December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

LA Times - "Gestapo State"
by catalyst-remailer＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This is a good article from the L.A. Times. It is a bit off topic, so I'll post it anon and avoid the fLamers. AMERICANS ARE PUTTING UP WITH A SPIRALING GESTAPO STATE By Paul Craig Roberts Special to the Los Angeles Times What will become of "law and order conservatism" now that we know that our law-enforcement agencies -- from the Justice Department to local police forces -- can be as criminal as the miscreants that they are supposed to pursue? Unspeakable acts of cold-blooded murder and fabricated evidence now routinely characterize everyday acts of law enforcement in the United States. In Malibu, Calif., a 30-person raiding party of sheriff's deputies, federal drug agents and the California National Guard broke into the home of Donald Scott and shot him dead. Scott, it turns out, was a reclusive man, heir to a European fortune, whose $5 million, 200-acre ranch was targeted by federal agents under drug-forfeiture laws. No drugs or marijuana plants were found, but an alert Ventura County prosecutor, Michael Bradbury, did find that the raiding party had an appraisal of Scott's ranch, along with notes on the sale price of nearby property. Gideon Kanner, a Los Angeles law professor who has examined the case, concluded that the feds thought Scott might have a wife who indulged in drugs and decided to see if they could bag a $5 million piece of property for the Treasury. In pre-democratic times, this was known as "tax farming". Government officials simply seized whatever they could and raked off a commission. Today, the commission is in the form of the bureaucracy's budget. Ever since President Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, invented "budget savings" from tougher Internal Revenue Service and drug enforcement, the pressure has been on these marauders to farm more revenues. The results are mounting abuses of citizens and occasional deaths. What will be done about it? Nothing. Scott, awakened from sleep by the sound of his door crashing in, made the mistake of walking out of his bedroom with a gun in his hand. The military force got off with a self-defense plea. Shades of Waco, Texas, where the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms folks killed 86 men, women and children, while the attorney general took all the credit to show how tough she is. Noted defense attorney Gerry Spence told the Montana Trial Lawyers Association in July that he had never been involved in a case with the federal government in which the government had not lied and manufactured evidence to gain a conviction. "These are not the good guys", he said. "These are people who do what they believe is necessary to do to bring about a conviction." The law gets hung with the victim. What, you might protest, about the Los Angeles and Detroit convictions of police officers who beat black motorists? Aren't these signs that checks and balances work and that we are free from the arbitrary application of power that medieval serfs had to endure? Alas, these police offers were not done in because they abused their power, but because they were charged with racism and violating the civil rights of a member of a "preferred minority". As incredible as it may seem, in the United States only blacks have any protection from abusive state power. They have a special, racial civil-rights shield. The rest of us must make do with happenstance. Formally, a person could protect himself by getting rich. But today that just makes you more of a target. Witness the fates of billionaires Michael Milken and Leona Helmsley -- and of Donald Scott. Politically ambitious prosecutors need drama, and they don't get that from the local drug pusher. Federal drug agents are not going to waste their time and risk their lives rounding up Jamaican drug gangs (who shoot back) -- especially when inner-city juries may not convict either out of fear or feelings of racial solidarity -- when they can pick soft targets like Scott. Nothing makes it clearer that the United States is no longer a "nation of laws" than federal wetlands regulations. These "laws" have been created entirely by bureaucrats and courts. All over America, people are finding their uses of their property circumvented and themselves in jail because of these regulatory police and their "laws". Recently, the Clinton administartion said: "Congress should amend the Clean Water Act to make it consistent with the agencies' rule- making." And Sens. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and John H. Chaff, R-R.I., have introduced a bill to codify all the wetlands regulations that are being enforced without any legal basis. Note that the two senators did not introduce a bill to stop unelected bureaucrats from illegally creating laws and running all over our constitutional protections. Not even a wrist slap. To hell with the U.S. Constitution, say the senators. Let's pass a law that future courts will use to give carte blanche to the regulatory police. Let's ennoble the bureaucrats. Divine rule cannot be blocked by special-interest lobbying. Roberts, former assistant Trasury secretary, is chairman of the Institute for Political Economy.

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Multiple Posting
by Mike Ingle 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sorry about the multiple appearance of "Digital Barter Economy". I did not send it twice; Delphi does that sometimes. It seems to think the message bounced the first time, so it sends it again.

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Re: Remailer Noise Traffic
by Philippe Nave 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Eric Hollander writes : > > Hey, no problem, I'll have my remailer barf up a bunch of noise messages if > you'll run a slocal to filter them out. > I don't know what 'slocal' is, but I've got a kill file; if these messages contain some identifying pattern, I should be able to filter them out. Throw me a few of them and I'll tinker with my setup; also, give me some warning about what they'll look like so I can pick them out of the 'normal' mix of inspired brilliance and warped lunacy that passes for Cypherpunks message traffic...... :) [Zing! Off on a tangent.....] Stop me if you've heard this... This looks like a neat opportunity to play with digital money. Note that I said _play_. Apologies to all, but my eyes glaze over when I read too deeply into postings about authenticated foo bar prime number anonymously deniable recursively repudiable ching fong quux blat zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...... However, if you wanted to send me (n) digital coins, electric cents, donkey farts, or whatever for every (k) noise messages I send/receive, I can see where it would be fun to try to spend them. Everybody else could try to steal them from me, I could try to spend them over and over and try to counterfeit them (perhaps asking for skilled help), and we could fiddle around with Monopoly money to our hearts' content. I'd buy things, somebody would produce goods for sale, we'd screw up the whole 'economy' repeatedly, and you digital-cash types could write enormously complex and elegant papers about the whole thing. - -- ........................................................................ Philippe D. Nave, Jr. | The person who does not use message encryption pdn(a)dwroll.dw.att.com | will soon be at the mercy of those who DO... Denver, Colorado USA | PGP public key: by arrangement. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLUgq+AvlW1K2YdE1AQFoIwQAiCL067b+4zHbPQJYTJiDz0vrwu9dCwr9 9f83J4rAMFWENB/+8MRDskKgG0oY9l1qz/trdwqvkWr5SpYuGGnecULl/8jpAp6f NfNOA3bCopVpnTH4EpHG569kAjcpQk9vWi8zmEj7Y7s/hW4sVZmqmTVvMWbh6EEp yRRlkVmrjVM= =cJX9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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GUI for a remailer!
by nate＠VIS.ColoState.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Check out: http://monet.vis.colostate.edu/testing/mailer.html It's a test of a remailer based in a WWW HyperText Server, coded by yours truly. You need a WWW client that supports "forms" to see it, so try NCSA's Mosaic 2.1 for X. (available from ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in /Mosaic -- they have binaries for most machines.) Tell me if you would like to set one up for yourself, and I would be glad to help. Please realize that this is just a test. Don't use it for remailing, just for seeing if you like it. Thanks, and have fun, -nate -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Nate Sammons <nate(a)VIS.ColoState.Edu> <nate(a)yuma.ANCS.ColoState.Edu> | | Colorado State University Computer Visualization Laboratory | | Data Visualization/Interrogation, Modeling, Animation, Rendering | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+

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Re:quote of the day
by an56238＠anon.penet.fi 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Eric Hughes writes: >Because of economics and political stability. > >You can build computers and monitoring devices in secret, deploy them >in secret, and listen to _everything_. To listen to everything with >bludgeons and pharmaceuticals would not only cost more in labor and >equipment, but also engender a radicalizing backlash to an actual >police state. So, it looks like cryptography boils down to making a lot of noise on the _everything_ channel, to prevent the state from listening to it, but that the case of an individual under suspicion is hopeless. How terrible! That almost scares you into being honest and paying your taxes and everything again. All of you cypherpunks who were hoping to hide your little secrets with pgp, just forget about it: what cryptography is all about is to make statistics look bland. >Of course, if one is paranoid, these considerations of the whole do >not hold, since for only one person the cost balance is reversed. But I *am* paranoid, and proudly so, since the age of two. And you would be too if you were into the business of getting cryptography down into the real world instead of toying with theoretical ideas in front of a computer screen. - -zap -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCUAgUBLUdx0Ck+9PttYUp1AQHm+AP0CFtl01rygFYz16WYFsd5r7+gpe9iajUr xeVmB/YTccc/GJO8jbzeA+cpTtedQ8t5iiFlMdtX6NcskeN3fwi52RAL/7sgNhIL LMV13dhl7IJ5pEHb2zdhbCIMClXSVVihHfs2eJRRWHSVwSYV+0Xpy8ISNW/OM7A3 WsqlsMip/A== =ZHFB -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To find out more about the anon service, send mail to help(a)anon.penet.fi. Due to the double-blind, any mail replies to this message will be anonymized, and an anonymous id will be allocated automatically. You have been warned. Please report any problems, inappropriate use etc. to admin(a)anon.penet.fi.

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Talk at MIT Feb 2 (mini-abstract)
by Alan (Miburi-san) Wexelblat 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[This was posted to an MIT internal newsgroup; people in the local area are welcome to attend. I do not have any further information. --AW] MIT TOC SEMINAR Wednesday, February 2, 1994 Refreshments at 4:00pm, Talk at 4:15pm in NE43-518 Title: Tracing Traitors by Amos Fiat, Tel Aviv University Abstract: We give cryptographic schemes that help identify the source of a leak. Such schemes are relevant in the context of pay television, and easily combine and complement the broadcast encryption schemes of Fiat and Naor. Joint work with Benny chor and Moni Naor Host: Baruch Awerbuch

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Re: subpoenas of personal
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com C >I stated that those cases didn't hold against reporters because of C >constitutional backing (i.e. Freedom of the Press). C > C >A protection which we do not have, unless you happen to publish. C > C >-ck An appeals court has just held that Press Shield laws apply to those writing books. Since anything can be research for a book, those of us who have written books may have protection for all our "notes." Likewise those who have written freelance magazine articles. Better to use encryption for your notes though. DCF Who wonders if those who post to Usenet News are "reporters"? --- WinQwk 2.0b#1165

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Re: subpoenas of personal
by smb＠research.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

An appeals court has just held that Press Shield laws apply to those writing books. Since anything can be research for a book, those of us who have written books may have protection for all our "notes." Likewise those who have written freelance magazine articles. Better to use encryption for your notes though. One caveat -- I believe that the shield laws are state laws; the U.S. Supreme Court has *not* upheld the principle. Check with your local lawyers first.

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Re: clipper pin-compatibl
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

T >Yeah, a lot of folks suggested the same thing (I didn't, so I'm T >neutral on the credit issue). It was debated in scy.crypt, as well as T >here on Cypherpunks. Modesty, modesty. It seems to me than *some* T. C. May discussed the reverse engineering of the Clipper Chip in April 1993 as part of the Clipper/Capstone announcement firestorm. DCF An elephant never forgets. --- WinQwk 2.0b#1165

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Re: The Packwood Memorial Diary Server
by jim＠bilbo.suite.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jim choate writes: > The courts could then assume that the purpose of the > server is to collect and store documents in such a way that > there is a priori intention to prohibit legal agents from > accessing said data under court ordered supeona. This > qualifies as a conspiracy in every legal jurisdiction > that I know of. It also opens the sysadmin open to > prosecution as well. > > Won't float in any pond I know of... > Are there really no countries in the world that would permit such a server? How depressing. If true, I guess the next question becomes: How can you offer a service to the Internet, but make it impossible for a Bad Guy to physically locate you? Perhaps the server shouldn't stay in any one location for very long. Bring it up and post an Internet address. Operate for a few days, then shut it down and move to some new location, with a new Internet address. Sounds possible, but damned inconvenient. A wireless connection would help. The server host could be in a van or RV or something. <sigh> Jim_Miller(a)suite.com

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