Computers' but he did it in
Xenix, not in DOS. DOS is a nice, simple computer operating system that will
work fairly well for the uninitiated without giving them a lot of grief.
It's fairly primitive, but one can do a tolerably decent job of conducting
their affairs in bits and bytes without having to worry about the dark side
of their new hi-tech/toy-nology.
-Excerpt from "The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre"
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Subject: Sloppy Chips from Intel
From: Eric Cordian <emc(a)wire.insync.net>
To: cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net
By now everyone has probably heard that Intel Pentium and Pentium MMX chips
hang when executing the instruction sequence F00FC7C8 even when in an outer
ring of privilege or in V86 mode.
With numerous small Linux-based ISPs out there, often providing shell
services to anonymous customers, or serving customer-provided CGI programs,
the existence and public disclosure such an easily exploitable flaw in their
CPU's hardware protection mechanism is catastrophic.
Â…
While today's problem does not permit clandestine entry into a system, since
it kills the system when it is exercised, it does raise the question of
whether there are other more subtle problems in the hardware protection
mechanism, which might enable knowledgeable users to execute an occasional
instruction at the wrong privilege level, or otherwise do things which
should be prohibited according to the published hardware specifications.
Â…
Buggy microprocessor microcode can produce very subtle exploitable faults in
a chip, which are almost impossible to notice when running ordinary
applications and operating systems. Instructions may do the wrong thing only
when they follow certain other instructions. There may be rare times when
the processor is wrongly interruptible, or when a restricted instruction is
not forbidden, or is given access at the wrong privilege level, or with
incorrect address translation.
Were such features to be deliberately introduced into a chip, in order to
permit a backdoor for undetected entry, they could be made completely
undetectable, and could depend upon any number of unlikely conditions, or
even specific hidden register values, in order to be made manifest. Every
microprocessor could even have its own "key" for the activation of such
"special features."
Unlike UNIX, for which complete compileable source code is available, we
know little about what microcode is run through the several million
transistors on a typical microprocessor. If sloppy engineering alone
produces such dangerous faults, imagine what could happen should industry
decide to deliberately cooperate with various LEAs and TLAs. (In the
national interest, of course.)
The possibilities are truly mind-boggling. Perhaps exploits like tapping
Aldrich Ames' PC and crashing Saddam Hussein's PCs en masse were not done by
black bag jobs and viri, but by the activation of "National Security"
backdoors present in all complex modern microprocessors.
* 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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"I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build
rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy
anarchy. I am chaos. I am alive., and tell you that you are free"
-Eris, Goddess Of Chaos, Discord & Confusion
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Subject:
From: Anonymous <anon(a)anon.efga.org>
To: cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net
In the grand tradition of RSA-in-3-lines-of-perl, we present
Crash-A-Pentium-in-44-characters:
main(){int i=0xc8c70ff0;void (*f)()=&i;f();}
-f00fie
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Subject: pentium bug/microprocessor design
From: "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri(a)netcom.com>
To: cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net
For those of you who don't know, there's actually a minor crisis brewing in
chip design.
The crisis is that because of the enormous increasing complexity of
individual chips, it's becoming statistically impossible to completely test
them.
There are new schemes in the works by which Intel etc. are trying to deal
with this, including a remarkable scheme in which new microcode can be
downloaded to the chip. it also involves encryption in which one needs to
know the encryption mechanism for the chip to accept the new instructions.
apparently it's done in such a way that no one except those who know the
encryption can successfully alter the chip.
But this does raise a lot of cypherpunks issues such as about reverse
engineering etc.
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Subject: A.Word.A.Day - vomitorium
From: Wordsmith <wsmith(a)wordsmith.org>
To: linguaphile(a)wordsmith.org
vo.mi.to.ri.um n. A passage or opening in an ancient amphitheatre or
theatre, leading to or from the seats. Usu. pl.
1754 Dictionary of Arts & Sciences. I. 129/2
"They were entered by avenues, at the end of which were gates, called
vomitoria."
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"Programmers are the unifying force that supply the energy enabling two
separate and unique components, hardware and software, to have a
relationship that is capable of productivity and growth. A marriage of
matter that could spawn and produce a multitude of children to go forth and
do many new things in the world, for better or worse, for good or for evil."
"You are society's last hope for thwarting the Forces of Evil gearing up for
the final battle, readying themselves to wreak grievous havoc upon the
world, such that it has never known. It is up to you to 'raise the torch,'
and let the 'light of knowledge' spread throughout the civilized world, in
the thread of 'clues' scattered throughout the UNIX operating system, and
throughout your programming and your instructions."
"You must band together, man and woman, young and old, into a 'Magic Circle'
for your own protection from the Forces of Darkness! You must develop your
own secret codes and rituals to deal with the Evil Forces which will beset
you daily once you set foot on the Path of Righteousness."
-Bubba Rom Dos
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[Not-News NetWork-- Mohave Desert] Aug 4/97
WHAT DOES A FIVE HUNDRED POUND GORILLA READ AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE? - sog
The "Not-News Gorilla NutWork" was rocket-launched in the Mohave Desert
early yesterday morning by a rag-tag bunch of paramilitarist computer
gurus who unveiled an InterNet Bill of Bytes that included the words,
"MicroSoft shall make no laws..."
Angered by a self-appointed council of computer industry magnates who
have announced their intention to seize fascist control of the quickly
burgeoning Information Highway by controlling the definition of all
information, the rebels set up a shooting range which contained a wide
variety of targets ranging from copies of the Wall Street Journal to
life-sized cardboard cut-outs of a hooded figure referred to only as,
"a billionaire to be named later."
Â…
"We have decided on two classes of ratings." explained a tassel-
haired young woman as she slid shells into a Winchester Defender
sitting on her lap. "On..." she said, lifting the shotgun with one
hand, then liberating the hooded head from a nearby cardboard cut-out,
before turning back to say, with a Cheshire grin, "...and off."
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[Estevan Mercury, Oct 22, 1997] Â…
Sandquist will be leaving his position at SRI Homes (Shelter-Regent
Industries) where he has been a design technologist for the past four years,
and will hook up with like-minded individuals in Redmond to serve big
industry.
Â…
He said one of his teammates is the author of the Inside Active Server
Pages, one of the more recent bibles of computerdom. Sandquist explained
that active server technology is relatively new to industry and the public.
"I can't believe I'm getting this shot," he said.
Â…
"I can't believe I'm getting this shot," he said.
Â…
"I can't believe I'm getting this SHOT," he said.
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Subject: A.Word.A.Day - vomitorium
From: Wordsmith <wsmith(a)wordsmith.org>
To: linguaphile(a)wordsmith.org
vo.mi.to.ri.um n. A passage or opening in an ancient amphitheatre or
theatre, leading to or from the seats. Usu. pl.
1754 Dictionary of Arts & Sciences. I. 129/2
"They were entered by avenues, at the end of which were GATES, called
vomitoria."
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Once again the Forces of Good have been forced underground, faced with
incredulity and disbelief when they try to reveal to mankind that the Evil
One is once again afoot in the land, making His plans for the Final Battle.
The 'Circle of Eunuchs' find themselves working feverishly to rebuild a
silent underground dedicated to enlightening those few that are willing to
listen to the Whisper of Light that is being overwhelmed by the Roar of
Darkness.
~son of gomez
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"Cryptography is like literacy in the Dark Ages. Infinitely potent, for good
and ill... yet basically an intellectual construct, an idea, which by its
nature will resist efforts to restrict it to bureaucrats and others who deem
only themselves worthy of such Privilege."
A thinking man's Creed for Crypto/ vbm.
* Vin McLellan + The Privacy Guild + <vin(a)shore.net>
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Now the Circle of Eunuchs discover themselves locked in a covert battle with
Forces that have railed against mankind for Millenniums, facing the
disbelief and terror of others in their efforts to enlighten mankind about
the Evil Forces once again massing throughout the world in a chilling
endeavor to bring us to our ultimate destruction.
While we sleep our way through our daily lives, in unawareness, the Movement
is spreading through Secret Circles spanning the face of the globe, helping
to prepare mankind for the Final Battle.
~son of gomez
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"The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre"
"WebWorld & the Mythical Circle of Eunuchs"
"InfoWar (Part III of 'The True Story of the InterNet')
Soviet Union Sickle of Eunuchs Secret WebSite
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