December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Devil's advocate
by Anonymous User 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I am being a sort of devil's advocate here. Please leave the flame throwers at home. I see an argument of "what do you need to protect so badly that Clipper cannot work? Are you doing something ILLEGAL? Clipper works, and only trusted law enforcement personell can use the keys, therefore there is no risk here.". It is hard to explain to some liberal friends of mine that "trusted law enforcement personell" could mean judges, policeman, friends of policeman, etc. Just blathering on, but I have not seen any real counters to this. PS: Is there something out there that can do a sort of Kerboros with PGP? Basically the two hosts would use IDEA and RSA for communicating with each other, and normal TCP/IP for communicating with hosts without this program. ------------ To respond to the sender of this message, send mail to remailer(a)soda.berkeley.edu, starting your message with the following 8 lines: :: Response-Key: ideaclipper ====Encrypted-Sender-Begin==== MI@```%AS^P;+]AB?X9TW6\8WR:2P&2%`$A:^X<=%NK,O<WT)5.AU1X(X-.IM MXGP85,'U521D,MAL[8V$8.!?+;DI[1U<C\)3G54T(4'GQ=P$1&YL9%C=]'[, #>D^@ ====Encrypted-Sender-End====

5 4

someone clue me in about USACM..
by sommerfeld＠orchard.medford.ma.us 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Could someone explain to me the difference, if any, between the "USACM" and the panel of luminaries who put out the "Codes, Keys, and Conflicts" paper? The paper was downright bland in tone, while the one-page USACM position in the press release is clearly hostile towards the EES. Who is the USACM? How big is it, who can join, and who has? - Bill

1 0

'Black' budget purchases
by Michael Wilson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Cypherpunks: --- The following is posted by Tim May --- I didn't comment before on Michael Wilson's revelations about the Maryland Procurement Office (and how it revealed NSA purchases). But I will now. He writes: > Michael Wilson > Managing Director, The Nemesis Group > > [I hope that the record of purchases made through the Maryland Procurement group > are making their way from systems such as Mead Data and into private systems for > analysis; warning, access of such data is expensive.] Actually, there are much cheaper way to get even more accurate data. Gunter Ahrendt has been the compiler of a list of supercomputer sites, a list which he publishes weekly in comp.sys.super. (I haven't seen it recently, so it may be dormant for the summer.) Here's an excerpt for the NSA and CSS: 2) 83.73 - (02-JUN-1993) [NSA] National Security Agency,California,US 1) 3 * Cray C916-512 83.73 3) 69.79 - (22-JUL-1993) [CSS] National Computing Security Center,Central Security Service,National Security Agency Headquarters,Fort George G Meade,Maryland,US, postmaster(a)ftmeade-eas.army.mil 1) TMC CM-5/512 ~35.04 {linearly scaled from a 64CPU unit} 2) 5 * Cray Y-MP/8-256 34.75 etc. I don't discount the possibility that NSA, CSS, NRO, etc. try to hide some of their purchases--certainly in budgets, if not physically. But in general they have little to gain by hiding the fact that they have, for example, 8 Connection Machines. After all, Thinking Machines knows (purchase, service), and word gets out. Ahrendt has had good accuracy. In any case, the number of supercomputers the NSA and its related affiliate agencies have is not too worrisome to me. --Tim May --- end of inclusion --- The data from the Maryland Procurement Office that is stored in certain databases (and removed from others, as I have just discovered when I checked) provides the complete 'black' budget purchases of the intelligence community, not just their purchases of supercomputers. Such raw data goes a long way towards confirming other bits of intelligence, such as the establishment by NSA of its own chip manufacturing facility owing to a lack of trust in undocumented sections of commercial silicon. This data is useful beyond knowing the numbers of supercomputers available (although it does help provide an upper boundary on raw processing power, useful for quantifying tolerances). What we find interesting regarding the number of supercomputers at NSA is what they do to the keyspace; a supposition of ours from the early period of commercial public key was an attack on the domain of potential keys. Given a known keylength, a powerful systematic search for primes that fit that range can, over time, begin to damage the strength of the system. Careful analysis of technical resource also allows one to speculate--are CM platforms (pardon the pun) used for exhaustive systematic search for keys, while Cray systems are used for attacks on the keyspace? Differentiation of parallel versus scalar processing towards attack domains is interesting. Additionally, having such information is useful beyond its application towards analysis. Operationally, it is useful for an adversary to know, for instance, that photo recon analysis is performed on NeXT workstations. This knowledge provides specifications on just what can achieved in the way of image enhancements, etc. It also opens up a realm of options in informational warfare; knowledge of the target platform is critical toward building a tailored attack mechanism to cripple their capability, while knowledge of their providers supplies an adversary with the introduction mechanism (there is no such thing as an isolated system). Michael Wilson Managing Director, The Nemesis Group The Adversary

3 2

Politics and crypto
by Michael Wilson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Cypherpunks: There seems to be a debate floating through here on how an individual's political beliefs may influence their usage of cryptography. When I was first formulating my personal beliefs regarding politics, it seemed that Western democratic nations had created an artificial dichotomy for themselves. The political Left had the belief that while you, an individual, should have the right to do what you want with your body (free choice, free speech, substance use, etc.), they wanted to control what you did with your money (social programs, playing field leveling, etc.). The political Right had the belief that you should have the right to do what you want with your money (free markets, minimal taxation, etc.), but not with your body (right to life, war on drugs, etc.). The 'lunatic fringe' opinion, that there was no dichotomy, and that you should be able to do what you want with your money/body because they are the same thing, was the Libertarian position. Personally, I feel that a perfect world should be Libertarian. In reality, I believe that political systems evolve, and that the supporting infrastructure of the region in question will dictate the most efficient form of government for it (I'm sorry, but regions in South and Central America do not have the supporting economy to actually afford the luxury of democracy). Politics are a tool for control, but as a system, they are subject to the same evolutionary pressures as organic systems. Just as lower life forms in simple ecological niches evolve into higher life forms in more complex niches, political systems evolve as well. There is a good reason why revolutionaries in very poor nations tend to espouse socialist or communist rhetoric--those are political systems that can raise the quality of life considerably and immediately, a necessity for partisan support. Only once there is a strong enough foundation in place can a Nation (not Empire) support the freedoms and inefficiencies of a democracy; when the time is right, it will happen on its own (witness the collapse of the Soviet Union--the well educated population in central, controlling regions decided they wanted a better lifestyle). Sadly, this is why many American attempts to foster democratic tendencies in satellite nations or in countries in turmoil have failed. It would be like trying to build a self-sustaining aircraft manufacturing plant in primitive Africa. In such a case, it is easy to understand how anomalous this is--there is no infrastructure to support the plant, and there is no point in having the planes that it would produce. Thus the lack of a political doctrine here--it would be inappropriate. Who can tell the proper order of things? Who can say that it wasn't a natural occurrence that the USSR brought the region from a backward agrarian economy into the industrial age and could go no farther? Who can say if the 'top of the food chain' is really a representative democracy? Not I. Note that this does not reflect the need, at all levels, for basic human rights (Maslow's hierarchy). Cypherpunks need to view political beliefs as orthogonal to what they doing. For propaganda purposes (read 'psychological warfare'), arguments do need to be structured along lines that the target audience can understand. When talking to the Western Left, push examples that stress the emotional human rights; arguments for the Right should be reasoned on an economic basis. Libertarians will understand either. Anarchists will appreciate the 'sand in the gearworks' appeal of strong crypto. As a side note, the Clinton Administration seems to be veering off into dangerous territory for citizens of America. They seem to want centralized control of both aspects, a person's body *and* money; programs such as healthcare, Clipper, national ID cards, national information infrastructures, and so forth are all direct yet subtle attacks on such basic freedoms. It creates both the motive *and* mechanism for tyrrany. Michael Wilson Managing Director, The Nemesis Group An old hand at political engineering...

1 0

What was the House Rules Committee vote?
by jim＠bilbo.suite.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The House Rules Committee was supposed to vote on the General Export Administration Act HR 3937 yesterday. Anybody know the result of the vote? Did they mark the bill "open"? Jim_Miller(a)suite.com

1 0

RE: Devil's Advocate
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm not so kind as others on this list. I think people should live consistent with their philosophy and what they advocate. Many times arguments are useless and only experience serves to convince. I wouldn't try to convert another from their faith just because it would do me good. As long as it's possible to find alternate methods of doing the same thing (in this case achieving privacy), I wouldn't try too hard to save Liberals from themselves. I think they deserve to use Clipper. Blanc

1 0

USACM Calls for Clipper Withdrawal (fwd)
by NetSurfer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 30 Jun 1994 16:35:37 +0000 From: "US ACM, DC Office" <usacm_dc(a)acm.org> To: "usacm_dc(a)acm.org" <distribution.list(a)acm.org> Subject: USACM Calls for Clipper Withdrawal U S A C M Association for Computing Machinery, U.S. Public Policy Committee * PRESS RELEASE * Thursday, June 30, 1994 Contact: Barbara Simons (408) 463-5661, simons(a)acm.org (e-mail) Jim Horning (415) 853-2216, horning(a)src.dec.com (e-mail) Rob Kling (714) 856-5955, kling(a)ics.uci.edu (e-mail) COMPUTER POLICY COMMITTEE CALLS FOR WITHDRAWAL OF CLIPPER COMMUNICATIONS PRIVACY "TOO IMPORTANT" FOR SECRET DECISION-MAKING WASHINGTON, DC The public policy arm of the oldest and largest international computing society today urged the White House to withdraw the controversial "Clipper Chip" encryption proposal. Noting that the "security and privacy of electronic communications are vital to the development of national and international information infrastructures," the Association for Computing Machinery's U.S. Public Policy Committee (USACM) added its voice to the growing debate over encryption and privacy policy. In a position statement released at a press conference on Capitol Hill, the USACM said that "communications security is too important to be left to secret processes and classified algorithms." The Clipper technology was developed by the National Security Agency, which classified the cryptographic algorithm that underlies the encryption device. The USACM believes that Clipper "will put U.S. manufacturers at a disadvantage in the global market and will adversely affect technological development within the United States." The technology has been championed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the NSA, which claim that "non-escrowed" encryption technology threatens law enforcement and national security. "As a body concerned with the development of government technology policy, USACM is troubled by the process that gave rise to the Clipper initiative," said Dr. Barbara Simons, a computer scientist with IBM who chairs the USACM. "It is vitally important that privacy protections for our communications networks be developed openly and with full public participation." The USACM position statement was issued after completion of a comprehensive study of cryptography policy sponsored by the ACM (see companion release). The study, "Codes, Keys and Conflicts: Issues in U.S Crypto Policy," was prepared by a panel of experts representing various constituencies involved in the debate over encryption. The ACM, founded in 1947, is a 85,000 member non-profit educational and scientific society dedicated to the development and use of information technology, and to addressing the impact of that technology on the world's major social challenges. USACM was created by ACM to provide a means for presenting and discussing technological issues to and with U.S. policymakers and the general public. For further information on USACM, please call (202) 298- 0842. ============================================================= USACM Position on the Escrowed Encryption Standard The ACM study "Codes, Keys and Conflicts: Issues in U.S Crypto Policy" sets forth the complex technical and social issues underlying the current debate over widespread use of encryption. The importance of encryption, and the need for appropriate policies, will increase as networked communication grows. Security and privacy of electronic communications are vital to the development of national and international information infrastructures. The Clipper Chip, or "Escrowed Encryption Standard" (EES) Initiative, raises fundamental policy issues that must be fully addressed and publicly debated. After reviewing the ACM study, which provides a balanced discussion of the issues, the U.S. Public Policy Committee of ACM (USACM) makes the following recommendations. 1. The USACM supports the development of public policies and technical standards for communications security in open forums in which all stakeholders -- government, industry, and the public -- participate. Because we are moving rapidly to open networks, a prerequisite for the success of those networks must be standards for which there is widespread consensus, including international acceptance. The USACM believes that communications security is too important to be left to secret processes and classified algorithms. We support the principles underlying the Computer Security Act of 1987, in which Congress expressed its preference for the development of open and unclassified security standards. 2. The USACM recommends that any encryption standard adopted by the U.S. government not place U.S. manufacturers at a disadvantage in the global market or adversely affect technological development within the United States. Few other nations are likely to adopt a standard that includes a classified algorithm and keys escrowed with the U.S. government. 3. The USACM supports changes in the process of developing Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) employed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This process is currently predicated on the use of such standards solely to support Federal procurement. Increasingly, the standards set through the FIPS process directly affect non-federal organizations and the public at large. In the case of the EES, the vast majority of comments solicited by NIST opposed the standard, but were openly ignored. The USACM recommends that the standards process be placed under the Administrative Procedures Act so that citizens may have the same opportunity to challenge government actions in the area of information processing standards as they do in other important aspects of Federal agency policy making. 4. The USACM urges the Administration at this point to withdraw the Clipper Chip proposal and to begin an open and public review of encryption policy. The escrowed encryption initiative raises vital issues of privacy, law enforcement, competitiveness and scientific innovation that must be openly discussed. 5. The USACM reaffirms its support for privacy protection and urges the administration to encourage the development of technologies and institutional practices that will provide real privacy for future users of the National Information Infrastructure.

1 0

ACM Releases Crypto Study (fwd)
by NetSurfer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 30 Jun 1994 16:34:47 +0000 From: "US ACM, DC Office" <usacm_dc(a)acm.org> To: "usacm_dc(a)acm.org" <distribution.list(a)acm.org> Subject: ACM Releases Crypto Study Association for Computing Machinery PRESS RELEASE __________________________________________________ Thursday, June 30, 1994 Contact: Joseph DeBlasi, ACM Executive Director (212) 869-7440 Dr. Stephen Kent, Panel Chair (617) 873-3988 Dr. Susan Landau, Panel Staff (413) 545-0263 COMPUTING SOCIETY RELEASES REPORT ON ENCRYPTION POLICY "CLIPPER CHIP" CONTROVERSY EXPLORED BY EXPERT PANEL WASHINGTON, DC A panel of experts convened by the nation's foremost computing society today released a comprehensive report on U.S. cryptography policy. The report, "Codes, Keys and Conflicts: Issues in U.S Crypto Policy," is the culmination of a ten-month review conducted by the panel of representatives of the computer industry and academia, government officials, and attorneys. The 50-page document explores the complex technical and social issues underlying the current debate over the Clipper Chip and the export control of information security technology. "With the development of the information superhighway, cryptography has become a hotly debated policy issue," according to Joseph DeBlasi, Executive Director of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which convened the expert panel. "The ACM believes that this report is a significant contribution to the ongoing debate on the Clipper Chip and encryption policy. It cuts through the rhetoric and lays out the facts." Dr. Stephen Kent, Chief Scientist for Security Technology with the firm of Bolt Beranek and Newman, said that he was pleased with the final report. "It provides a very balanced discussion of many of the issues that surround the debate on crypto policy, and we hope that it will serve as a foundation for further public debate on this topic." The ACM report addresses the competing interests of the various stakeholders in the encryption debate -- law enforcement agencies, the intelligence community, industry and users of communications services. It reviews the recent history of U.S. cryptography policy and identifies key questions that policymakers must resolve as they grapple with this controversial issue. The ACM cryptography panel was chaired by Dr. Stephen Kent. Dr. Susan Landau, Research Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, co-ordinated the work of the panel and did most of the writing. Other panel members were Dr. Clinton Brooks, Advisor to the Director, National Security Agency; Scott Charney, Chief of the Computer Crime Unit, Criminal Division, U.S. Department of Justice; Dr. Dorothy Denning, Computer Science Chair, Georgetown University; Dr. Whitfield Diffie, Distinguished Engineer, Sun Microsystems; Dr. Anthony Lauck, Corporate Consulting Engineer, Digital Equipment Corporation; Douglas Miller, Government Affairs Manager, Software Publishers Association; Dr. Peter Neumann, Principal Scientist, SRI International; and David Sobel, Legal Counsel, Electronic Privacy Information Center. Funding for the cryptography study was provided in part by the National Science Foundation. The ACM, founded in 1947, is a 85,000 member non-profit educational and scientific society dedicated to the development and use of information technology, and to addressing the impact of that technology on the world's major social challenges. For general information, contact ACM, 1515 Broadway, New York, NY 10036. (212) 869-7440 (tel), (212) 869-0481 (fax). Information on accessing the report electronically will be posted soon in this newsgroup.

1 0

Re: ANI 800 number
by werner＠mc.ab.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From: khijol!erc(a)apple.com (Ed Carp [Sysadmin]) >Date: Fri, 1 Jul 1994 08:55:30 -0400 (EDT) > >> shamrock(a)netcom.com (Lucky Green) wrote: >> >> No, but you can use AT&T's test number - 1073214049889664 > >Too bad it doesn't work from Canada :( Doesn't seem to work for me in Cleveland, either. Maybe you have to have AT&T long distance for it to work. tw

3 2

Re: (FWD) WHAT MOTIVATES FORWARDERS?
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Well, I for one like to see forwarded stuff. I have no desire to chase down likely references. Maybe I'm lazy for letting others filter stuff for me, or maybe you're lazy for not hitting "D". Quien sabe? It's you :-) Really, it's a question of degree and obscurity. A forward a day isn't too bad, a dozen a day is, especially if they're 600 lines of EFF press release which we see *everywhere*. However if the item was found in some out of the way place (like say a BITNET mailing list for librarians) then forwarding would be reasonable. But stuff from comp.org.eff.talk, sci.crypt, talk.politics.crypto and alt.security.pgp which are groups that most people interested in crypto will read, is a bit redundant. If you're not reading them, you *should* be. G

2 1