December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Pedophiles in Cybersp
by peb＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From: Duncan Frissell <frissell(a)panix.com> >P >of the article is "May you live in interesting times". >This phenom is one of my big hopes for cyberspace. Me too. The growth of non-centralized transfer of information will certainly bring about more democracy in the world (and thus, less war). Even the presence of large flame wars would not totally diminish the emergence of cooperation. E.g., in WWI, trench warfare dragged on because the soldiers on each side started to cooperate in a sort of subliminal way: trench soldiers from either side would develop a pattern of engagement that created a status quo where no one would get killed. This cooperation trend is eliminated by constantly swapping in new soldiers--this depersonifies the enemy and makes it easier to shoot to kill. (I think this same effect is also seen in police beats--if the local cop gets really friendly, s/he starts cooperating with the people s/he is protecting rather than being completely objective. From the "authority and control" perspective, this makes the cop corruptable. >From the citizens perspective, this makes the cop more cooperative to the direct needs (however unfair--it is more personal) of the citizens.) I mention "interesting times" since the transition to new freedoms does not occur without a fight from the side that loses some of its control. Overall, the effect of personifying people's enemies (proportionally less slanted, centrally transmitted news) should have a positive impact. Paul E. Baclace peb(a)netcom.com

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CEB 6 the Unpleasantness
by Gary Jeffers 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Cypherpunks' Electronic Book (CEB) 6 the Unpleasantness. >Gary Jeffers apparently blames me for his dropping of the "Cypherpunks >Electronic Book" project: >> Cypherpunks' Electronic Book (CEB) part 5 - the hangover. As badly as it was received, you should be proud to take the blame! But no, I don't blame you. > >> Tim May writes on & on & on about my failure to write the CEB. >> Hey, just where did I pick up GUILT? I had a really great idea for >I did not write "on and on" about this--go back and read what I wrote. >> Cypherpunks that I also felt was a glaring omission of Cypherpunks'. >> I wrote up the idea as best as I could & tried to interest some com- >> petent C'punk to do it. I thought I did a really good job of writing >> up the idea. Unfortunately, I lack the skills to write the particular >> code to do the idea. Its sort of like bringing home a rabbit for suppr >> & everybody dumps on you cause it wasn't a moose. What kind of guilt o >> you dump on people who actually do bad things? >Flaky ranters like you and Hettinga are but the latest in a string of "Flaky ranters like you"? Now, you have lost your pretense of criticism of an idea & have gotten to your real agenda - attack on my person - you sorry fuck. (my turn) :-) >ranters who wring their hands and cry "*Do* something@! I tried to be >polite in my comments, even saying "So, if the CEB enthusiasts want to & now after your heroic self control has been taxed to the max, You are 007 - Licensed to be nasty! a small max really, made for offense taking. >try this, I applaud them." >In most of these cases, including Detweiler's similar wailings that no >one would create "alt.whistleblowers" for him, such politeness is >apparently unappreciated. Ranting is ever so much more fun, I guess. >(Hettinga's rants about "Garth and Wayne," broken windows, fleas on >his head, and "I'm not worthy" are just too strange for me to follow. >I sense a proto-Detweiler is forming in the great void.) I have not followed your dysfunctional relationships with your buddies Detweiler & Hettinga, but do feel free to keep them to your- self. Are you trying disingenuously to identify me with these people? They say that if you squint your eyes just right & long enough, dogs look look much like Adolph Hitler. So, Tim, why don't you go out & find one, squat, & squint till you notice the resemblance? :-) That's a joke Tim. But in a more serious vein Tim (preferable a major one), I thought your bad experience with the Extropians would have kept you from assaulting -ing people with claims of being elements in a class based on flimsy comparisons. You remember when your candy ass got chased off the Extropians' list with allegations of your being a fascist. But, of course, that would have scared anyone: a bunch of savage Extropians writing Fascist! Fascist! Fascist! :-) >> Admittedly, implementing the idea is magnitudes more work that get >> ting the idea. However, it was a great idea & why should I suppress i >> because I personally couldn't implement it? No doubt, great ideas fal >> from Tim May like rain from the skies & he considers them cheap if no >> nuisances. However, in most of the world, they are in short supply & re >> considered valuable. >Nonsense. Like Detweiler's "electrocracy," this idea was just an old >notion in new clothes. In this case, the "stone soup" FAQ idea all >over again. >I said it before, so I'll be brief: worrying about the details of >distribution instead of the writing is the big mistake. Distribution >is relatively trivial, whether by ftp at the soda site, distribution >by mail, whatever. >> I have discovered that the idea of bunches of creative, skilled >> programmers with lots of time on their hands is a myth. I guess they >> all manage to figure out something worth while to write. Originally, >> had thought that there would be at least one of them around looking >> for something worthy to do. Note: There is no covert meaning to the above paragraph. I really was naive in thinking that they might not have their time fully occupied with projects. >If _you_ think it is worth, and _others_ think it is worthy, then >absolutely nothing is stopping you all from doing this project! Do you >think the comments of _me_ are enough to stop you? Jeesh. >What you seem to have done is to see my comments about such "stone >soup" let's-volunteer-the-others appraches and then just _given up_ in >a huff. Methinks you just have no staying power and were hoping the >Cyperpunks Masses would make your CEB project the centerpiece of their >efforts with little further work on your part. It just doesn't happen >that way. >> I believe that I have described a very worthwhile project for anyoe >> who wants to do it. I have a lot of hope that someone will do it late. >> I don't think its going to be forgotten. I would like to thank the >> people who supported the idea. CEB doesn't look like it is going to >> happen soon but if Cypherpunks grows, I think it is inevitable that i >> will happen. >It won't happen because nobody out there is going to do it, not >because your feelings got hurt. Mocking other peoples' hurt feelings can get you into places where your own delicate feelings get hurt. >> But, Tim, if you decide you want this done - do it yourself. You >> just have no idea how you get dumped on when you suggest others do >> it for you! :-) >More nonsense. Nonsense I am finished responding to. Tim, for a guy who doesn't care about other peoples' hurt feelings, you have got real thin skin. >--Tim May Its surprising to me that my CEB plan got such bad reviews. I got my idea flamed by a lot of C'punks but life is tough. You present an idea & its not necessarily going to get accepted. You take a chance. But that is fair. I carry no grudge against the other C'punks. Tim May, however, is different. He criticized ME! & he was so unpleasant! Now we find out how Tim likes the intentionally unpleasant. I don't know Tim May very well but I've noticed he gets into a lot of flame wars. Could this be his M O?: Get into an argument with a victim over a matter of fact, then slyly turn it into an attack on the person without losing the applause of the gallery? Also, I don't like his shrill strident manner. I don't like a bully. When I run into one, I like to make sure he takes a few lumps too! Yours Truly, Gary Jeffers PUSH EM BACK! PUSH EM BACK! WWWAAAYYY BBBAAACCCKK! BBBEEEAAATTTT STATE !

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Re: NYT article
by peb＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Does anyone find the following somewhat distorted: "...White House and Justice Department officials have argued forcefully that is a necessary information-age compromise between the constitutional right to privacy and the *traditional* powers of law enforcement officials." [my emphasis] If wiretapping laws were passed in 1968, I don't consider that *traditional*. Is Markoff speaking about surveillance in exceedingly general terms? Paul E. Baclace peb(a)netcom.com

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Re: Wiretapping, NYT article
by smb＠research.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I think the "traditional" use of wiretapping, prior to the 1968 law, was _de facto_, not _de jure_. The cops just wiretapped whomever they felt needed wiretapping. (For evidence of this, from the FBI to NSA, see books on Hoover's era, and Bamford on the NSA. For local cops, I have no immediate source, but note that "wire men" did not suddenly spring into existence in 1968...wiretapping has been used for many years.) The increased focus on civil rights (some would disagree with this characterizaton...) with the "Miranda rights" and "authorized wiretap" trends of the 1960s forced these practices to be formalized. More or less. There was a Supreme Court ruling in 1967 (I don't have the citation handy) that held that wiretaps constituted an illegal search and seizure. The Federal wiretap statute (18 U.S.C. 2510 et seq., later amended by the ECPA) was a direct response to this ruling. Until then, wiretaps were barred from Federal use by the Federal Communications Act, and not by 4th Amendment considerations (Nardone v. United States, 320 US 379 (1937)). But that was a question of admissibility of evidence, and in 1953 (Schwartz v. Texas, 344 US 199) the Court ruled that that was not binding on state courts. As a sidenote, the first act regulating police wiretaps was in New York in 1942; in 1895, the state had passed a law prohibiting wiretaps completely.

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more info from talk at MIT yesterday.
by sommerfeld＠localhost.medford.ma.us 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The folks from the NSA said the following about key generation: - each escrow agency provides a "seed key", seed1 and seed2 - the box which programs the chip generates two random keys, random1 and random2 - for each chip programmed during that batch (which is "12 to 14 hours of production"), the box computes a classified deterministic function (U1, U2) = F(serial, random1, random2, seed1, seed2) to generate the unit keys They did *not* explicitly say that the random seeds were destroyed at the end of the production run. Also, someone asked "How do we know that the unit key isn't a hash function of the chip serial number?" The answer was: "You don't". They also confirmed Tom Knight's suspicions about what they're going to do when someone reverse engineers the chip and publishes the Skipjack algorithm & the family key: they've got a patent application filed, under a secrecy order; if the algorithm is published, they'll lift the secrecy order and have the patent issued, and use that to go after anyone making a compatible version. They also had a comment that they considered Blaze's findings to be mostly irrelevant, as the only people who would use it would be persons who *didn't* trust the escrow system, but *did* trust the algorithm... - Bill

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Extropians List Statistics 5/23 (fwd)
by NetSurfer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Gee Tim, the Ex. list sure has quieted down since your departure! -NetSurfer #include standard.disclaimer >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> == = = |James D. Wilson |V.PGP 2.4: 512/E12FCD 1994/03/17 > " " " |P. O. Box 15432 |finger for key / Viacrypt Reseller > " " /\ " |Honolulu, HI 96830 |====================================> \" "/ \" |Serendipitous Solutions| Also NetSurfer(a)sersol.com > >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 4 Jun 1994 23:01:12 -0400 From: Extropians Mailing List <extropians-request(a)extropy.org> To: Extropians(a)extropy.org Subject: Extropians List Statistics 5/23 Weekly List Statistics for 5/23 to 6/3 Total Number of Messages Posted: 24 Total Size of Messages Posted : 61156 bytes Average Total Size per Day : 8736 bytes Average # of Messages per Day : 3 Average Message Size : 2548 bytes Number of Posters Participating: 21 Top Ten Posters by Frequency 1. nancc(a)netcom.com (2 total, 0.3/day, 8.3% of total) 2. david(a)bitdance.mv.com (2 total, 0.3/day, 8.3% of total) 3. johnkc(a)well.sf.ca.us (2 total, 0.3/day, 8.3% of total) 4. russw(a)netcom.com (1 total, 0.1/day, 4.2% of total) 5. vincent.cate(a)furmint.nectar.cs.cmu.edu (1 total, 0.1/day, 4.2% of total) 6. sasha(a)cs.umb.edu (1 total, 0.1/day, 4.2% of total) 7. extropians-request(a)extropy.org (1 total, 0.1/day, 4.2% of total) 8. jhdaugh(a)mail.msen.com (1 total, 0.1/day, 4.2% of total) 9. pcm(a)world.std.com (1 total, 0.1/day, 4.2% of total) 10. georgesmit(a)aol.com (1 total, 0.1/day, 4.2% of total) Top Ten Posters by Volume 1. more(a)usc.edu (10.9kbytes, 1601 bytes/day, 18.3% of total) 2. pcm(a)world.std.com (6.4kbytes, 934 bytes/day, 10.7% of total) 3. johnkc(a)well.sf.ca.us (4.7kbytes, 689 bytes/day, 7.9% of total) 4. vincent.cate(a)furmint.nectar.cs.cmu.edu (4.4kbytes, 648 bytes/day, 7.4% of total) 5. 70544.1227(a)compuserve.com (3.9kbytes, 563 bytes/day, 6.4% of total) 6. david(a)bitdance.mv.com (3.4kbytes, 496 bytes/day, 5.7% of total) 7. jhdaugh(a)mail.msen.com (3.3kbytes, 476 bytes/day, 5.5% of total) 8. pavel(a)park.bu.edu (2.7kbytes, 399 bytes/day, 4.6% of total) 9. nancc(a)netcom.com (2.7kbytes, 398 bytes/day, 4.6% of total) 10. xtr(a)liberty.demon.co.uk (2.6kbytes, 386 bytes/day, 4.4% of total) Histogram of the week by number of messages ++ Sun |0| ++ +----+ Mon |4 | +----+ +---+ Tue |3 | +---+ +-----+ Wed |5 | +-----+ +-------+ Thu |7 | +-------+ +-+ Fri |1| +-+ +----+ Sat |4 | +----+ Histogram of the week by daily volume ++ Sun ||0 ++ +-+ Mon | |7280 +-+ +--+ Tue | |8507 +--+ +---+ Wed | |14024 +---+ +----+ Thu | |19545 +----+ ++ Fri ||2389 ++ +--+ Sat | |9411 +--+

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Bill Machrone's PC Magazine article
by nobody＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Privacy in the Digital Age" Bill Machrone PC Magazine June 14, 1994 page 87 Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis, I'm sure, but don't let that stop you from forwarding to interested lists and newsgroups. I'm a fairly conservative, law-and-order kind of guy. I support my local police. I sometimes have trouble identifying with some of my more liberal journalistic compatriots. But suddenly, you and I (along with the rest of the computer industry) are caught up in an issue of national importance that transcends politics and gets down to constitutional issues and basic freedoms. The issues, however,are in danger of being clouded as the usual suspects take sides and start shouting. The knee-jerk liberals have squared off against the knee-jerk conservatives over the privacy and security of digital communications. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility oppose the FBI and the Justice Department. And they're all quoting Al Gore. Let's get beyond the labels, politics, and allegiances and look at the facts. Here's the short form: The Feds realized that with the advent of widespread digital commmunications, their ability to monitor and tap communications would be radically diminished or would take far more time and money. So they proposed that all future digital devices be equipped with a high-security scrambling cip, called Clipper. Crazy? Like a fox. Every Clipper chip would have a serial number, which would give you access to a key that would decrypt whatever data the chip had encoded. The key would be kep in two pieces in two different places, and only a court order could bring them together. Trouble is, nobody trusts the law enforcement agencies to keep them apart. Don't even wonder if the National Security Agency will be monitoring digital conversations for its favorite trigger words. Furthermore, the pending legislation provides for fines up to $10,000 a day against telecommunications companies who don't give the Feds the access they want to decoded data streams. It doesn't end with telephones and data networks. The Feds intend to have Clipper technology on every fax machine, every cable TV box, every ATM, every device capable of receiving and sending a digital data stream. They want to monitor the entire information network for "patterns of abuse and criminal activity." Offering this capability in the form of a "security" chip that supposedly protects our data is insulting and offensive. The silly part of all this is that it represents the classic case of locks keeping out the honest people. The sad part is that we don't trust law enforcement agencies, however well-intentioned, not to abuse the power. Even worse, we the taxpayers are going to foot the bill (to the tune of half a billion dollars) just to build the monitoring network. We'll pay again in higher product costs. Nobody builds complex data-encryption chips for free. There is this little issue, however, of First Amendment rights. When the White House issued its briefing document on the Clipper announcement, it averred that no U.S. citizen, "as a matter of right, is entitled to an unbreakable commercial encryption product." FBI director Louis J. Freeh echoed this position in a _New York Times_ interview, in which he claimed that the American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety and security. I find both statements odious. Privacy is a nonissue for most of us. People who want their communications to be secure have always had the means to do so. People who don't need secure communications don't bother and don't care. Also, security is a pain in the neck. The inherent hassles make us very choosy about when we use it. All the Clipper chip will do is waste our tax money. There's no point in making everyone's transmissions and conversations secure if a third party holds the key. No criminal in his right mind would depend on Clipper encoding when fully secure means are available. If the government manages to overthrow all logic and make Clipper a legal requirement, those of us who want or need real security will be forced into acts of civil disobediance. For data, it's a piece of cake. You can find half a dozen shareware programs on ZiffNet that implement the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Data Encryption Standard (DES). If you're one of the superparanoids who suspect that the NSA put a trap door into DES--no one has ever found evidence of it--you can use PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), a shareware program popular on the Internet, or PC-IRIS, available on ZiffNet. Both use a technique known as RSA to encrypt your data, which is widely regarded as extremely difficult to break. RSA has the additional benefit of providing public-key encryption; you publish a key that people use to encode messages to you, and then you use a private key to decrypt the message. DES is probably only viable for another year or two before it becomes too easy to crack; RSA should be secure for some time longer. Voice security is harder, but not much. You either go to a spook shop and pay a lot of money for a telephone scramber device or build your own. The latter option is not all that difficult, given the advent of DSP (digital signal processing) chips. All you need is the DSP, a couple of megs of memory, and a few support chips. Some of the DSP vendors have evaluation kits that contain virtually everything you need, Basically, you digitize your voice, take samples of the data, and perform calculations and transformations on it. You then turn the resulting data stream back into sound and send it over the phone line. For fun, you might send several data streams at the same time but out of phase with one another, the way modems do. An identical piece of hardware on the other end performs the operations in reverse order. Suffice it to say, however, that if the NSA types hear a scrambled conversation that they can't understand, they're going to wonder what you've got to hide. We're not encouraging criminal behavior by pointing out cryptographic resources. The dummies won't read this and the smarties don't need to. The only people who will be adversely affected by Clipper are you and me. --end--

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Re: Black Eye for NSA, NIST, and Denning
by kentborg＠world.std.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

thad(a)pdi.com (Thaddeus Beier) >DEADBEAT sez >>> and importance of Blaze's result for what it is: minuscule. [with which thad disagrees:] >Blaze's result destroys the current justification... Both exaggerate, me thinks. 1) Dr. Blaze blasts out of the water any justification for faith in the competence/honesty of the NSA in this matter. This is a real basic, easy to explain to the corner barber, case of the NSA being caught with its pants down. It was a serious technical flub for them to leave something "this easy"* in the PCMCIA version of Clipper. * "this easy" is compared to the billions-and-billions of years good crypto systems are supposed to hold up, it is not a dig on Dr. Blaze who knows one hell of a lot more about this than do I. 2) We might be net-geeks, but Normal People--even crooks--still use the phone. It is not at all clear to me that the Blaze LEAF Spoof (BLS?) is something which will easily retrofit to a Clipper *phone*. First, is it theoretically possible to do his spoof in the key exchange of a telephone call? Second, is it possible to do it quickly enough that the other phone doesn't get suspicious--i.e., time out? Third, is the needed spoofing hardware something tiny which I will be able to find a Circuit City for $30, which I can trivially plug into my phone as I walk out the door? If not, the practical result is that nearly no one will foil the phone tapping. -kb, the mild-mannered Kent who just realized that: "Now I *am* in the NSA's files. Even the NSA on a stupid isn't dumb enough to not archive this list." P.S. Seeing as how the NSA already has cypherpunks archived, maybe we could talk them into letting us have access to their files--not everything, just the stuff we wrote. FoIA request maybe? -- Kent Borg +1 (617) 776-6899 kentborg(a)world.std.com kentborg(a)aol.com Proud to claim 28:15 hours of TV viewing so far in 1994!

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RE: MAKE DIGITAL MONEY FAST!!!
by catalyst-remailer＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- cdodhner(a)indirect.com (Christian Odhner) wrote: >Subject: MAKE DIGITAL MONEY FAST!!! > >Wanted: Cypherpunk with a little spare time and a lot of >reliability, a reputation I trust, and experience with the >Pr0duct Cypher Magic money client program, to split digital >profits with me on a 75%-25% basis (ie: you keep 75% of the >digicash!) > <long NSA-bait sig deleted> What application do you have in mind? Are you starting a currency exchange, gambling server, or something similarly interesting? If you need code written, be more specific. With the new 1.1 autoclient, you should not need any code. The autoclient can be run by a script. It takes all input from stdin and the command line. Never give up more than 50% of the profits from anything! Pr0duct Cypher P.S. Have you considered suing Stu Baker for stealing your sig and using it in his propaganda? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLfFPl8GoFIWXVYodAQHlMAQAkDDGlp0MOT8AERCfBXqA0Kpt5GnXEOAL hmEpgrlBr7AYcfUkipoeAGkfvwEU4zKLVojrzdxa5vgPw9jnEkR8yOLS1R1Aq2BX M/fJ2OJA0e08RUlAjpPsSLtzM637rUa3Rhx6wWihMZVAL5BblmF5nAVtpzvW4x7o 88UqWcK+UyA= =Lyyl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Ultra and Coventy
by smb＠research.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Perry wrote that the British let Coventry be destroyed lest Ultra be revealed. Kahn doesn't believe that. From ``Kahn on Codes'', p. 110: Nor, to debunk another story, did Churchill let Coventry be destroyed because he believed that defensive measures would risk the secret of ULTRA. Critical analyses of documents show that this is pure myth. The footnote cites F.H. Hinsley with E.E. Thomas, C.F.G Ransom, and R.C. Knight, ``British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations'' (London, 1979- ), I:528-48; N.E. Evans, ``Air Intelligence and the Coventry Raid'', Royal United Services Institution Journal (September 1976), 66-73. I don't have access to either of those publications, so I can't assess that further.

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