December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: (FWD) WHAT MOTIVATES CRYP
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Bob Morris writes: > I'm a leftie and was also a bit bemused by the idea of using crypto to > avoid paying taxes. Hopefully we can find a bit more exalted use of > crypto than that. Some of the peace movement folks I've hung around with over the years were part of the "Resist paying taxes because they pay for the War Department" movement, with various methods of not paying ranging from public refusal to working in the underground economy to making less money. Then there was that Thoreau fella.... > However, I assume all here are agreed that strong private crypto is a > good thing. "Politics makes strange bedfellows", indeed. > This wouldn't be the first time that those on the fringes of the left > and the right saw a common enemy - encroaching government with control > in their hearts. If your political scale puts different sets of people who oppose encroaching government control on opposite fringes, it needs some rework. (Not to say that some of us won't cultivate the fringiness available in any particular movement; many of us find the mainstream libertarian "deep-in-center-field" position to be a bit boring....) Bill

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Re: Physical storage of key is the weakest link
by lcottrell＠popmail.ucsd.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

tcmay(a)netcom.com tells us: >Much more likely: > >* Diskettes left lying around. Secret keys on home computers. > >* Incompletely erased files. (Norton Utilities can recover erased >files; mil-grade multiple-pass erasure may be needed.) > > >A simple search warrant executed on your premises will usually crack >open all your crypto secrets. (Fixes to this are left as an exercise.) > >Where to store one's secret key is an issue that makes academic the >issue of whether one's key can be compelled. A diskette stored at >one's home, in one's briefcase, etc., can be gotten. A pendant or >dongle or whatever that stores the key can also be gotten. The >passphrase (8-12 characters, typically) is secure, but not the key. > >--Tim May If your passphrase is good (128+ bits of entropy), then your private key is as secure as the messages that you send. Although it need be broaken only once, I see no real danger of IDEA being compromised in the near future. Given a good passphrase, I would suggest that you want multiple coppies of your key to prevent loss or accidental destruction. My passphrase is > 30 characters. Fortunately Mac PGP remembers the key during any given session so typing is kept down a bit. -------------------------------------------------- Lance Cottrell who does not speak for CASS/UCSD loki(a)nately.ucsd.edu PGP 2.3 key available by finger or server. "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra. Suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night the ice weasels come." --Nietzsche

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(FWD) WHAT MOTIVATES CRYP
by bmorris＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com JJ> anathema to the libertarian and I'm curious to know if there JJ> are other crypto users (I would NEVER call myself a cypherpunk JJ> :-) who's interest stems from a left-wing rather than JJ> right-wing viewpoint. I'm a leftie and was also a bit bemused by the idea of using crypto to avoid paying taxes. Hopefully we can find a bit more exalted use of crypto than that. However, I assume all here are agreed that strong private crypto is a good thing. "Politics makes strange bedfellows", indeed. This wouldn't be the first time that those on the fringes of the left and the right saw a common enemy - encroaching government with control in their hearts. * RM 1.4 B0037 *

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Re: (Fwd) What motivates Cryp
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

J >It may seem that I am being particularly naive in being J >surprised by this but I am from the UK where libertarian views J >of this kind are not so widely held. Though they *were* largely invented there... I think it's just that most of us get out when we see state control here getting oppresive past our personal limits. (Which it just did, hello Criminal Justice Bill, goodbye Graham) G

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Re: ANI 800 number
by Matthew Ghio 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

shamrock(a)netcom.com (Lucky Green) wrote: | About 1.5 years ago, Sandy posted an 800 number that would give you the | | number of the phone you are calling from. Does anyone still have that? | No, but you can use AT&T's test number - 1073214049889664 (you won't be charged for the call) If you're interested in that type of thing, you might want to read alt.2600

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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====

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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

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'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

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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...

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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

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