December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: unSAFE (at any speed)
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Declan McCullagh got off his knees and pulled up his pants long enough to forward: > From: Michael Sims <jellicle(a)inch.com> > To: fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu > Subject: unSAFE > Well, I've read Mr. Davidson's defense of the SAFE bill and of course > Mr. May's earlier argument against it. A few more comments. > The Trading with the Enemy Act was passed in 1917 and amended > (importantly) in 1933 (Great Depression, New Deal). > It specifically > allowed the president to regulate as he wished, during wartime, the > assets and fiscal transactions conducted by an enemy country. > (Confiscation and all that). Fair enough, for a WWI era law. > > Recall, this is during a declared war only. > In 1933 it was amended, hastily, sneakily, back-door-ily, in order > to grant incoming President Roosevelt extraordinary powers over the > money supply of the nation. It was amended to declare all citizens > of the United States to be "enemies", under its power during any > time of war *or national emergency*. That is, the "Trading with the > Enemy" act now applied to all citizens of the US and all of their > interpersonal transactions. Amen! Someone who understands that the governement long ago usurped the power of the voters and has declared the citizens to be the enemy, putting in place governmental powers that allow the elite to rule the country according to their personal dictates, no matter what the wishes of the citizens are. The ruling elite (not the people we elect, by the way) let us fight vainly over this or that provision of laws and regulations which cut off our private parts an inch at a time, and then, once their overt screwing of the citizenry has reached its final limits, they finish the job behind closed doors, via the dictatorial power of *national emergency* legislation. > Thus the new wording below. This is now during war *or national > emergency declared by the president*. > > "through any agency that he may designate, or otherwise, investigate, > regulate or prohibit under such rules and regulations as he may > prescribe <...> > Roosevelt of course declared a national emergency and proceeded on > his way. However, he declared it in such a way as to make it > continue until revoked. This country remains in a state of emergency > today, and will do so forthe foreseeable future, and the President > retains the extraordinary powers intended solely for wartime. > These include the total ability to regulate commerce in the United > States. 'We the sheeple' would be outraged if the government entered our homes and businesses and forced us into compliance with their wishes at gunpoint. So they do it with financial guns, in an age where money=survival, and the average joe's mind has been so conditioned to financial rule that the Money Gods are deemed to be invincible paragons of 'right thinking.' No matter how obvious it is that the government is using our own money to screw us, we still feel that we are 'bad people' if we don't pay our taxes. We feel like we are truly guilty criminals if we resist participating in our own oppression. > I recommend Michael Froomkin's excellent (and lengthy) article on the > subject at > http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/planet_clipper.htm. > > Although about the Clipper chip, if you go about 60% through the > article he has a solid discussion of the EAA, IEEPA and the > presidential power thereunder. It's 50 U.S.C. Sec. 1701 and > following. Section 1702 there has the meat of it. > > This Act allows the President, once he has declared a state of > emergency, to regulate essentially any commerce with another nation, > except those items directly identified as "speech" - magazines, > papers, etc. And if he declares a "Jaywalking Violators National Emergency" with far-reaching consequences, it will get a small blurb on the back pages of the major print media, if anything. Declan (bless his D.C. journalist ass) might speak up about the dangers of the action, but is unlikely to be heard by the people at the shopping malls, where most Americans live. > Every "right" the SAFE act grants is already possessed. The law > also poses severe penalties for using crypto in furtherance of a > crime. How long until we have a new law which "grants" us the right to breathe, but makes breathing in furtherance of a crime subject to severe penalties? > Anyone using PGP on their computer? Crime involved at least one > email sent for any reason? Extra five years. This will hardly > support the spread of encryption. > > It gives law enforcement guaranteed access to keys: an awful > precedent. Any law enforcement officer or investigative officer > (attornies prosecuting a case) who is empowered to prosecute or > participate in the prosecution of offenses under this act may compel > disclosure of keys. All one needs is an escrow provision to ensure > that such a key is available for the government to retrieve - and > such a provision is perfectly legal for the president to impose. > Thus, an FBI agent, who is "empowered" to investigate crimes under > this act, can compel disclosure, by a third party, of your keys - > without cause to even believe an offense has actually been > committed. Without judicial review. This will further the spread > of strong crypto? The end result? We can *still* use strong crypto, but *now* it will cost us five years of our life to do so, unless we give up our keys, which negates the use of crypto in the first place. I used to love Garner Ted Armstrong talking about missionaries who travelled to obscure corners of the earth in order to *save* people by telling them about Jesus. He would ask them what happened if a particular individual died before the missionary arrived, and thus never got a chance to hear about Jesus? Would they burn in hell, as a result. The missionaries would explain that, since they never got a chance to hear about Jesus, that they would go to heaven by default, since God wouldn't punish them with everlasting fire just because they never had a chance to be *saved*. Garner Ted would then point out that the missionaries where thus not giving the individual a chance to go to *heaven*, since they were going there anyway, by default, but were, in fact, giving the individual a chance to go to *hell*. I think about this every time that I hear about a new piece of government legislation designed to *save* me from this-or-that evil/hell. > THIS BILL GIVES NOTHING AT ALL AND MAKES USE OF CRYPTO WORTH > FIVE YEARS IN PRISON. Continued support of this bill by privacy and > crypto advocates is outrageous. Yes, but the reality of life is that reasonable people learn that they need to compromise...and compromise...and compromise...and compromise...and compromise...and compromise...and compromise... "HEY! WHERE DID ALL OF MY FREEDOM AND PRIVACY GO?!?" TruthMonger

1 0

"GOOD NEWS" "The Good News Electronic Journal"
by Biz-E-Wiz＠usa.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

***************************************************************** Thank you for Subscribing to "The Good News Electronic Journal". Your subscription is appreciated. To unscribe: HIT reply, type REMOVE in the subject area and HIT send. Thank You, The Management ***************************************************************** *** CHECKER Software -- Accept checks by Fax, Phone, or E-mail. Reg. Retail Price $199 - <<<- GET IT NOW FOR $49.95 ->>> Send this ad and payment to: Linkco - POB 66781 - Phoenix, AZ 85082 ***************************************************************** ****************************** PLEASE IGNORE THIS MESSAGE IF YOU LIVE OUTSIDE THE USA ------------------------------------------------------ BEAT-THE-IRS & PAY-NO-MORE -------------------------- Our PACKAGE, (Beat The IRS & PAY-NO-MORE) will teach you EXACTLY how to EASILY: STOP FEDERAL Income Tax Withholding, STOP April filing of 1040 Form, & STOP THE IRS EXTORTION PERMANENTLY ------------------------------------------------------- The IRS Federal Income System is based on VOLUNTARY COMPLIANCE.... We will teach you how to legally VOLUNTEER OUT OF THE SYSTEM! -------------------------------------------------------- - Your Success is ABSOLUTELY unconditionally GUARANTEED if your were BORN in and LIVE in one of the 50 Republic States. Our methods work every time for everybody. They are 100% legal, honest and ethical. We will pay anybody $1,000 if they can prove our method is ILLEGAL, DISHONEST or UNETHICAL!!! Our method has worked for every person who has ever bought this package without exception. NOBODY HAS EVER FAILED OR ASKED FOR A REFUND!!! - Our PACKAGE includes a LIFETIME, FREE, SIMPLE, Sizzling, RED Hot 50% PAY OUT Dealership, PLUS ALL the marketing material master copies you will ever need. YOUR PAYCHECKS WILL BE 10% TO 20% BIGGER EVERY WEEK, within 2 weeks of filing the proper forms and affidavit. WHY NOT GIVE YOURSELF A RAISE THIS YEAR BY EXERCISING AND ENJOYING MORE OF YOUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS. SET YOURSELF FREE! ------------------------------------------------------------- Your package includes unlimited FREE phone consultations, a copy of the U.S. Constitution, The Bill of Rights, forms, affidavits, and much, much more! TO ORDER BY MAIL: Send this entire ad and a $35 Money Order to: LINKCO --Dept. #1, POB 66781 -- Phoenix, AZ 85082 To order by phone and Fax Check call our office at (602)267-9688 between the hours of 4 and 11pm Mountain Standard Time. You may also call just to ask questions. Thanks for reading this message! Dealer #00001 - (Unconditional Money Back Guarantee) - - Copyright 1996 Linkco - ***************************************************************** From: FREEDOM STAR BANK -- P.O. Box 66781 -- Phoenix, AZ 85082 To Wise Investors, The Freedom Star National Bank of Arizona offers: "The More You Save The More You Earn". We offer only CD's, i.e., Certificates of Deposit. $100-$999 deposit pays 18%. $1,000-$4,999 deposit pays 24%. $5,000 and up deposit pays 30%. All % rates are per year and are not compounded. There is a 50% penalty for early withdrawal. All deposits have a 1 year maturity. All funds must remain on deposit for a least 6 months. Call Mr. Jon L. Boulet at 1-602-267-9688 for more information or to make a deposit. Thanks! ****************************************************************** 100,000 E-MAIL ADDRESSES *** ON 3-1/2" DISK *** $19.95 LINKCO MARKETING - POB 66781 - PHOENIX, AZ 85085 ***(602)267-9688*** ****************************************************************** 3,800 FRESH HOT FAX NUMBERS ***$41*** ON 3-1/2 DISK LINKCO MARKETING - POB 66781 - PHOENIX, AZ 85085 ***(602)267-9688*** ****************************************************************** (YOUR 50 WORDS *** BULK E-MAILED) to (1.5 MILLION HOT PROSPECTS) ***SEND YOUR 50 WORDS ON 3-1/2 DISK + $129.95*** LINKCO MARKETING - POB 66781 - PHOENIX, AZ 85085 ***(602)267-9688*** ****************************************************************** ***GREAT NEWS!*** Learn my SECRET to build a large downline FAST! Make more MONEY than you've ever made in your life! Great News International has created a NEW and POWERFUL marketing concept and its own DOWNLINE GENERATOR to market the finest product package ever offered through an MLM company! A possible WEEKLY $8,968 with each group of 30 people!! Only $50 one time out of pocket! SATISFACTION MONEY BACK GUARANTEE! FREE report, Valuable to all Networkers! ***Find Out How--Call 716-453-8952*** ***Fax-On-Demand (703)904-7770 Doc. #404*** ***InterNET: http://www.gnint.com/ir/jb4428.htm*** ***Jon L. Boulet (602)267-9688 *** Sponsor ID #jb4828*** ****************************************************************** Check out -LINKCO- (602)267-9688 1-11-pm (MST) We offer the following: 1. Domain registration services. 2. Domain name sales, trades, and consignments. 3. Copywriting. 4. Typeseting and graphic design. 5. TAX advice and counseling. 6. E-mail address lists. 7. Fax number lists 8. Web page design and hosting. 9. Bulk e-mail software and e-mail address extractors. 10. Pop3 E-mail accounts that are bulk mail friendly. 11. FREE investment advice. 12. FREE MLM counseling. 13. Discount Bulk e-mailing service. 14. 9 cent/min. long distance service. Changing LD provider not required. FREEBIE, just call me. 15. Discount advertising - opportunity publications. ************************************************************* Dear Entrepreneur, How to get MORE ORDERS for ANYTHING YOU SELL! Hi, saw your posting online and was wondering if you market products/services using your computer and would like to learn how to do so QUITE a bit better than what you are already doing? If so, just say the words (words=MORE ORDERS) and I'll email a free, helpful file that could mean the online marketing difference between scintillating success and frustrating failure. Just write me at: Linkco1(a)Juno.com and a complete information package will be e-mailed to you ASAP. ************************************************************* ********* E-MAIL DIRECT MARKETING ************ Effective Direct Advertising at a cost you can afford...... CARD DECKS cost you about 2 cents per card or $2,000 per 100,000. A post card size Advertisement in print cost about $800 per 100,000 circulation. BUT GET THIS !!!!! YOU can send your FULL 1 or 2 page sales letter and order form to 100,000 anxious affluent computer owners that are interested in your opportunity for ONLY: <<< $129 >>> That's the power of E-Mail and it means more and biger profits for YOU !!!!! Your cost is about $1 per thousand to get your sales letter out. If this doesn't make you BIG MONEY, NOTHING WILL!! Send us your advertising copy on a 3-1/2" disk in ASCII (.TXT) format along with this ad and your $129 check payable to: (LINKCO). Mail to: LINKCO - POB 66791 - Phoenix, AZ 85082 QUESTIONS CALL: (602)267-9688 3-11PM (MST). ************************************************************** ************************************************************** 10,000 BISINESS ENTREPRENEURS E-MAIL ADDRESSES *** ON 3-1/2" DISK *** $49.95 *** LINKCO MARKETING - POB 66781 - PHOENIX, AZ 85085 ***(602)267-9688*** ************************************************************** *** 2,000 MLM'ers E-MAIL ADDRESSES *** *** ON 3-1/2" DISK *** $29.95 *** LINKCO MARKETING - POB 66781 - PHOENIX, AZ 85085 ***(602)267-9688*** ************************************************************** ***

1 0

Re: SAFE Bill / Fuck You (an inch at a time)
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

William H. Geiger III wrote: > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > In <199705020430.VAA16643(a)fat.doobie.com>, on 05/01/97 at 10:30 PM, > nobody(a)huge.cajones.com (Huge Cajones Remailer) said: > > > We put up with crap from our government that we wouldn't accept from > >someone trying to sell us a mouthwash. The reason that we're not all > >drinking the "New Coke" is that D.C. has siphoned off all of the spin > >doctors/brainwashers from the corporate advertising industry. > > Well there must be a few spin-doctors left as we are drinking "New Coke". > :) > > The whole "New Coke/Orriginal Coke" was one of the best con jobs I have > ever seen. The Coca-Cola Company had a small problem, the cost of sugar. > It's compitition was using corn suryp as a sweetner in their products which > was much cheaper than the sugar Coca-Cola was using in theirs. > > Now how were they going to switch from sugar to corn suryp in Coke without > lossing a portion of their customers because of the change in taste? NEW > COKE!! > > Here is what they did: > > Come out with NEW COKE which was a major formula change. > Drop OLD COKE at the same time. > Wait a few months while the natives are restless over the change. Bring > back "OLD COKE" due to customer demmand (making Coca-Cola Inc. the "good" > guys). Don't tell anyone that you have switched from sugar to corn suryp > (the sheep will never notice). > > Vola!! Now Coca-Cola has dramatically increased their profits and won a > major PR campain (they care about their customers) sales are up costs are > down and the sheep are happy. > > Now I have NEVER seen the neanderthals in DC ever pull off somthing this > good. :) I guess that if their spin-doctors had been involved in the cypherpunks list takeover, that we would all have golden images of Sameer on our computers. CokeMonger

1 0

A Letter from the Smithsonian
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dear Dr. Dimitri Vulis, Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled "211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post. Hominid skull." We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents "conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Queens County two million years ago." Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be the "Malibu Barbie". It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field were loathe to come to contradiction with your findings. However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to its modern origin: 1. The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilized bone. 2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-hominids. 3. The dentition pattern evident on the "skull" is more consistent with the common domesticated canine (dog) than it is with the "ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams" you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time. This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution, but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Without going into too much detail, let us say that: A. The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has chewed on. B. Clams don't have teeth. It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your request to have the specimen carbon dated. This is partially due to the heavy load our lab must bear in its normal operation, and partly due to carbon dating's notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic record. To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced prior to 1956 AD, and carbon dating is likely to produce wildly inaccurate results Sadly, we must also deny your request that we approach the National Science Foundation's Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning your specimen the scientific name "Australopithecus spiff-arino." Speaking personally, I, for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the species name you selected was hyphenated, and didn't really sound like it might be Latin. However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating specimen to the museum. While it is undoubtedly not a hominid fossil, it is, nonetheless, yet another riveting example of the great body of work you seem to accumulate here so effortlessly. You should know that our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the Institution, and the entire staff speculates daily on what you will happen upon next in your digs at the site you have discovered in your back yard. Dr. Vulis, we eagerly anticipate your trip to our nation's capital that you proposed in your last letter, and several of us are pressing the Director to pay for it. We are particularly interested in hearing you expand on your theories surrounding the "trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix" that makes the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex femur you recently discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9-mm Sears Craftsman automotive crescent wrench. Yours in Science, Harvey Rowe Curator, Antiquities

2 1

Re: SAFE Bill discussion
by lucifer＠dhp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Mac Norton wrote: > On Fri, 2 May 1997, Shabbir J. Safdar wrote: > > By attacking the supporters of the bill, you're attacking CDT, the ACLU, > > EPIC, VTW, EFF, Eagle Forum, Americans for Tax Reform, and PGP Inc. You're > > saying that all the Internet advocates have turned against crypto? > > Criticizing the bill is not the same thing as "attacking" its > supporters. Criticizing the arguments of those supporters in > favor of the bill, and questioning seeming inconsistencies > therein, is not the same thing as "attacking" those supporters. > Nor does such criticism imply an accusation that all, or > even some, of those supporters "have turned against crypto." > > The illogical equlvalence you set up, however, does seem to > be characteristic of these supporters' arguments.:) Nor does citing a litany of 'Libertarian Approved Sources of Good and Righteousness" reduce the size of the stick getting shoved up one's butthole, or the right and responsibility of those who oppose this action to speak up. These fine, upstanding organizations that Shabbir speaks of have all become a part of the system. They have learned to play along with the compromise game, just like would-be terrorists who give up their hostages one-by-one to the 'negotiators'. The secret of hostage negotiation is to convince your opponent that you are his 'friend' and to convince him/her to be 'reasonable'. (Read "compromise.") I recently had a lawyer who suggested that I take the 'deal' that the prosecution was offering me, because it was a 'good one', even though I was innocent. Fuck him. I acted on my own behalf and tore the prosecutor a new asshole in court. The irony is that my lawyer, in the words of the judge, herself, was "one of the better lawyers" in the community. Fuck the "CDT, the ACLU, EPIC, VTW, EFF, Eagle Forum, Americans for Tax Reform, and PGP Inc." And fuck Mother Teresa if she wants me to support the SAFE bill. I don't care how many children she's saved, it has nothing to do with my decision to fight against bad legislation. TruthMonger

1 0

Re: SAFE Bill discussion
by Lucky Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:47 AM 5/2/97 -0400, Shabbir J. Safdar wrote: >By attacking the supporters of the bill, you're attacking CDT, the ACLU, >EPIC, VTW, EFF, Eagle Forum, Americans for Tax Reform, and PGP Inc. You're >saying that all the Internet advocates have turned against crypto? > >I don't think so. I think you're sense of perspective is out of whack. I think the members of the privacy coalition suffer from the EFF syndrome. The same syndrome that got us Digital Telephony, because the EFF got suckered into believing that it "was the best deal we could get". Yeah, right. The government managed to sucker the EFF then. Now, they are suckering the members of the "privacy" coalition into supporting a law that will gain us *nothing* we don't already have while potentially putting citizens away for five years for the most minor offenses. SAFE must be either completely rewritten (unlikely) or defeated. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred "I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence." Mahatma Gandhi

1 0

Booby traps, but no anarchist writings
by Lou Poppler 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From today's NYT http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/ny-explosives.html [N] EW YORK -- A Bronx man who booby-trapped his apartment with homemade bombs accidentally blew his left hand off Thursday morning, the police said, [snip] Just what Saperstein -- who has a criminal record dating back to 1983 for weapons possession, disorderly conduct and drug possession -- was doing with all the explosives puzzled investigators. "There's no indication he was involved in any group," said a police investigator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "There were no rantings or anarchist writings of any kind." [snip] [end of quoted material] Good thing this guy didn't have a folder of old cypherpunks messages on a hard drive! Then he'd *really* be in trouble I guess.

2 1

High Ranking Reprsentative pulls support of SAFE...
by Jonah Seiger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Looks like the FBI and thier allies have been playing hardball, and have managed to convince a high-ranking Republican member of Congress to buy into their ani-cryto reform arguments. Solomon is the Chairman of the House Rules Committee. This fight just got a lot tougher. Jonah ---- May 1, 1997 OPPOSE HR. 695 "SAFE ACT" Dear Colleague: Earlier this week, after meeting with officials from Defense and FBI, I removed myself as a cosponsor of HR 695. Allow me to explain some of their concerns about this bill. The Department of Defense believes that HR 695 would increase the export threshold for encryption software to a level which would effectively remove existing controls. This would make unbreakable encryption technology widely available and "have a negative impact on national security, effective law enforcement and public safety". The FBI opposes the bill because, "It would be irresponsible for the U.S. to adopt a policy that consciously unleashes widespread, unbreakable, non-key recovery encryption products that undermine law enforcement in the United States and worldwide." I also met with Ambassador Aaron (OECD), who pointed out that many of the major industrial countries have already approved encryption safeguards and the rest are waiting for the United States to act. He believes HR 695 would send the worst possible signal to our allies. Lastly, Assistant Attorney General Andrew Fois stated in a letter to Chairman Coble, "... the bill would severely compromise law enforcement's ability to protect the American people from the threats posed by terrorists, organized crime, child pornographers, drug cartels, financial predators, hostile foreign intelligence agents, and other criminals... It is difficult enough to fight crime without making criminals' tasks any easier." In addition to the FBI and DOD the legislation is opposed by the Justice Department, Central Intelligence,. the NSA, the National District Attorney's Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the National Sherrif's Association. Again, I would ask you to oppose HR 695. Sincerely, [signed] GERALD B. SOLOMON Member of Congress. * Value Your Privacy? The Governmet Doesn't. Say 'No' to Key Escrow! * Adopt Your Legislator - http://www.crytpo.com/adopt -- Jonah Seiger, Communications Director (v) +1.202.637.9800 Center for Democracy and Technology pager +1.202.859.2151 <jseiger(a)cdt.org> PGP Key via finger http://www.cdt.org http://www.cdt.org/homes/jseiger

2 1

The Virtues of Extremism
by Tim May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It seems to me we're seeing an obvious manfestation of the classic "inside the Beltway" mentality. The vocal SAFE suporters are so closely aligned with the legislative process that they can't see the forest for the trees. I won't even speculate too much about the dynamics of why this is so, but it's been seen time and time again. Maybe it's that their vision becomes tunnel vision, sort of like the way a pilot focusses on his altimeter, tapping it and not quite believing it, as his plane crashes into the ground. Maybe this is the only world they know, the world of lobbying. Maybe they do truly believe it's "the best deal we can get." Well, I am not inside the Beltway, and I don't think much of _anything_ Washington does. I refused to renew my membership in the National Rifle Association when it became clear they were "playing the game," going along with repressive, gun-grabbing legislation because "this is the best deal we can get." The NRA lost a lot of members with this stance, and saw gun ownership rights eroded at every turn. The new leadership, elected after this fiasco, pledged that no longer would they "work with" repressive legislation. We'll see what happens. Meanwhile, as with the Cypherpunks movement, vastly more radical steps are needed to sanction the gun grabbers like Swinestein and her leftist allies. (Hint: the more extremist organizations I now work with are probably one of the areas I'm apparently committing putative felonies in. We don't treat the gun laws as valid, and will defend our rights against any gun grabbers. That we use PGP means we could easily face the maximum CDT-approved sentence. As Marc Rotenberg reminded us, the CDT wrote: ""CDT strongly urges you to report H.R. 695, the SAFE Act, out of the Courts and Intellectual Property Subcommittee without amendment." Fuck Congress, and fuck CDT.) "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Now more than ever Cypherpunks need to take action. If SAFE becomes law, every single organization which supported it should be held accountable. That means PGP, Inc., if indeed PGP, Inc. supports this repressive legislation. Perhaps we should think about sending letters, summarizing the points we've been making here, to all of these organizations which signed the letter supporting SAFE. Perhaps many of the organizations spent little time thinking about the issues. Perhaps Roger Schlafly should speak to his mother (head of the Eagle Forum, as I recall) about the chilling effects of criminalizing crypto use when any of the tens of thousands of Big Brother-defined "prosecutable offenses" are allegedly committed. Perhaps we should ask Phil Zimmermann why PGP, Inc. supports this. Or perhaps he'll finally see the light when some of his anti-nuke friends are charged with using his own product, PGP, in connection with their "prosecutably offenses" at the Nevada Test Site! That would be ironic indeed. It's time we simply give up on Washington and its criminal actions. Washington is a cancer than can only be cured with a few megatons of nuclear disinfectant. --Tim May, still a felon, and soon to be even more of a felon if he uses crypto in support of his activities There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

1 0

Re: TWO Letters on SAFE
by jimbell＠pacifier.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:07 5/02/97 -0400, Jonah Seiger wrote: >This is indeed true - CDT sent a separate letter and signed the IPC letter. > >As Marc Rotenberg knows very well, the legislative process is complicated. >Marc also knows that Goodlatte, Coble, Lofgren, and the other subcommittee >supporters of SAFE chose not to consider any amendments at the subcommittee >markup, but rather to take up our concerns at the full committee. You obviously meant, "ignore our concerns" rather than "take up our concerns," right?!? Because that is, more accurately, what they did and will do. >Goodlatte's staff and the other sponsors of SAFE had worked very hard to >prevent any amendments, hostile *and* friendly, at the subcommittee vote >for fear of hostile amendments from the Administration and opponents of >SAFE in the congress. A bill isn't worth much when it gets to the full >Committee if it gets gutted at the Subcommittee. Goodlatte wanted to get >some momentum behind it before going into the expected all out fight at the >full committee. I see a issue that's not being addressed. Presumably, in legislative negotiations the theory behind including such a provision (the criminal provision) is that there are people "out there" who would support it with that provision present, but who would oppose it with that provision removed. (Moreover, the theory would suggest that somebody believes that this bill would be MORE likely to pass with the provision present than absent.) Who, exactly, are these people? Aside from a few government thugs, I really don't see the groundswell. Numerically, I think I'm safe in concluding that there are in the citizenry, by far, more people who would support the SAFE bill only with the provision removed than those who'd support it only with the provision present. We should insist on a bill which reflects the desires of the public, NOT the government. One more thing. That idiot Clinton can easily veto this bill if he chooses to do so. The only way this bill is going to turn into law, I think, is if he _doesn't_ veto it, and that will mean that he prefers getting its "positives" (positive to him, at least), the criminal provision, and all those "legitimate needs of law enforcement", and tolerating its "negatives" (again, to him, at least.) He may publicly oppose it, but I think that position is a fraud. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

1 0

Building a Tempest Interceptor (fwd)
by Ray Arachelian 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This was on the Surveillance List... by Frank Jones aka SpyKing(a)thecodex.com http://www.thecodex.com Copyright 1997 The is very little public knowledge about TEMPEST. Most infomation, including how to safeguard against monitoring, has been classified by the government. You can view an article I wrote on TEMPEST at: http://www.thecodex.com/c_tempest.html and another at: http://www.thecodex.com/rise.html In order to protect computers and CRTs from electromagnetic emission monitoring (interception, recontruction and viewing) it is necessary to use shielding. This shielding is available in several forms but that is another article... Once the shielding is installed, how do you test it for leakage? It is necessary to see if you can monitor the device yourself. Since TEMPEST monitoring equipment is normally very expensive and hard to come by, here is a simple way to construct a simple monitoring device that will help you detemine if your computer can be snooped on by outside sources... this device was designed for defensive purposes and should NOT be used offensively... it does not have the distance capability of my DataScan device but it WILL work as a laboratory benchtop demo device... Like Van Eck and Moller, I have deliberately flawed the article for the technically challenged... After all, we dont want everyone to have one of these, do we? TEMPEST Interceptor - Follow my instructions... You need to learn something about electronics to make this happen. The first lesson will be to construct a sync generator to drive the computer monitor without any signal or video. To start this you must take your spectrum analyzer, turn off every appliance in the area. Put the analyzer near the computer monitor, turn on the monitor but NOT the computer. Start searching around 15Khz. You should get a strong signal somewhere between 14Khz & 17Khz. Log that frequency. Next try looking around 30Hz to 60Hz. Which is stronger 30 or 60? Log that. Next were gonna build a computer sync generator (video gear will not work). Most technicians who have tried to build a TEMPEST interceptor have been trying to use off-the-shelf products. Don't believe what you read or hear, they won't work. Youve got to build a computer sync generator. It isn't really so hard to do. Get yourself a copy of the "CMOS Cookbook". It's around. In there it shows how to build a 555 timer. It is a small and simple circut. Maybe 5 components. The 555 has in it all the clock and electronics to make a timer from 1Hz to 10Mhz. Follow the instructions and make a variable timer (it is really simple). Make the first one run at the exact frequency of the monitor, say 16 Khz. Next make a seperate one at the second frequency say 30 Hz. Then tie them together with a .o1 Mfd cap. The output should drive your monitor (generator is done). Two minor things I forgot to mention. The output of the 555 is about 5 to 12 volts. You will need to attenuate it to about .3 volts. Several resistors will do. The other thing is that you need a negative pulse out of the 555. The normal output of a 555 is a square wave. On and off . You must vary the duty cycle to create a square wave which is most of the time on and the sync duration off. You now need a seperate dedicated computer monitor. Open the input plug and find the shielded cable inside. Attach the output of your circut to the center-conductor and the battery minus from your circut to the shield. You have a solid black screen on the monitor. Turn up the brightness. There should be no rolling and weaving. If so... adjust the pot in YOUR CIRCUIT not the monitor, to stop it. Next step. Collect the signal you hear and see on your anaylzer/receiver. Take the output of your reciever tuned to those frequencies. Connect the output through a .01 mfd cap to the output of the sync generator and viola you should start to see the monitors radiated signal on your monitor. Shielding your viewing monitor from the recieving monitor and small adjustments in your generator frequency should do it. In fact no adjustments should still do it. The antenna that you use is critical. Make sure you use the right one... ;-) ************************************************************************** Send Postings to: spyking(a)con2.com with "Post" in subject field with subject ************************************************************************** Subscribe to: spyking(a)con2.com In the subject field type: subscribe-surveillance list e-mail address **************************************************************************

1 0

chained stego & interfaces to remailers
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Introduction (Skip down to "Chained Stego" if this intro is obvious for you) Some users are in countries where crypto is illegal, and would still like the ability to communicate with others on topics which are considered illegal in their countries (an example being documenting civil rights abuses). For them using encryption is not an option unless they combine with steganography. Also in countries where using crypto is legal, people still would like to have the ability to discuss topics which are considered illegal in their country (an example exporting cryptographic code, perhaps) For these users they do have the option of using encryption. However for some serious users of crypto, they may wish to hide the fact that they are sending encrypted communications to anyone at all, as well as hiding _who_ they are communicating with via mixmaster remailers, and hiding the contents of their communications via the use of encryption. Using remailers and using encryption shows up under traffic analysis even in freer countries, and if you were using steganography, you would be above suspicion, apparently never having sent an encrypted message at all, or at least not having sent one during the time in question. A useful capability to address the needs of these classes of users would be to be able to send messages to a remailer by steganographically encoding them in publically published material, Examples being: messages posted to USENET, messages posted to mailing lists, material made available on web pages (text, images, audio files), CUSeeMe video streams, etc. Such a system would allow a person in a country where crypto is outlawed to participate anonymously in discussions in the remaining free parts of the world without appearing to be using cryptography. The simple approach is to set up stego to remailer gateways which scan newsgroups and mailing lists. (It might be a useful to integrate this function into the Eternity server, as it is already doing quite a bit of scanning of newsgroups, and scanning newsgroups is relatively expensive, so we may as well scan for multiple message types while we are scanning). So, to send an anonymous message, a person PGP encrypts their message, and manipulates the encrypted message to remove the statistical properties identifying it as a PGP message (by removing "-----BEGIN..." headers, the fixed PGP formatting inside that, and the bias caused by the use of RSA), PGP stealth version 2.x would be suitable for this purpose. Next a suitable steganographic encoding is required. A simple method would be perhaps an in-your-face approach, to include a randomly distributed, randomly changing .sig: == Use a random number, go to jail, so lock me up already. QGRjcy5leC5hYy51az4gKEhpZ2ggU2VjdXJpdHkpiQCVAgUQMli+7B98EdWB2LS9 AQFF0gQAjiAOPPCs7s0VCHoFI2IWMEcAeQInmnl2p+6rpsvIxjX1v3wBqqstgBu5 aCLY9Uns+iKjzcnt5DTj6NPhJ8EOlefwgHUssiBLTsw7tOvT9fQwcIXOE5ikGP7j RObTq3a2Vtz4/O/YgN0KQnWcqTDuadeP17cJ2bbaWJpZiGDyWGSJARUDBRAySOsk The stego remailer gateway has to be able to put back together the multiple parts in the correct sequence. The Date: field from the post would be enough information to allow this. Chained Stego However there is another problem: the remailer gateway knows the identity of the stego users. The stego users therefore have to trust the stego gateway not to tell the authorities in their country. They also have to trust that the gateway is not actually be run by their own countries censorship board. The price for misplacing trust and revealing your use of encryption may be death in some of these countries. It would be nice if we could chain the stego function, so that the amount of trust required of each element could be reduced, in a similar way to chaining through remailers acheives this. So (here we get to the actual content of this post, the above having been introduction), we could arrange that the stego user encrypts with a selection of stego gateways public keys. The steps to send to gateways A and then B are: 1. encrypt with B's public key, normalise output (with pgp stealth) 2. encrypt with A's public key, normalise output 3. encode normalised output from 2 into an innocuous looking USENET post The process by which the stego message is recovered is then more complex, and has higher overhead. Each stego gateway has to scan newsgroups for stego messages, and forward it's potential partially decrypted stego messages to the other stego gateways. Then each of those remailers decrypts, and if the result is more stego noise, again forward back to the other stego gateways. The problem here is when do we stop! Remember if we pick a message, and apply our stego decoding method to it we get something which looks indistinguishable to a stego message whether there exists a stego message or not. Also how much of USENET do we scan? The stego gateways will be sending a lot of partially decrypted potential stego messages between themselves. One potential solution to the infinite loop problem is to include with the message a note to the gateway stating how many times this has been decrypted. After a few hops it can be discarded. If the max hops is 2, and there are 3 gateways A, B and C. The messages created by the single encrypted message are: round 1: A, B, and C decrypt and forward to each other round 2: B, and C decrypt C discards the output; B forwards the message to the requested remailer (We presume that multiply encoding to the same remailer is not useful, if A can decode by denormalising and decrypting twice, you may just as well have addressed it to A normalised and encrypted once). B does not know which person's USENET post this came from. He does not know where it is going (to another USENET group via a chain of remailers, or to an indivdual) However B does know that remailer A knows who the message is from. Presume there are n remailers. For hops which go through h remailers, collusion is required by all h remailers to obtain the identity of the poster. If the attacker owns k of those remailers, that is k of the remailers are colluding to discover the identity of the stego user, then the if k < h the attacker will never discover the identity of any posters using chains of length h. If k >= h the attacker will discover the identity of a stego user only in cases where the chain includes all of the hops. (C(n,k) is choose k of n function computed with n!/((n-k)!k!) k!(n-h)! Prob = C(k,h)/C(n,h) = -------- n!(k-h)! Some sample values, n = 8 values of h = hops, and k = no of rogue gateways h= \k| hops\| 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 --------------------------------- 1 | .13 .25 .38 .50 .63 .75 .88 2 | .00 .04 .11 .21 .36 .54 .75 3 | .00 .00 .02 .07 .18 .36 .63 4 | .00 .00 .00 .01 .07 .21 .50 5 | .00 .00 .00 .00 .02 .11 .38 6 | .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .04 .25 7 | .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .13 Now interestingly it seems to me that this figure is per stego message, so if you chose different gateway chains on each message your cumulative chance of being caught would be worse than if you just chose a chain and stuck to it. You're trying to minimise your cumulative chance of being identified. If you use a chain, and the jack boots don't kick down your door for a few weeks, you hope it is a good chain. Of course there is a chance that gateways could be taken over and your chain would then become a compromised chain. An additional danger if a gateway is compromised and it's key is revealed, the attacker can then go back through it's saved messages and look for messages which came from the newly acquired gateway, or went to it, to see how many more chains this compromises. It would seem like a good idea for the gateways to ensure forward secrecy by re-keying reasonably frequently. To do better than this, we could make the stego gateways to act like middlemen remailers. That is a gateway will always communicate with other gateways via a remailer. Now gateway B does not know which of gateways A or C decoded the message from the newsgroup. So he has to attack them all. Better still, the gateways can be completely hidden. They can use a message pool to communicate. This has higher overhead, but now the fact that gateway B knows either A or C decoded the message does not help much because gateway B can't physically locate A and C. An alternative to the suggestion of including a count of the number of decryptions that have taken place so far to avoid infinite loops, is to do the job probablistically. Say that each remailer says that it will only accept mesages where the low order 3 bits after decryption are "101". This rule doesn't apply to the first hop, which knows that the message hasn't circulated anyway, as it has just pulled it from the newsgroup. So the first gateway decodes, forwards to the other gateways. Each gateway decodes, and if the desired bit pattern comes out, sends the decrypted message to the other remailers. This way we place no restriction on the number of hops, avoid revealing who the first hop is explicitly, but ensure that the messages which are not stego at all die naturally, and don't propogate for ever between the gateways. Also the "101" is likely enough to come up quite by chance, and the number of actual stego messages is small compared to just ordinary USENET posts that seeing a "101" doesn't prove anything conclusive after 1 hop. However after several hops (if an attacker owns several of the gateways), the probability of getting multiple "101"s in a row points increasingly to a stego message, whereas if we relied on a header stating how many hops, no information would be leaked by the attacker handling multiple hops in the middle of the chain. So it's a trade off between lower overall overhead whilst allowing multiple hops, whilst increasing the susceptability of the system to leaked information to an attacker who owns multiple rogue gateways. However these are all very high overhead because they have DC net like overheads, you send a copy to everything to everyone always, so you have a perfect mix. You can trade off this security to obtain lower bandwidth. Here's one suggestion of how to do this. Obviously we can't include with each partial decryption instructions on who to remail it to (because if you found some instructions, that would reveal immediately that it was a stego message). However, we can interpret the random bit patterns as remailer instructions. Say there are n gateways, we can number the gateways consecutively and take the decrypted message mod n - 1 to produce the index number of a gateway to send to next. We can include a count of decryptions so far to reduce overhead. Another way to avoid infinite loops with this variation is to take the decrypted message mod ((n - 1) + j), anything over n-1 gets discarded. Messages naturally die out statistically at a speed determined by the ratio of j / n - 1, after h hops there is probability: (j / n - 1) ^ h that the message will get discarded. Provided the stego users account for a small amount of traffic, their use would likley be lost in the large pool of noise even if they stuck to a particular chain. Or they could themselves use normally distributed selections of random chains. However if they did this, their cumulative chance of sending through only rogue gateways on one post would increase. Interestingly this setup has different properties to mixmaster mixes, with this arrangement traffic analysis gives you nothing, as the inputs are hidden, and the traffic is perfectly normally distributed. (Presuming that the stego users create random chains also). Cover traffic between gateways adds nothing. You probably need cover traffic on output however, so that the gateways send constant, or at least evenly distributed amounts of traffic off into the remailer net, so that one persons posting can not be correlated with exits from the gateway network. Some delay in the gateway network would help also. Random delay is different to mixing in this instance because there is already lots of mixing going on, the point is to ensure that an exit from the gateway network is not observable at fixed time periods after posts from particular suspected stego users. If there are many users this should average out. Note also, that when a message does decode to a message, the gateway should generate a random replacement message and forward that to a random remailer with the same probability as for other non-decoding messages, otherwise receiving a message would skew the statistics. Given that the stego user has an interest in sticking to a chain, this is less secure than sending copies of partially decrypted potential messages to all gateways. Either he doesn't stick to his chain, thus increasing his odds of being detected, or he uses his fixed chain and runs the risk that this statistic shows through. If there are many stego users each with different fixed randonly chosen chains, the fact that chains are fixed would be less likely to reveal information as the random chains would tend to cancel out, and themselves have the same normal distribution as the non-stego traffic. Comments? More efficient ways to get around the weakness of a single remailer gateway hop? Adam -- Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

1 0

Re: A new system for anonymity on the web
by Hal Finney 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Adam Back, <aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk>, writes: > Hal Finney <hal(a)rain.org> writes: > > Theoretically, at least for long downloads, passing through multiple > > slow links shouldn't slow down the transmission, > > I'm not sure that this is so. > [...] > When Alice and Bob are online, consider that they are actually using > their bandwidth most of the time. I know I do; if I'm not using it I > hang up, with pay per second phone lines, you're likely to. Actually here in the U.S. most people have access to unmetered Internet access these days. Local and national ISP's are almost always that way, and AOL offers that option now as well. I find that I tend to browse in "flurries", paging around a bit, then settling down to read for a while. But you're right, I did not consider the interference among multiple paths running through a jondo. That issue applies to the higher speed links as well. If average path length is n, then on average there will be about n paths going through each jondo (assuming all "home" jondos have set up paths). So the question will be whether the average person uses more than 1/n of the bandwidth available during the time he is connected. This will no doubt depend on the pricing model for Internet service, as you suggest. > > just increase the latency. I don't have a very clear picture about > > how long it would take to snake in and out of a bunch of people's > > modem lines en route to the web server. > > I'm sure it's going to increase the latency too. My ping times are > 200ms from the PPP link alone (ie pinging the PPP server machine > itself). Add to this that the members of the jondo / crowds pool may > not be on the same ISP, and you've got the additional overheads of > whatever latency is added by the cumulative latency between each of > the hops in the chain. Yes, latency would be cumulative, and I just tested mine and found it was 160-220 ms, about the same as what you saw. So running through say 5 jondos at the end of modem paths would add about a second of latency. I think this would be fine if it only happened once per web page, but almost intolerable if it was once per tiny picture. > I wonder if you could improve the security of this by trading off > against some additional bandwidth consumption for the ISP. Say have > split the jondo in half, with two cooperating half-Jondos acting as a > single virtual jondo in such a way that someone with root access on > one machine but not the other, can't extract any useful information by > spying on that half of the jondo. This is an intriguing idea. Secure multiparty calculation protocols allow calculations to be made such that neither machine would have access to all the data. It is an interesting question how this could be applied to the anonymous communication problem. In this specific case, if the Crowds system were enhanced so that end-to-end encryption was used (which seems very practical and useful), you could run a jondo on your PC whose only function was to link to the jondo on the ISP and then set up the additional path through the jondo net. The path between your local PC jondo and the end one in the path would be encrypted, so even root on the local ISP could not see the contents of what you send down the jondo path. He might still be able to see when you were sending and when not, but he couldn't tell where it was going. Hal

2 1

SafePassage Web Proxy follow-up
by SafePassage Sales 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dear SafePassage Evaluator: It's been a while since you downloaded the evaluation version of SafePassage, and we just wanted to check in to see how things were going. If you have problems installing SafePassage, using SafePassage with your current browser, or any other questions about our SafePassage product line, please email: safepassage-sales(a)c2.net or safepassage(a)ukweb.com If applicable, please include some recent samples of your log files, and detailed information on your platform and the version of SafePassage you're using. If you have sales or ordering questions, please feel free to give us a call at 510 986 8770. Our hours are 10 am to 6 pm, Pacific Daylight Time. You can also contact UKWeb, our European partner and master distributor, at +44 113 222 0046. -- Join our Early Adopter Program: For the following applications, we are offering a flat-fee license of $45,000 per year, provided payment is received by May 15, 1997: (a) Banks, for distribution to their customers. (b) Internet Service Providers, for distribution to their customers. (c) Companies, for internal use.

1 0

Artikel about XS4ALL in New York Times (fwd)
by cpunks＠algebra.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

----- Forwarded message from tank ----- >From cpunks(a)manifold.algebra.com Fri May 2 05:04:57 1997 From: tank <tank(a)xs4all.nl> Message-Id: <199705020912.LAA11297(a)xs1.xs4all.nl> Subject: Artikel about XS4ALL in New York Times To: tank(a)xs4all.nl Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 11:12:37 +0200 (MET DST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com Precedence: bulk THE NEW YORK TIMES/CYBERTIMES www.nytimes.com April 29, 1997 By BRUNO GIUSSANI For an ISP in the Netherlands, Controversy Is an Old Friend AMSTERDAM -- April has meant business as usual at XS4ALL (access-for-all), the third-largest Internet service provider in the Netherlands. The month started off with the XS4ALL Web site being out of reach for a substantial portion of the European online population, and it is ending with the provider's adding a notch to its track record as a champion of freedom of speech. On April 11 the Dutch Web site was blocked by the German academic network, Deutsche Forschungsnetz (DFN), which serves about 400 universities and research organizations and provides Internet access to a half million people. DFN acted under pressure from the Federal Criminal Investigation Bureau pointing out the illegal -- in Germany, though not in the Netherlands -- content of Radikal Magazine, which is housed on the XS4ALL server. Radikal, a left-wing underground magazine, advocates "militant and armed interventions" to overthrow the government, and has published a "Short guide to hindering railway transports of all kinds" -- a handbook describing how to attack and damage tracks. Since selectively barring single home pages is technically impossible, the DNF action cut off all 6,000 pages on the XS4ALL servers, including those of Serbian opposition radio station B-92 and several scientific databases. Thus, while blocking illegal material, the German network was also hampering scientific work -- which DFN has been established to nurture. Not to mention that skilled Internet users could route around the obstacle by using a remailing system or a proxy server located abroad. What's more, Radikal Magazine can be found on several dozen "mirror sites" around the world. Ten days later -- after being flooded by protests -- the German network lifted the ban on XS4ALL. "An effective blockage of illegal information has not been within the realms of possibility," Klaus-Eckart Maass, a DFN spokesman, conceded in an interview with The Associated Press. Now, this happened the very same week as the indictment of a German manager of CompuServe, a leading international online service, for the transmission of allegedly illegal materials over the Internet and as the German Parliament opened discussions on a new multimedia law. The new bill would place the responsibility for content on the supplier of the data, thus Internet service providers would not be held liable for illegal information that could pass over their wires unless they have been alerted and "have the technical ability" to delete or block it -- the very same scheme the German academic network found impossible to enforce. It was not the first time XS4ALL had been at the forefront of an Internet skirmish. Last September, most German ISPs blocked XS4ALL for a month after complaints by a regional prosecutor about Radikal. (In January Angela Marquardt, a Bavarian socialist politician, was indicted for linking to the banned magazine from her personal home page). "After a couple of weeks, the censored information was mirrored on some 50 Web sites around the world and voluntarily removed by our user from the XS4ALL server," the company's founder, Felipe Rodriquez, 28, explained. "After the block had ended, our user put the documents back on his page." Along with German prosecutors, the Amsterdam-based provider has lined up a fair list of other adversaries: the McDonald's fast-food chain, the Serbian government and the Church of Scientology, just to name a few. XS4ALL's roots reach into the hacker movement. The venture started out in 1993 "to give anyone the possibility to access the Internet." At that time there were no commercial access providers in Holland. It has grown into a respectable and very successful business in less than four years, yet the principles on which it was created have not changed: "Internet for the masses" is still its motto. XS4ALL currently has 55 employees, boasts 21,000 subscribers and hosts some 6,000 home pages. "A few years ago, we would have been portrayed as a band of dangerous anarchists, bent on disrupting society," Rodriquez told the Dutch daily Trouw. "But now they have come to see that we are nice and quiet people really." The company was instrumental in the creation of the Amsterdam Digital City project, a community networking initiative backed by taxpayer's money, and Rodriquez himself played a key role in setting up the Dutch anti-child-pornography hotline, the first of its kind, last year. "Before we started the hotline, Holland had a reputation of being a kid-porn freehaven," he said in an interview last week. "We designed it as a non-censoring form of self-regulation." The hotline is run by Internet users and providers. Unlike Britain's Internet Watch Foundation, the Dutch hotline doesn't censor any information nor does it ask the provider to do so. Hotline operators contact the author of the information and ask him to remove the offending content. "If the author does not comply, we report him to the police, and he'll be prosecuted," said Rodriquez, who also is chairman of the Dutch Providers Association. "The Internet Watch Foundation forces the provider to remove the illegal content," he added. "This is a fundamentally different approach to responsibilities on the Internet. We think the author of the information is responsible for his own actions, not the provider." That's why XS4ALL didn't take any steps against the customer who posted Radikal Magazine on its server. "Our policy is that as a provider we are not in the position to judge whether this magazine is illegal in the Netherlands, therefore we do not interfere with our users' freedom of speech," Rodriquez stated. "If there is any doubt about the legality of the publication in Holland, a Dutch court of law would be the proper place to remove these doubts," he added. This was the case when, in September 1995, the Religious Technology Center -- better known as the Church of Scientology -- filed for the seizure of all the XS4ALL computer equipment "because one of our users had put on his home page some information to which Scientology said it owned the copyright." The document -- the now famous "Fishman affidavit" -- is the actual transcript of a testimony given by Steven Fishman in a Los Angeles Court in which he accused the church of having forced him to act illegally. "We denied any responsibility for the content on our users' pages; they decide for themselves what they will publish," Rodriquez recalled. "We won the litigation." The user preferred to take down the controversial document. Yet when violation of the law is flagrant, XS4ALL doesn't hesitate to comply, as it did a few weeks ago when it shut down a customer's home page called Neuroroom, which sold marijuana and other soft drugs in Holland and abroad. The company's commitment to support free expression and democratization of the Internet doesn't stop here. Last fall when the Serbian government censored radio station B-92, XS4ALL helped design an Internet campaign and started to carry news broadcasts (in RealAudio format) that kept the rare opposition voice alive and the international public informed through independent accounts of the events occurring during the mass demonstrations in Belgrade. "They gave us disk space, donated network traffic and helped in training people," said Frank Tiggelaar, a Dutch activist for democratization in former Yugoslavia. "Basically any project we like gets free resources from XS4ALL," Rodriquez commented. The campaign of Helen Steel and Dave Morris is among the projects XS4ALL's old hackers do like. The two British environmentalists are the main characters of a civil case that started in 1990 when the McDonald's restaurant chain sued them for distributing flyers pointing at what they called the company's economic and ecological "ravages." The trial is not over yet -- but it has spawned a large Internet-based support network and fed a huge anti-McDonald's Web site called McSpotlight hosted, not surprisingly, by XS4ALL. EUROBYTES is published weekly, on Tuesdays. Click here for a list of links to other columns in the series. Related Sites Following are links to the external Web sites mentioned in this article. These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability. When you have finished visiting any of these sites, you will be able to return to this page by clicking on your Web browser's "Back" button or icon until this page reappears. Bruno Giussani at eurobytes(a)nytimes.com welcomes your comments and suggestions. Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company -- XS4ALL Internet BV - Felipe Rodriquez-Svensson - finger felipe(a)xs4all.nl for Managing Director - - pub pgp-key 1024/A07C02F9 ----- End of forwarded message from tank -----

1 0

Re: FCPUNX:Layoffs at PGP
by jamesd＠echeque.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> [arrow] PGP Pretty Good on Privacy of Layoff Details > by Kristi Coale > > [...] > > > "Internet Fast-Forward is not as closely related to the tools we > develop for individuals for privacy," he said. And the fact that > Fast-Forward filters ads which are an "inimical part of some of > the emerging Web commerce models ... we don't want to hinder this > development." I think this tells us everything we need to know about the management of PGP inc. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

1 0

Cyberstrike
by harka＠nycmetro.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- May be of interest... In> From: cleacy(a)execulink.com (Chris Leacy) In> Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.announce In> Subject: SOFTWARE: CyberStrike 1.13a Ad filtering/Cookie cutting Proxy In> Date: 30 Apr 1997 23:28:43 -0400 In> CyberStrike: Version 1.13a First Public Release In> The first public alpha of CyberStrike was released today. In> It can be found at <URL:http://www.execulink.com/~cleacy> In> CyberStrike is a banner ad filtering, cookie cutting, HTTP In> header overriding proxy of a program. In> Whether for privacy concerns, or just to speed up your In> browsing, CyberStrike performs admirably well at it's task. In> Chris Ciao Harka /*************************************************************/ /* This user supports FREE SPEECH ONLINE ...more info at */ /* and PRIVATE ONLINE COMMUNICATIONS! -> http://www.epic.org */ /* E-mail: harka(at)nycmetro.com (PGP-encrypted mail pref'd) */ /* PGP public key available upon request. [KeyID: 04174301] */ /* F-print: FD E4 F8 6D C1 6A 44 F5 28 9C 40 6E B8 94 78 E8 */ /*<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>*/ /* May there be peace in this world, may all anger dissolve */ /* and may all living beings find the way to happiness... */ /*************************************************************/ ___ Blue Wave/386 v2.30 [NR] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAgUBM2mQeTltEBIEF0MBAQEbUAf+NQOMPrml38ijLwv8MIPSkTUbtbNQebJy R4LaeYhXI6Z/OzJdX6AQC2GisxMyPiz3QWWBoAqxGkunWDHbQzDfZVWW6nZa4zLY do2r11CEWFPba1igX+8JtCm9gd11S8Zlff5Pw5eTYOMcsVSHf6Z/+iAT5aqnIdcb YU26JswL1MofhWlNhbNXYc/9wQ3uUn1hU3lin+Lujfa5+cXXlTyfz6eFcJlwD7ZY KdK7UfPMuCeZnUX/VJqBdJ1idXfC5YOlwVMBNIyQK7PgCy59FvP5CiiXhpui7uSj WijKBSMUsz2HuQIuQJf6zvW/bi5DGWr6PerTXnuVaUkjNHr4Fp13Mg== =5TtH -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- If encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will have encryption...

1 0

Re: Bombs Away, from The Netly News Network
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:50 PM 5/1/97, Jeff Barber wrote: >Declan McCullagh writes: >> "A >> member of the DoJ committee accessed a single web site >> on the World Wide Web and obtained the titles of 110 >> different bomb-making texts." > >I wonder if this was a bookstore. I did a search for "explosives" >on amazon.com and came up with at least that many titles. Only a >handful were of the Anarchist's Cookbook ilk. Most were academic or >industrial studies; a few were from US Govt or Govt-affiliated >organizations. Probably Paladin Press. Publisher of such notables, as Hit Man: A technical manual for independent contractors, a semi-fictional work with lots of details (written by an anonymous woman, BTW). See http://www.paladin-press.com PGP mail preferred Fingerprint: FE 90 1A 95 9D EA 8D 61 81 2E CC A9 A4 4A FB A9 Key available on BAL server, http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bal/pks-toplev.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Schear | tel: (702) 658-2654 CEO | fax: (702) 658-2673 First ECache Corporation | 7075 West Gowan Road | Suite 2148 | Las Vegas, NV 89129 | Internet: azur(a)netcom.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- "I know not what instruments others may use, but as for me, give me Ecache or give me debt."

1 0

Re: Privacy news: Oakland Cameras
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>How do you hack a camera? Physically damaging the camera works, but can get you jail time. A better solution, if you have a nearby office window facing the cameras, is to use a near-infrared laser (<$100) and blind camera. A strong IR signal will easily overwhelm the AGC circuit and cause the camera to behave as if its pointed into the sun. All video cameras contain an IR block, but it generally isn't sharp enough to cut off an 850 nm diode laser. --Steve PGP mail preferred Fingerprint: FE 90 1A 95 9D EA 8D 61 81 2E CC A9 A4 4A FB A9 Key available on BAL server, http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bal/pks-toplev.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Schear | tel: (702) 658-2654 CEO | fax: (702) 658-2673 First ECache Corporation | 7075 West Gowan Road | Suite 2148 | Las Vegas, NV 89129 | Internet: azur(a)netcom.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- "I know not what instruments others may use, but as for me, give me Ecache or give me debt."

1 0

Re: SAFE Bill discussion
by Shabbir J. Safdar 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Administration hates this bill, because it threatens their ability to roll out Key Recovery. They've said as much in the letter Declan forwarded: "The bill could be read as prohibiting the United States government from using appropriate incentives to support a key management infrastructure and KEY RECOVERY." [emphasis added] Do you think that if this bill helped the Administration, that they'd be out there urging the subcommittee chairman to stop it? I think not. I'm also puzzled by the fact that CDT is being criticized pretty much solely, even though the entire Internet Privacy Coalition, and several other groups all wrote a letter of support of the bill with only a criticism of one provision. However the overall statement was of support. (see http://www.privacy.org/ipc/safe_letter.html) As far as I can tell, everyone criticizing the bill either thinks that: a) CDT actually runs all these groups behind the scenes, or b) pretty much all of the Internet advocates believe that this bill is needed and are doing the best they can with what Congress has written. You're pretty hard on CDT, but EFF, EPIC, the ACLU, VTW, Americans for Tax Reform, the Association for Computing Machinery, Computer Professionals for Social Responsiblity, Eagle Forum, the National Association for Criminal Defense Lawyers, and PGP Inc all signed this letter. Can you consider, perhaps, for a second, that critics of SAFE are being unreasonable? I would think so, as critics of SAFE include the Clinton Administration. Is that the kind of company that cypherpunks keep? Here's a great excerpt from the Internet Privacy Coalition letter: The pending bill provides a positive framework for the reforms that are long overdue in this critical area. It makes clear that the sale or use of encryption, a vital technique to promote network security and individual privacy, should not be restricted in the United States. This is the view widely shared by users of the Internet and the computer and communications industry. It was also a central recommendation of the report of the National Research Council last year. Looks like widespread support from people who study this issue for living. I'm glad to be counted among them. -S -Shabbir

9 13

Re: Bypassing the Digicash Patents
by Hal Finney 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Robert Hettinga, <rah(a)shipwright.com>, writes: > Again, it's using the right business model, and not necessarily > cryptography, which makes a market happen. Blind signatures and hash > collisions are necessary, but not sufficient, for the market to exist. Bob, if I understand you correctly, you've suggested that digital bearer instruments will in the long run actually be more efficient than conventional book entry based transaction models. Anonymity will be cheaper than identified transactions. But, if digital bearer certificates of all kinds are, as you suggest, cheaper and more efficient than conventional ones, why can't we just use ordinary non-blinded digital instruments and ignore the identifying information? For example, XYZ Co. could issue a signed note saying "Serial number 12345, worth 100 shares of XYZ Co.". A bank could issue a signed note saying "Serial number 54321, worth $100 at DigiBank". These can be done with ordinary digital signatures. No blinding or patent issues arise (by the end of this year, when the patents expire!). These are not blinded, so they are in principle traceable. They have to have unique serial numbers to solve the double spending problem, and those could be used to track them. This makes them less attractive from the privacy perspective, but what about from the point of view of the financial markets? Can they just ignore the serial numbers and treat them as the bearer certificates you have been talking about? (Don't real bearer certificates often have serial numbers on them?) Maybe this geodesic market you're talking about (which I don't understand at all) could work with current technology? Hal

3 2

Re: Chaum steps down as CEO of Digicash
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 1:53 pm -0400 on 4/28/97, Hal Finney wrote: > Chaum's orientation towards privacy has not been well accepted by the > conservative banking community (a similar point was made by Peter Swire > in his article about payments and anonymity). Again, financial privacy is like flight. To the people who invented it, flight was an inherent good. People died trying to create it. However, the thing which made flight commonplace was commerce. Flying is not only the fastest way for people and other important things to get somewhere, but, over great distances, it is simply the cheapest way for people to travel. People don't purchase "wow, we can fly". They purchase economy seats to Cleveland. :-). The same thing with financial cryptography, and, by extension, strong cryptography in general. What will sell financial cryptography is not financial privacy per se. What will sell financial cryptography is the fact that digital bearer certificate protocols will prove, by virtue of their very *anonymity*, to be many orders of magnitude cheaper to use than any internet transaction method of equal security. Or any transaction method at all, for that matter. Including, of course, the book-entry transaction settlement methods (like checks, credit cards, securities clearinghouses, interbank settlement) we use today. It is under *that* proposition alone, the potential for radical cost reduction in *all* transaction settlement processes -- and the prospect for radical economic transformation that that brings -- that the blind signature patent should be marketed and licensed. Notice I said "licensed". Cryptographers -- and that is who Digicash is, nothing else, no matter how hard they try to be otherwise -- should invent, license, and validate the use of cryptographic protocols. And, clearly, there is no better financial cryptographer in the world than David Chaum, the man who created, from whole cloth, everything we consider to be modern financial cryptography. Digicash should not try to be a financial trustee, or a certificate underwriter, or even a software developer. All three things Digicash, BV, has tried to be in its many previous incarnations. Now, it appears, Digicash, Inc., is going to try to become the internet equivalent of a credit card association. However, once you understand what Digicash's strengths really are, you can see why this current strategy is just the next progression in, I'm sorry to say, the fool's market that Digicash, Inc., has become in terms of investment return. So, you can understand how, sometimes, I'm very much afraid we'll have to wait until this round of funding is burned through -- say 3 to 5 years -- before we see any progress in the market for digital bearer certificates. And, if Digicash keeps finding a "greater fool" when the money runs out, we'll end up waiting until 2007, the expiration date on the blind signature patent, in order for anything to happen at all. Yet, most of rest of the time, however, I'm not so pessimistic. I'm convinced that if Digicash starts non-exclusive licensing of the blind signature patent, and the other relevant Chaum patents it now controls, even as an experiment, I expect that they would very soon find that their profit margins on those licenses would dwarf the profits on all their other projects. Maybe then they'll realize they should stop trying to be something else, and be what they what they have been all along: the very best financial cryptographers in the world. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA Lesley Stahl: "You mean *anyone* can set up a web site and compete with the New York Times?" Andrew Kantor: "Yes." Stahl: "Isn't that dangerous?" The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

6 13

Re: Artikel about XS4ALL in New York
by Paul Bradley 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Fri, 2 May 1997, tank wrote: > "A few years ago, we would have been portrayed as a band of dangerous > anarchists, bent on disrupting society," Rodriquez told the Dutch daily > Trouw. "But now they have come to see that we are nice and quiet people > really." The only "nice people" are dangerous anarchists bent on destroying governments and buggering poloticians to death. (last part a personal preference of course, the author is totally straight but would nonetheless be distinctly amused to see any government official butt-raped to death) > The company was instrumental in the creation of the Amsterdam Digital > The hotline is run by Internet users and providers. Unlike Britain's > Internet Watch Foundation, the Dutch hotline doesn't censor any > information nor does it ask the provider to do so. Hotline operators > contact the author of the information and ask him to remove the > offending content. "If the author does not comply, we report him to > the police, and he'll be prosecuted," said Rodriquez, who also is > chairman of the Dutch Providers Association. How very benevolent. Its nice to know that instead of censoring your pages they send in the jackbooted thugs to do it for them, then throw you in a nice 6x9 cell for the henious crime of displaying some .gifs or similar. > "The Internet Watch Foundation forces the provider to remove the > illegal content," he added. "This is a fundamentally different approach > to responsibilities on the Internet. We think the author of the > information is responsible for his own actions, not the provider." And if he chooses not to remove the content you happen to find offensive? If you truly believed in the rights of the author and publisher of the information you would think about it before sending in your own particular brand of thugs to "crush the mutiny". > Yet when violation of the law is flagrant, XS4ALL doesn't hesitate to > comply, as it did a few weeks ago when it shut down a customer's home > page called Neuroroom, which sold marijuana and other soft drugs in > Holland and abroad. Sometimes one really wonders why we bother to set up mirrors to allow freedom of information to users, when the owners of these servers, supposedly in favour of free speech, do not even have the strength of character or conviction to decide for themselves what they will allow on their servers rather than bending over for the long cock of the law... > The company's commitment to support free expression and democratization > of the Internet doesn't stop here. As far as I can see it hasn`t even started yet. > Last fall when the Serbian > government censored radio station B-92, XS4ALL helped design an > Internet campaign and started to carry news broadcasts (in RealAudio > format) that kept the rare opposition voice alive and the international > public informed through independent accounts of the events occurring > during the mass demonstrations in Belgrade. I presume B-92 fell into line and matched the "requirements under law for obtaining a free-speech permit" before XS4ALL allowed this/ > "Basically any project we like gets free resources from XS4ALL," > Rodriquez commented. And anyone who guarantees to publicly lick the boots of the benevolent owners in thanks for their support gets as much free space as they like? Of course I believe in the right to free expression of anyone and if these thugs choose not to allow material they don`t like on their servers they have every right to remove it. I just don`t see that setting up mirrors to defeat blocks on sites that refuse to carry certain content is of any value in the fight for free speech. Sure, create a mirror of Radikal, but giving any credit or attribution to XS4ALL seems to be a poor choice. Paul "Still messing with mail apps so totally .sig-less" Bradley

3 3

Conference on UK Crypto Initiative 19 May 1997
by Dave Banisar 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

SCRAMBLING FOR SAFETY Privacy, security and commercial implications of the DTI's proposed encryption policy May 19, 1997 Computer Security Research Centre The London School of Economics Organised by: Privacy International Global Internet Liberty Campaign Chairman: Prof. Ian Angell, London School of Economics On May 19, the Computer Security Research Centre of the London School of Economics will host a one day meeting on the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry's policy paper "Licensing of Trusted Third Parties for the Provision of Encryption Services," The event is being jointly organised by Privacy International and the Global Internet Liberty Campaign. The LSE meeting - the only public meeting during the consultation phase - will comprehensively assess all aspects of the governments proposal. Security specialists, academics cryptographers, legal experts, cyber-rights groups, ISP's and other commercial organisations will participate. The DTI and representatives from other agencies will be in attendance for the entire day. There will be no cost for members of the public to attend. An interactive audiocast on the Internet will also be available. DRAFT AGENDA: Introduction to cryptography Welcome and opening remarks - Dr James Backhouse Keynote - Geoffrey Robertson QC (invited) The DTI proposals - presented by the DTI Perspectives: * Legal and Commercial - Peter Sommer (LSE) and Alistair Kelman (LSE) * Architectural and Technical - Dr. Whitfield Diffie, Sun Microsystems - Phil Zimmermann, PGP Inc. - Dr Ross Anderson, University of Cambridge - Dr. Carl Ellison, Cybercash * Civil Rights and Privacy - Simon Davies, Privacy International * International - OECD (invited) Section by Section analysis of the document. Wrapup (Around 3:30) MORE INFORMATION More information on the conference and the DTI initiative is available from http://www.privacy.org/pi/conference/dti/. REGISTRATION To register for the conference, email Simon Davies at davies(a)privacy.org. ABOUT PRIVACY INTERNATIONAL Privacy International was formed in 1990 as a watchdog on surveillance by governments and corporations. With members in more than 40 countries, it has created an international movement that has helped to counter abuses of privacy by way of information technology. Privacy International has conducted campaigns in Europe, Asia and North America to raise awareness about the dangers of ID card systems, military surveillance, data matching, police information systems, and credit reporting. It is based in London, UK, and is administered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, D.C. Privacy International publishes a quarterly newsletter (the International Privacy Bulletin) and organizes conferences each year on privacy and technology. More information is available at http://www.privacy.org/ ABOUT THE GLOBAL INTERNET LIBERTY CAMPAIGN The Global Internet Liberty Campaign is an international coalition of 28 human rights, free speech, cyber-liberties and privacy groups that has come together to promote free speech and privacy on the Internet. More information is available at http://www.gilc.org/ ------- David Banisar (Banisar(a)epic.org) * 202-544-9240 (tel) Electronic Privacy Information Center * 202-547-5482 (fax) 666 Pennsylvania Ave, SE, Suite 301 * HTTP://www.epic.org Washington, DC 20003 * PGP Key http://www.epic.org/staff/banisar/key.html

1 0

Re: Layoffs at PGP
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

First ECache is seeking a qualified individual to head e-cash related development. Company is headquarted in Las Vegas, but candidate would ideally be located in SV. --Steve PGP mail preferred Fingerprint: FE 90 1A 95 9D EA 8D 61 81 2E CC A9 A4 4A FB A9 Key available on BAL server, http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bal/pks-toplev.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Schear | tel: (702) 658-2654 CEO | fax: (702) 658-2673 First ECache Corporation | 7075 West Gowan Road | Suite 2148 | Las Vegas, NV 89129 | Internet: azur(a)netcom.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- "I know not what instruments others may use, but as for me, give me Ecache or give me debt."

1 0