December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Censorship In Cyberspace 1/6
by rarachel＠photon.poly.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This is a transcript of the FFE's Censorship in Cyberspace forum. This transcript was made possible by funds from John Young. Major thanks John. **** Feminists For Free Expression **** CENSORSHIP IN CYBERSPACE St. Peter's Church, New York City Saturday, October 22, 1994 Moderator: Joan Kennedy Taylor Panelists: Robert Corn-Revere Ellen Lafontaine Gerard Van Der Leun Philip Zimmermann TRANSCRIPT Censorship in Cyberspace The Panelists: Robert Corn-Revere is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Hogan & Hartson, specializing in First Amendment and communications law. He has extensive experience in practice before the Federal Communications Commission and federal courts. Mr. Corn-Revere received a B.A. from Eastern Illinois University in 1977 and an M.A. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1980. Ellen Lafontaine is completing her doctoral studies at New York University in International Education on a Foreign Language Area Studies fellowship. Her research focuses on the role of intercultural learning networks in the foreign language classroom. Ms. Lafontaine is one of the organizers of YouthCaN '95, an international youth conference for environmental projects via telecommunications. Gerard Van Der Leun is formerly with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is a serious hobbyist on the InterNet and has hosted several on-line conferences. Philip Zimmermann is the creator of the controversial "Pretty Good Privacy" encryption software (this "freeware" has spread as far away as Europe) for which he is now under criminal investigation, awaiting possible federal indictment. He lives in Boulder, Colorado. The Moderator: John Kennedy Taylor is the author of "Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism Rediscovered", published in 1992 by Prometheus Books. Her work has also appeared in, among other places, The Wall Street Journal, Success, and Reason. Ms. Taylor was a commentator on the Cato Institute's syndicated radio program, "Byline," for ten years (1979 through 1989). She is also Vice- President of Feminists For Free Expression. INTRODUCTION: Good afternoon, and welcome for joining us. It's an absolutely gorgeous afternoon, so we're very happy to see you here. I'm Trish Moynihan Williams. I'm a member of the Board of Directors of Feminists for Free Expression, and this afternoon I'm actually the voice of Rachel Hickerson, our Executive Director, who unfortunately has a bad case of laryngitis. So I'm speaking for her, but I really hope you won't miss the opportunity this afternoon to say hello to Rachel even though she may croak back, and get to meet our wonderful Executive Director. I wanted to tell you just a little bit about Feminists for Free Expression for those of you who are just getting to know our organization. We are a group of diverse feminists working to preserve the individual's right to read, hear, view and produce materials of her own choice without the intervention of the State "for her own good." I encourage you to learn more about us. There are pamphlets in the entry way as you came in if you haven't picked one up already. And to join us. We are a membership organization, and really need your support. As you see listed on your program this afternoon we have a stunning lineup for our program on Censorship in Cyberspace, and that program is going to be moderated by FFE's own Joan Kennedy Taylor. Joan has been [involved with] feminist issues since the early 1970's. She is the author of Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminist Rediscovered, which was published in 1992 by Prometheus Books. In 1993 the Hoover Institution commissioned her to write the essay, "Women's Issues: Feminism, Classical Liberalism and the Future." Among the places where her work has appeared are the Wall Street Journal, Success, The Washington Times and Reason. She is Vice President of Feminists for Free Expression. So I am delighted to turn the program over to her. Joan. * * * KENNEDY TAYLOR: Can everybody hear all right? There is no sound system, but I am told the acoustics are excellent. Okay. This is a very exciting program for me, because so much is going on and so much is changing so quickly that every day brings something new. This is a new age in communications, and it also has its problems. On-line services are becoming gigantic. The InterNet makes national borders irrelevant, which to some people seems a real problem. Torrents of information and misinformation can be received or disseminated by anyone with a computer modem. Security establishments have lost their virtual monopolies on encryption to such an extent that an article in the Times compares trying to enforce a universal coding standard such as the Clipper Chip with trying to enforce prohibition. The U.S. Congress just before it adjourned passed the controversial Digital Telephony Act, a wiretapping bill that requires phone companies to keep their networks accessible to law enforcement wiretaps as they install new technologies. What does this all mean in the age old fight between those who want to control how ideas and expression are communicated and those who believe in the literalness of the First Amendment, that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press? We have asked a number of experts who also believe in civil liberties and the First Amendment to explain why we do not have to abandon these principles as we enter this confusing and exciting communications age. Our guests will speak in alphabetical order, and I hope you all have programs, which give you the back- ground of all our speakers. They will speak for twenty minutes each. Then there will be a brief period for any questions they may wish to put to each other and they will then take questions from the audience. First we turn to the relationship between law and technology. Advances in communications technology have always been greeted with suspicion. Should the law control what we do with them? Can the law control them? Robert Corn-Revere, a Washington lawyer specializing in communications law, looks at the past and the future to give us a legal doctrine for the Information Age. Robert.

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Censorship In Cyberspace 2/6
by rarachel＠photon.poly.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

CORN-REVERE: First I'd like to thank Feminists for Free Expression for inviting me to come and speak at this today. I think that the topic is one of the most important that at least those of us who care about communications are dealing with right now and it's one that's going to be developing very quickly. Although I have to say -- I'll apologize in advance. I'm from Washington. I used to work at the FCC, and so to be talking about these issues may seem to be a bit ironic. And to compound that, to have a lawyer to be the first person to speak in a discussion on Censorship in Cyberspace is a bit like having a hall monitor be the keynote speaker at a writer's conference. But it is an area that I have been writing about for some time and have some concern about, and hopefully discussions like this one will help move toward a greater understanding that can actually do some good. Being in Washington I'm always hesitant to say that, but it is possible sometimes. First of all I know it isn't in the program, it doesn't mention the term, but I'm going to just say that I hate the expression Information Superhighway. If there is a single thing that we could do to make some sense of what's going on we would eliminate that forever. I mean not only does it spawn just this avalanche of horrible metaphors -- on ramps, off ramps, toll booths, traffic cops. Name it, they're out there. It's just going to get worse, to the point where the Washington Post finally had a front page story that talked about the Information Superhypeway, which is pretty much what it's becoming. And in a way it I mean it really doesn't convey any information. In a way it's a lot like teenagers and sex. I mean, you know, everyone is talking about it. Everyone's convinced that everyone else is involved in it. The people who are talking about it don't really know much what it's about but are convinced that once they're doing it too it's going to be great! That's a lot of what is going on in the policy discussion in Washington, D.C. But I have a particular reason for disliking that expression, and that is that it tends to focus or it tends to direct peoples' attention to the means of transmission by calling it a highway. So we'll need traffic cops. And when you look at the method of transmission historically, that's been the hook, the jurisdictional hook, for governments to get involved in speech. For that reason I really think we would move a long way toward clarity if we could shift metaphors. As most of you I'm sure know, this year the Congress failed to pass telecommunications legislation wanting to be in the forefront of developing the Information Superhighway, talking about all the vital national policies that are involved. And while I don't discount the importance of the issues, I tend to think it's a little bit dangerous to start the debate and start from the proposition that Congress needs to be fashioning this for us, and I think that that's simply going to lead to more trouble. In really underscoring that, I think it's useful to talk about communications systems and talk about the development of these things from something of a historical perspective, because technology has always been an intimate part of the struggle for freedom of expression. It's no accident for example that the first official censorship bureau emerged shortly after the development of the printing press. None existed before then because none were necessary, and to that extent censorship was the bastard child of technology. You didn't need a central official authority to keep track of scribes. The Church did that very nicely, thank you. And the communications that they produced didn't really pose any kind of a threat to the State. First of all they were produced in small numbers, not mass produced, and in the second place you didn't have the ability to produce multiple volumes of a uniform copy, of a simultaneous transmission of exactly the same words. There were minor errors between them and it took a long time to copy addi- tional copies. But once you had because of the printing press the ability to crank out multiple documents that could all be trans- mitted simultaneously, then the communication tended to pose a threat to official authorities and for that reason you then had this drive to establish social policy, policy that would constrain or in some way control that communication for what were considered by those in power beneficial ends. And so you see that sort of history repeating itself over and over again, and ultimately in the end the technology tends to win. You can look at the successive means of censorship in the 16th and 17th centuries, whether they were official censorship bureaus or the Court of the Star Chamber or the Stationer's Company, and government monopoly licensing and those sorts of things. Each of them failed. Each of them went out of fashion because the technology of the printing press was superior to the ability of the bureaucrats to exert control -- up until the point when you get to the formation of the United States and the adoption of the First Amendment, where the United States became the first nation to embrace new technology as an essential component of its political system. That's what the First Amendment is about. It specifically identifies the press, that new technology of its day, or relatively new to the framers of the Constitution, as an essential component of what this country was about. So technology for the first time rather than just being a hindrance to official authorities became an essential part of what free expression is to be and came to be in this country. Despite that hopeful beginning, and despite the fact that it really took a couple of hundred years, well, 120 years anyway before the courts started to define what the First Amendment was about, technology continued to be something of a problem as new technolo- gies for communications were developed. The Supreme Court first faced this problem in 1915 when it was asked to rule on whether or not the cinema was protected by the First Amendment. And this was before the Supreme Court had actually addressed the issue of the First Amendment and what it meant in any way, but it was presented in this case about a licensing board, a trilogy of cases actually about a licensing board in Ohio. And in that case the Court simply said, "This is not speech. We're talking about film here. It's commerce. And besides, it's dangerous." And so they decided that the First Amendment simply didn't apply to the technology of film. Now thirty-seven years later the Supreme Court reversed itself and film was protected the same as the printed word. But it took thirty- seven years and actually longer than that for the pronouncement of the law to become disseminated through the country, where it wasn't until 1972 that the last film licensing board, municipal film licensing board, in Dallas, Texas, was abandoned. So it does tend to take a long time. The same thing has happened of course with television, and again, as with the Information Superhighway, the focus is on the means of transmission and the government's argument historically has been that we have this medium. It's scarce because you have a certain number of frequencies. If the government doesn't regulate it you'll have people speaking over each other, and so the government has to get involved. And by the way, we're not just going to be traffic cops to decide people don't run into each other in the air waves. We also need to control pretty much what's said in the broadcasting as well. And so again focussing on the way the communication was transmitted created the jurisdictional hook by which broadcasting has had second class rights under the First Amendment. Now that's changing. It's changing because the courts have come to be more sensitive to the First Amendment issues involving broadcasting. Most thoughtful observers recognize that the whole notion of scarcity (a) was created by government in the first place, and (b) if, to the extent it was ever true, because government of course decided how many of those frequencies would be used for communications, to the extent it ever was true it no longer is, again because of increases in technology, both because of digital compression, the ability to get a lot more out of the same band- width spectrum, and also because there are so many other techno- logies that can transmit the same information and more than just broadcasting. Whether it's cable television, whether it's fiber optic transmission, whether you're talking about videodiscs, videotapes, there are any number of ways you can transmit the same information. And so the courts are moving more toward an appreciation of the First Amendment status of broadcasting, to the point where the Supreme Court this summer in a case involving cable television essentially said that the government has no business dictating the content of broadcasting. Again, that was just language that the court used, but it tended the signal the direction they're heading. And I think ultimately again the technology will win. My concern though is at each stage where we're confronted with new technology we have to go through this process yet again. It happened with the printing press. It happened with film and then took four decades and longer for practical application, for that to get reversed. With broadcasting it first was regulated in 1927 as a scarce medium and then again that law was rewritten in 1934 and hasn't been rewritten since. We're on the verge of a rewrite, and that's what some of the telecommunications legislation is about, but it doesn't abandon these concepts of government control. In fact it strengthens them and would extend them to the newer technologies, whether it's fiber optics or something else, or direct broadcast satellites for that matter. So I think that it's time to recognize that all speech is the same under the First Amendment, and that the means of transmis- sion don't make any difference whatsoever. The fact that some communications may have social force or power to change things isn't a reason again for government to get involved. That's why the printing press was controlled. That's why we adopted a First Amendment in the first place. And so the method of transmission shouldn't make any difference whatsoever. The other thing that I think is fairly dangerous when it's handled in the way that it's currently being considered is that if things have moved slowly in the past wait until they become the subject of a regulatory agency. Having worked at the FCC I can tell you a lot about that. Things move much more slowly in the regulatory state. We are controlled by endless numbers of defini- tions, and once you fit into a regulatory pigeonhole, a defini- tional pigeonhole, you will stay there either until the courts turn it over, knock it down, or until some sixty years later or however many years later someone decides that that may have been a bad idea in the first place. So I'm very concerned about carving these things into the stone of legislation and then using that as the model for extending government control over communications. The whole idea of having this network, this notion of instantaneous communication, is to free up speech and not to create jurisdictional reasons to exert greater control. For that reason I am particularly concerned about the Digital Telephony Bill that was just passed. It was passed by both houses of Congress in early October, and it does require tele- phone companies to cooperate and assist law enforcement authorities in wiretapping and issues like that. In some ways it doesn't change the preexisting state of the law. In 1986 there was a rewrite of the Federal Wiretapping Law that essentially brought that into, recognized, digital communications. It did require that kind of cooperation. This really more clarifies that rather than imposes a new obligation. The other clarifying part of it thankfully is that it says that federal authorities have to get a warrant before they can do it. But it still maintains the essential premise of governmental control, and I think that what we need to working toward is an understanding that the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment, because they work together, must be recognized for all technologies as we move on into the future. I'll just say one or two more things because I know I've taken a bit of your time, just to say that if nothing else, because again I've been talking legal structures because that's the world that I work in, but if nothing else it would helpful if people could get an understanding that when they're approaching a new type of communications they're not approaching something fundamentally different, and I'll give you two examples that I think tend to underscore that. One is a recent action by an export office in the Department of State that denied an export license for the disk version of a book on encryption, while the print version is freely available and as a matter of fact 20,000 copies have been sold worldwide. Now the justification is that when you put it on a computer disk it is somehow different and can be disseminated differently when of course anyone can take the print version and key it in and you have the same thing. But that's one example of where the understanding of what the communication is, what the information is, is treated differently under the law because it is in a different technological form. Another has to do with a recent case involving a regional office of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, an action that ended closing down a men's only and women's only computer bulletin system at Santa Rosa Junior College because of allegations of sexual harassment and people saying generally not nice things on this computer bulletin board. But as part of this ruling, and it's still being worked out, it isn't final yet, the Office of Civil Rights took the position that a computer bulletin board is not subject to the same free speech rights as if you were talking about a physical bulletin board or if you were talking about the campus newspaper. It is somehow different. I think these are very dangerous beginnings, very dangerous trends, and unless we address these questions both in terms of our understanding of what's going on and in terms of the law then what we've seen in history will be perpetuated and it will take a far longer time, decades, if we're lucky, for that to be sorted out. So that's why I think this is one of the most important topics that we could talk about today, because I think that communications has been historically a vital force in society and it's only going to get more important. Thank you. * * *

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Censorship In Cyberspace 3/6
by rarachel＠photon.poly.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

MODERATOR: What about the children? Our new technolo- gies expose children to information and ideas from all over the world. Some of it is information. Some of it is misinformation. Should we take steps to restrict this access? Ellen Lafontaine will explore this area with examples of educational alternatives to censorship. LAFONTAINE: Thank you, Joan. I have a little cold, so I hope that you can hear me. I hope I won't cough halfway through. As we all know, cyberspace or the InterNet is a very popular subject today. When one adds the issue of censorship it becomes even more compelling and controversial. Today you will be presented with the legal, political and technical viewpoints of the censorship debate. However, I contend that while these perspec- tives are illuminating there is the danger of missing the far more important issue of the right to free speech for students in its application to this medium of technology. This issue of censorship is not solely one of a technical nature, for instance how to block access to pornographic material and banned books. A cursory glance at the variety of news groups and conferences on the InterNet may seem, depending upon your point of view, as either provocative or offensive. For example, it is possible to obtain an erotic article from the news group ALT.REC.SEX.WITH.OTHERS, or a few passages from Huck Finn, a banned book in some school districts. Indeed many educators and parents spend a lot of time worrying over whether Susan or Jimmy will accidentally read material that's not appropriate for their age. However, restricting access to news groups and conferences dealing with objectionable content matter is simply a subtractive strategy, subtractive in the sense of a withdrawal. The real issue instead involves the much great social challenge of placing in our schools this technological medium that has the potential to encourage student dialogue on any number of controver- sial issues. Increasingly our schools have greater access to the InterNet. We can expect that some educators and parents will perceive its introduction as dangerous as rolling a Trojan Horse into the classroom. Therefore a different and far more interesting approach to the issue of censorship is to focus upon the students themselves and their right to free expression in the classroom. To us this is an additive strategy, allowing our students to confront difficult realities both on a local level and a global scale and to successfully engage in the necessary conflicts that will inevitably result. The questions that we need to ask are: Can we tolerate and actively promote the desanitizing of the curriculum by allowing this new form of communication and inquiry into the classroom? Can we encourage our students to pursue the right to free expression and not turn their backs on controversy when it ensues? And lastly, can we create a critical literacy among students so that they are not only better prepared to confront the issues of tomorrow but also can be instrumental in changing or improving today's world for the better? To illustrate my point I would like to tell a story drawn from a paper that I coauthored with Professor Dennis Sayers of New York University. The research was originally compiled for his forthcoming book, Brave New Schools. The story concerns the use of a global learning network in an English class at a high school in Long Island. The network, supported by the Copland Family Fund, is called IERN, which stands for International Educational and Resource Network. The IERN network allows students to use telecom- munications to carry out projects with students from other parts of the world. The students at Cold Spring Harbor use the network to collect articles written by students from many different countries for a magazine called The Contemporary. Although produced at the high school, The Contemporary is so much a part of the IERN network that it is considered an official publication of that network. As its editors write, "The Contemporary is a student news magazine, international in scope, that aims to provide teenagers with a way to learn about issues of national and global importance as the first step toward understanding how youth can have an impact on the direction taken by our world." And one point I'd like to make. These are 14 to 17-year-olds that write, so I think you're all going to be very impressed by the level of their writing. Even though at times these issues of national and global importance were controversial in nature, this didn't stop the student editors from writing about them. However they were soon to find out that encouraging a debate on one of these controversial issues would lead to not one but two conflicts and near losses of their right to free expression, and surprisingly from two entirely different directions. It all began with the Middle East section of the January 1994 issue, which contained writings from Palestinian and Israeli teachers and students. Kristin Lucas, the 11th grade editor of the special sections, recounts her original motivations for collecting the writings. "At the start of my project my goal was to inform students around the world about recent developments in the long lived Middle East crisis. I set out with the belief that students from Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories needed to realize the similarities in their hopes and fears in order to pave the way for a more peaceful future." Using electronic mail and video send (ph), Kristin and the other students editors were able to collect several pieces of writing from both Palestinian and Israeli students and teachers. It was their intention to pair these writings next to one another in the Middle Eastern section for maximum impact. However, as they were going to press one of the Palestinian teachers, upon learning of Kristin's decision to intersperse the Israeli and Palestinian writings, and also objecting to some of the content in Kristin's introductory article, threatened to pull every one of the Palestinian writings. Kristin and her fellow editors were astounded. She spent seven periods of two school days trying to reach a compromise that wouldn't breach her right to free expres- sion. At the end they published all of the letters, but in separate sections of the magazine. This was a disappointing compromise for Kristin and her co-editors. In their opinion the initial attempt to foster a student dialogue on a controversial topic had failed. So they decided to exploit the technology to an even greater extent. Instead of relying upon letters and articles sent through elec- tronic mail, they opened a conference area on the network hoping this time for a more extensive, true back and forth student dialogue. Little were they to know that world events would sadly offer them one more Middle Eastern controversy. As we can all recall, on February 23, 1994 Baruch Goldstein murdered 50 Arabs and wounded many others at a mosque in Hebron (ph). This massacre triggered many Palestinian demonstrations on the streets of the occupied territories, which led to beatings and killings by Israeli authorities and reprisal murders by members of extremist groups on both sides. As a result extensive curfews were enforced and schooling for the Palestinians was suspended. Thus the resulting turmoil provoked a flurry of letters back and forth on many topics, one of which was the Western media coverage of the events. As one 12-year-old writes, Ranin Kiryan (ph), "The Western media is always at the scene when both Israelis and Arabs are killed, and the coverage is much more in favor of the Palestinian side in the opinion of Israel's. My opinion in general is that the Palestinians deserve a country." A Palestinian student disagreed with Ranin Kiryan. "I believe the Western media is not always at the scene when both Arabs and Jews are killed, and the coverage is in favor of the Israelis. But it's not important that the media covers this or that. What is important is that the killings stop. I respect your opinion that the Palestinians deserve a State." These two excerpts out of a handful of many demonstrate the enormous power of telecommunications to foster student partici- pation in an open and free dialogue. These students are learning tolerance by respecting each other's opinions on a very controver- sial topic. They are communicating in a real fashion about issues of social justice. One Israeli student who wished to remain anonymous, likely because his or her opinion would have sparked debate among his or her Israeli classmates, disputed the frequent press descrip- tions of Baruch Goldstein as an insane killer who acted alone. He or she says, "I believe that the massacre was not the action of a lone lunatic but one taken by a gunman acting under the influence of a radical minority group. This group deserves to be condemned, but the entire Israeli population should not be blamed. Similarly, the extremists among the Palestinians should be condemned but not all the Palestinian people." Truthfully, how many adults can master that concept, the few do not represent the many, as our anonymous contributor obviously has? Moreover, how many could acquire this understanding on such a controversial issue so close to home? Clearly these excerpts from the students' writings demonstrate the success of Kristin's original goals, to promote dialogue on a hotly contested issue in the Middle East with the hopes of illuminating common ground for peaceful coexistence. The Contemporary included these and many other letters in the May 1994 issue. There were also letters from students in other countries sharing their opinions and applying lessons from what they were reading to their own reality at home. Phoebe McDunna, a student from Australia, writes: "In my country we have many people from different backgrounds and we have grown to communicate and to accept everyone. This all sounds like Australia is a very loving and understanding country, but the sad truth is our native Australians, the Aborigines, are the last ones to become accepted and to be treated equally." Thus the debate that Kristin had sparked on the political turmoil in the Middle East led to students in faraway countries extrapolating lessons about the expansionist policies at the roots of their own countries' origins. So in going to press with this final issue of the school year, Kristin and her fellow students were pleased that they had achieved the goal of using telecommu- nications for opening and sustaining an extensive dialogue on a controversial issue. Kristin writes, "I've had the opportunity to accomplish what many other students may never have a chance to attempt. Even though I don't have the influence to reverse the sometimes harsh sentiments of these people, I would like to come away thinking that at least I did something to help the peace process along." Unfortunately Kristin had no idea of the new conflict for the May issue, this time much closer to home. Peter Copland (ph) is the head of the Copland Family Foundation that has supported the IERN network since its inception. His vision was to explore the potential of telecommunications to give youth a voice in shaping and improving their world. To this end he established IERN, providing funding from the Copland Family Foundation to underwrite the network during its formative years until it established a clear identity and had become self sufficient. This support took many forms, ranging from assisting in covering the cost of telecom- munications for some schools in North America and in other countries to assure cultural diversity in the networking projects and to contributing to special projects such as the Holocaust Genocide Project, with a range of funding demands including publications and study trips to Poland and Israel. So when Peter Copland asked to meet with the editorial staff and the faculty adviser at Cold Spring High to voice objec- tions to their coverage in the Middle East sections they were all very surprised. In his view, however, the coverage was biased toward the Palestinian point of view. He also felt that the writings from the adult contributors was a major departure from the original mission of the student magazine. Although he insisted that he didn't want to limit their editorial freedom he felt that The Contemporary's designation as an official annual IERN project should be reconsidered, and the controversial nature of the topics it covered might generate disagreements within IERN and jeopardize the willingness of some schools, for example in Israel and the U.S., to continue participating in the network. So the student editors met and drafted a response to Copland's concerns, and I'll quote a few passages. It was a very long letter, but I think this is very important: We sought to give all interested parties a chance to state their views and respond to each other. Did the contributors hear one another? Well, most seemed to listen but a few seemed to hear very well. Did we try to make the Middle East section a safe place to conduct such a discussion? Yes, but we realize that when feelings run as hot as they do in the Middle East there may be no such thing as a safe place to discuss any subject. Does this mean that we did not make a contribution to the resolu- tion of the problems discussed? No. We feel progress in this instance ought to be measured simply by the fact that the contending parties at least talked to each other and read what each other was feeling and thinking. Finally, dialogue, no matter how contentious it may seem, is the first step toward resolving any problem. These responses demonstrate the remarkably high level of critical thinking generated by engaging in such projects on a global learning network over the InterNet. The students developed a working knowledge of how to confront the possible loss of their right to free speech. Once again they negotiated a compromise by relinquishing the annual IERN project status for The Contemporary and incorporating a disclaimer for each issue. The final result was a conceptual awareness of the relationship of free expression and of the media of telecommunication that went far beyond the issue of keeping objectionable material out of young peoples' hands. In closing I will quote one student's real understanding of the individual right to free expression: "I think free and open communication is a wonderful thing. Perhaps with this experience some students will prize dialogue more dearly in the future. Hope- fully if we try to understand each other more we might be more willing to talk things out instead of going to war over them." Thank you. * * *

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Censorship In Cyberspace 4/6
by rarachel＠photon.poly.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

MODERATOR: Thank you very much, Ellen. Now. Can we imagine what it would be like if there were no traffic cops in communication? Well, we don't really need to, because no laws control the InterNet and no one owns it. How does it work? Gerard Van Der Leun, who was the first Communications Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, finds that free speech and civil liberties are, as he puts it, "the default state of the global InterNet," and he will tell us why and how. VAN DER LEUN: Hi. My name is Boswell at BELL.COM (ph), and I'm a Cyberholic. I started out chipping with an RCA dumb monitor at 300 baud, and now I'm looking to start mainlining off a slip connection. There's just never enough for me. I first sort of became I guess aware of the potential of this when I was a book editor in the mid 1980's at Houghton-Mifflin in Boston. Through a series of events I no longer recall I bumped into this woman named Elizabeth Ferrarini (ph) who was verging on a functional illiterate but wanted to write a book about her experiences on the fledgling nets then. I think she was one of the early members of The Source. And she used to log on with the handle "THIS IS A NAKED LADY." So those of you with any experience on the Net know what kind of E-mail and sends this starts to draw to you while you're on the Net. Her keystroke cup will runneth over in no time. Actually knowing nothing about this I ended up (a) commissioning the book, (b) rewriting it, and (c) publishing it. It became a book called Infomania: Life in the On-Line World. I think it was sort of the first book about this subject, and dutifully sank into obscurity by being the first in about 1987. A couple of years later in another incarnation I was at a tag sale and I bought a box for $60. It was an RCA dumb monitor with a 300 baud modem, and you could put about ten phone numbers in it. And I took it home, sort of figured it out from the manual, I went to Computer Shopper, found a BBS with my area code on it and bingo -- I was in Dave's Cave, a Fidonet (ph) node, looking for filthy stories and other things. And then it came to me one night in an epiphanous moment that you could actually with a telephone connection basically get things onto the disk of your computer you didn't have to type in yourself. Ah, revelation. This was nice. And from then, you know, just like Topsy the addiction simply grew until I sort of found myself floating around the InterNet for many years now, and actually in different years I've become one of the rarer breeds of people on the Net. I actually manage to make a modest living out of it rather than just shoveling lots of connect time dollars back into it. In the course of this I guess I stumbled into a system on the West Coast, if anything can be said to be anywhere in cyber- space, called The Well. Most people that have been on the Nets for some time have a vague idea that the Well is actually one of these systems whose impact is bigger than its userbase, and while on The Well I bumped into other denizens of cyberspace such as Mnemonic, who is actually Mike Godwin, one of the legal beagles for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Washington, and also into this very strange, slightly seedy cowpoke named Barlow, who had with his palaver actually talked Mitch Kapur (ph) into parting with some hard change to fund and found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which at its inception was actually a very exciting organization to be involved with since they basically wanted to defend young hack- ing kids against big crackdowns by Feds. I'm always looking for a good game of Feds and Heads in my life. I like to play with the Heads. You know, the EFF later devolved into what's now sort of a wonk tank and luncheon society down in Washington, D.C., but that was after my time, or I should say my time ended when it evolved into lunching with lobbyists. But since then I've gone on to be I guess a gadfly around the Net and on The Well to people. On The Well I run a conference that's called, well, I run two conferences. One is called Z (ph), which is basically a digest of all the other conferences, the best and the worst, what have you. And then the conference I'm proudest of is called The Weird Conference, and The Weird Conference's rule is that we don't have any rules, and you can say anything you want and nothing is forbidden. And nothing is ever censored except sometimes by me in a purely arbitrary fashion to keep people aware of what censorship feels like. It's true. Boswell will sometimes just log on and say, "Well, I'm going to erase your comment because I just don't like it." Checheche cht -- gone. What? What? There it is. Anyway, I was just sort of looking at the Net and I've been thinking about censorship, and I've been through Operation Sun Devil and I've seen Hacker Crackdown and I have Digital Telepathy and I'm aware -- I'm sure Mr. Zimmermann will enlighten you of what can happen to someone who goes out to play on the Nets when it's an essential Net tool. I mean you need to pack a lunch and have a legal fund. Nevertheless, I would say to you today, not just to this small group but almost to anyone, that my basic state is one of really intense optimism. I think the war against censorship is effectively over and we've won. I think what we're going to be dealing with now in policy areas and programming areas is what I would call mopping up operations and attempts by local and global authority to put the genie back in the bottle. But it's gone. I mean it's out there. The Net is out there. The Net has, in my mind at least, the Net has no center. It has no owners, none that I know of. It respects no borders. I mean, you know, Australia is just a domain name to the Net. It doesn't really matter where you are. English is pretty much its default language, much like air traffic control. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of waves of efforts to limit and otherwise control this medium. I would think, if you look at the growth statistics on the Net, if you look at the number of people coming on and you look at the kind of minds you're dealing with when you're dealing with the Net, I mean you are not dealing with the left side of the Bell curve when you're hitting on the Net. I mean you are dealing with people who are bright enough to get there, because it isn't easy. You're dealing with people who are really sharp about this new technology, because some of them write the programs that it runs on. You're also dealing, way at the bottom of the InterNet you're dealing with software, you're dealing with Send Mail, you're dealing with Read This, you're dealing with a lot of assorted software that all nodes have to have to talk to each other, and if you really look at that code and say, "Who wrote this code? Who wrote the thing that -- who created the water in which all this information swims?" Well, I think if you look at those original people a lot of them were basically anarcho-crypto heads that happened to be programmers and just wanted to, you know, send jokes to each other and talk about computers. I think it's --, you know, the default state of the Net is absolute freedom. In fact it's to such an extent that a large part of the Net is sort of set up to recognize attempts at censor- ship as system damage and simply route around it. I want to send pedophile memoirs from site A to site C. Well, you know, it's supposed to take the most efficient route and that's through site B. Well, this happens to be Jerry Falwell's machine. He decides what he wants on his machine in his "home." That's fine with me. So down it goes. Whup! Sorry. We don't take any pedophile stuff through this site. Boom! We'll kick it to D. D doesn't care. Boom! You know. I don't care if Jerry -- you know, it's fine with me what people have in their home. It's more complicated than this obviously and there's going to be a lot of argument and a lot of, you know, shouting back and forth and a lot of federal regulations passed and all of that, but I think what's happening here is we -- you know, what is the Net? The Net is basically the medium, and the Net reminds me of this book that was published at the end of the '70's where a man said, "Well, my idea for a really great book is a book of 350 pages and there's nothing on any of the pages. So I'm going to call it the Nothing Book." And everyone said, "What a terrible commercial idea." Well, of course he published the Nothing Book and now you go into any bookstore there's, you know, a big case of blank books. What we've got with the Net is we have, fundamentally we have the linking of millions and millions of hard drives. This fulfills the dream of every computer junkie in the world, that you have infinite drive space. You basically have infinite drive space. The Net is really -- what it is, is what we make it, every- body individually. It's like sort of the largest group hack in history. I think second to the phone company it's certainly the largest machine that's ever been built. Some people will get rather mystical. Under certain chemicals I'll get mystical and tell you it's the emergence of the World Mind. And like anything in the World Mind, it's got a lot of dark areas in it. Well, we'll just have to live with our dark fantasies as we live with our better deeds. To deny them is not really a good idea. I think one of the things that we're feeling right now with the immense growth is we're feeling three fundamental tensions within the Net, and I would also propose to you that for each ten- sion the Net also has the capacity to alleviate that tension. I think the first tension is between the concepts which can exist in a single human mind, in a single human society, that on the one hand ideas, ideas, need to be free. They need to be exchanged. They need to have no limit to the ability to make them baroque or make them fresh or make them new. But at the same time the same mind that has ideas that need to be free, we also hold within ourselves beliefs that need to be protected. Censorship is bad. I believe that. I need to protect that idea. That's central to something important to me. As an idea, censorship is bad? That may not be such a fundamentally true idea. Maybe there are some cases that people can make that censorship is good. All right. But my belief needs to be protected, although my ideas need to be free. Well, how does the Net deal with that? The Net, or UseNet, which is sort of this large machine, this large sort of Mother Ship of interest groups that rides upon the vast InterNet ocean, basically just creates infinite areas in which all beliefs can exist and all ideas can be free. And if you wander into an area with a certain belief -- say you wander into -- oh, the sex areas are always good because that's where everyone gets excited. You wander into ALT.SEX.MEMBERS OF THE SAME SEX. MOTSS. And you say, as we see in that group every month, you enter a message with the stirring headline, "FAGS MUST DIE." Well, it will be about four nanoseconds before about thirty other people will flame you hairless. Your I.D. will be exposed either in its strength or its weakness by thirty other minds working on that -- whew. At the same time you might want to say, "I believe that everyone should worship Jesus. Christ. Christian." Right? Well, you might sort of wander over to the Muslim and you might not feel too comfortable in the ALT.MUSLIM area doing that, but the Net has created, the wonderful alt groups have created ALT.CHRISTNET. They even have ALT.CHRISTNET.SEXUALITY. So what happens is when people feel a need to have a belief area in which their beliefs can be protected they'll just create an area and anybody who wanders in there that's not quite in the program, just flamed hairless and thrown out. That's all right, because you can wander over, you know, to another area or to a "secret moderated (ph) mailing list" that says, you know, "Kill Catholics Mailing List." Okay? We're going to talk with six other people on the Net about killing Catholics. That's a good idea. We'll just all be in that room together. You know, other people just put you in their Kill file and you're out of here. So the Net sort of resolves those two, that particular tension set. Next tension set, tension set number two, is information. Hmmmm. Information wants to be free. All right. Information wants to be free. True. True thing. All information wants to be free, and we don't really want to pay connect time charges to get it, either. On the other hand information is generated by people, and people need to be paid, okay? Because, you know, the information environment that makes my apartment, the landlord wants to be paid for that solid piece of information I live in so I need to get something coming in the other way. Well, I would propose to you that the way that both we can have free information and also have information which returns some kind of money or token back to its creator is probably at hand within the InterNet within the crypto environment. In other words I get a little sample of something. If I want to have the whole thing maybe I have to send $5 down the line on my Master Charge in order to get the key back. Mr. Zimmermann could probably talk a little bit more specifically about how cryptography and things like that probably hold the key to a real kind of commercial series of transactions over the InterNet. So that is sort of the Net. But on the one hand we have, you have to consider there's two things going on on the InterNet. One is speech, and people feel ASCII is speech and if you don't think it's speech say that on the Net and they'll probably come back to you and hand you your ASCII on a platter. Which empowers individuals. That's why we love it. At the same time the other question is how are we going to maintain copyright? Because people feel that maintaining copy- right disempowers individuals. Correct. Copyright was not created by the United States Government back in the dawn of government to empower individuals. That was a side effect. Copyright was created because people saw right away that unless people uld enjoy the fruits of their labor there wouldn't be quite so much invention within society and it was held to be a good thing to spur invention within society. I think that's probably the fundamental reason for copyright. And I think again, you know, the Net will give us the tools to do that. The Net has been as a global machine and through a pact that nobody intended and nobody created an extremely, surprisingly responsive organism to solving its own problems. They get solved on a pretty fast track. The final tension is sort of what is going on on the Net all the time in the way the Net only mirrors what we are and what we make it and who we are as a society, and that is the tension between the desire for liberty and the fear of liberty that leads us to yearn for some kind of authority. You see this polarity move along on the Net all the time. You see sort of libertarian -- libertarian anarchists are very big on the Net, are here, and then there's control freaks. They're also here. Anybody who's been out there for a while sees these people go at each other all the time. Then of course we have Net Heads, or Heads, whatever, and of course we have Feds, you know. And Heads and Feds have been playing games on the Net now for almost a decade. There's no reason to think they're going to stop. They sort of need each other. The Christ and the Antichrist in an eternal conflict. But meanwhile everybody else is just, you know, passing recipes back and forth and, you know, here's my, you know, here's my secret pedophile journal over here. Everybody's -- here's how you crochet something. Here's some code. Here's a filthy E of me and my dog. Just download, send money, state preferences. Then of course you have the anarchists, like I am. Hey! No rules, nothing. Let's just do it. You know, you're there. You are free. Just assume it and act on it, and -- THE NET POLICE. "You know, you're really a Nazi for saying it that way." In fact the famous Mneumonics law on the Net says that the longer any Net argument goes on, the more, the more ready you are to put us into -- "as length of the UseNet argument continues, the probability of a comparison to the Nazis approaches 1." And this happens. Then of course you have intellectual political explorers, you know, of all kinds, you know. Now we even have a Nazi, AMERICAN NAZI.COM on the Net. No longer are we approaching 1; the Nazis are already on the Net. But we have infinite disk space and they just go off in their little room. And then we also have PC people on the Net. PC's are very big on the Net, and very big on college bulletin boards. These are the people that believe that we can sort of control people in being nice, wonderful people, and when everybody's nice and wonderful and has no bad thoughts then it's going to be the Millenium. Hearts will open. You know, all will walk naked in the world. And then you have sort of the hackers and the crackers, you know, and there's a great deal of confusion about who's hacking and who's cracking. You know, if I'm cracking and I'm doing it because it's cool, I'm hacking, right? If someone's hammering on my password file they're cracking. I don't care how cool they are. So I think my fundamental statement about the Net is that it is literally the greatest tool for free speech that has ever been, ever been invented. Free speech is, you know, freedom of the press is available to those that own one. Hey. Two grand. We all own one. That's about the total cash investment. Never have printing presses with 15 million potential readers been so cheap, all over the world. I don't really despair for the future of the Net. I think the Net is probably the greatest tool for the potential liberation of the mind and spirit of all human beings that's ever existed on the planet. I view it as sort of the peoples' publish- ing company, that rejects no manuscripts, you know, that has all books available for ten cents each, you know, if that. You know, please. Read my screen. And then you're always coming back with the Net tension people saying, "Yes. But now that the people have the ability to communicate with each other globally on any issue from any point of view that they want to and governments can't really stop it that easily and it just sort of flows through these borders, don't you think it's time to call for all of us who use the Net to use it in a responsible manner?" And I say screw that. I say screw responsibility. Just do what you want. That's what it is there for. "Well, you have to telecommunicate responsibly." Well, I don't have to put a condom over my modem. Enough of this. You know, I mean everybody's always got to, you know, "We have a vast new medium. We must use it responsibly." No, I say we use it irresponsibly. I say we just fool around with it. We hack on it. We hammer on it. We pound it. We just see what happens. Who knows? You know, it might be a pi$ata and we crack it open and, you know, a lot of manure falls out. Or we might crack the pi$ata open and a huge Mardi Gras party will be wandering out. We don't know, you know. But I think we have to use it and use it heavily, because, you know, as they say in aerobics, "Use it or lose it." That's all I have to say. * * *

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Censorship In Cyberspace 5/6
by rarachel＠photon.poly.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

MODERATOR: Well. Getting back to censorship. I'm not quite sure what Phil Zimmermann is going to talk about, but I have a feeling that unlike some computer experts that I've talked to who think that the wide dissemination of encryption software like Phil Zimmermann's Pretty Good Privacy make the Digital Telephony Act no big deal because all the government will get is static when they tap in on these new phones, I have a feeling that he is a little bit more suspicious of the possibility of restrictive government action. So perhaps we can now find out what we might loosely call "the censorship crunch" (ph) and what is going to happen in it. Phil Zimmermann. ZIMMERMANN: How many people here know what PGP is? Okay. How many people don't? Okay. Looks like we've got about half and half maybe. Well, I'm not here to talk about PGP mostly but rather government policies, but I'll just talk about it a little bit. Cryptography is the art of making secret writing. It's been around for a long time. The problem is if I want to send you a message I use a key to scramble that message up and then you have to use the same key to unscramble it. The problem is how do I tell you what the key is? Do I tell you over the telephone what the key is to unscramble the message? If I do that then it can be inter- cepted, and so that's the problem with cryptography. In fact that has been the problem with cryptography since the days of Julius Caesar. But in the late 1970's some mathematicians at Stanford and M.I.T. devised another kind of cryptography that solves that problem of key distribution. It's called Public Key Cryptography, and the way it works is that there are really two keys. One encrypts, the other decrypts. As a matter of fact the two keys have a kind of yin-yang relationship so that either one will decrypt what the other one encrypts. This means that if you generate a pair of these keys, everybody generates a unique pair of keys for themselves, the keys have this mathematical relationship like this. They're kind of like Siamese twins. And you separate them at birth and you broadcast one of them to the world and put it on all your business cards and in your telephone book and, you keep the other one secret. Then if anyone wants to send you a message they encrypt it with the key that you published. That's your public key. But you're the only person in the world that can decrypt that message with the corresponding secret key. This solves the problem of key distribution. You don't need secure channels to distribute keys beforehand. With the old way that cryptography used to work before Public Key Cryptography came along, you needed a secure channel for the prior distribution of keys. Well, if you had a secure channel for the prior distribu- tion of keys then why do you need to use any cryptography at all? You know, I remember my Mom used to tell me when I was a kid that if you sprinkle salt on a bird's tail you can catch the bird. And for years I wondered about that. You know, maybe there's something about salt and birds. But I finally figured out why you can catch a bird if you can sprinkle salt on its tail. So if you could get a secure channel to distribute keys, then you've got the communica- tion problem solved. But maybe you could just send your message through that secure channel. Well, with Public Key Cryptography you don't need any secure channels. So if you combine that with the technologies of the Information Age, modems, personal computers, fax machines, etc., then you have a really good synergistic combination of tech- nologies that makes it possible for the first time for cryptography to affect millions of people in their everyday lives. In the old days before Public Key Cryptography you would have to do this prior distribution of keys. Governments didn't mind doing this, because they could put a guy on a plane to Moscow with a satchel handcuffed to his wrist carrying keys to the Embassy there. They don't mind paying the salary of somebody and buying them an airline ticket to do that. But if you're going to talk to your cousin in Colorado you're not going to do it by sending a courier carrying keys. So cryptography never had a chance to affect the lives of millions of people until Public Key Cryptography was invented and personal computers and the Information Age came along. Well, how many people here don't know what the Clipper Chip is, or haven't heard of it? Or just don't know what it is? Okay. I see almost everybody does. I'll just say a couple of words, but I'll abbreviate my remarks about the Clipper Chip. The Clipper Chip is an encryption device that the government is making for us that they hope we'll put in all of our telephones. It encrypts our telephone conversations so we can talk to other tele- phones that also have the Clipper Chip. The trick though is that at the time of manufacture the government puts the keys for encryp- tion and decryption in these chips, and they keep a copy of these keys for wiretap purposes. You know, I haven't talked to an audience where it wasn't immediately obvious to everybody that there's a problem with that as far as -- you know, I was talking on the phone the other day with the General Counsel of the NSA. I'm going to be debating him next week in Los Angeles and so we were talking about what we were going to do in the debate. And I made the remark that there is a difference in attitude between people on the inside and people on the outside. What I was talking about of course was inside the government, and in particular the law enforcement and the intel- ligence agencies. He said something like, that I was assuming a lot to think that it was just people on the inside who were for the Clipper Chip, and, you know, I just -- I don't remember running into too many people on the outside that felt differently. The government is trying to at first not pass legislation to make us use the Clipper Chip but rather to use government spend- ing power to make an awful lot of Clipper Chips deployed. They're using government spending power both to buy Clipper Phones that have the Clipper Chip in it and then they're going to use govern- ment spending power to require government contractors to buy Clipper Phones if they want to talk to the government. Well, this kind of gets the production lines going and brings the cost down. It makes it cheap enough so that it can be used more and more by the general population, the related chips to the Clipper Chip. It's not just the Clipper Chip. There's a whole series of chips the government's making. Capstone (ph) is another chip. They have this little card, a PCMCIA card. It's something that slips into your personal computer, into your notebook computer, that they're calling the Tessera Card, and the Tessera Card has got something similar to the Clipper Chip in it and it can do digital signatures, and they want you to file your taxes with it electron- ically. You know, it's funny. They call it the Tessera Card. Now I looked up "tessera" in the dictionary. I've got one of those giant, thick dictionaries. And tessera is a name that ancient Rome had for these little cards that were kind of like that, the size and shape of a Tessera Card, kind of a tile. And it was an identity card. And slaves were required to carry it, and if you didn't they could chop your head off or something awful like that. And I thought what a brilliant stroke of naming, you know? Who thought of that? I was talking to Clint Brooks, the Assistant to the Director of the NSA, in Los Angeles a couple of months back. We were on a panel together to argue this point. And he said that he was the one who named the Clipper Chip, and he was thinking that for these things, for example the Clipper Chip may not have been the best choice of names for it because people think of clipper as clipping the wings of democracy. Of course cryptographers like to rearrange letters and things because we like to do that, so we kind of just moved a couple of letters around and called it the Cripple Chip. So anyway what they're trying to do is to use government spending power to change the facts on the ground. Not by legis- lation, but by changing the facts on the ground. We don't have any laws requiring us to use 120 volt AC power, but we do. When was the last time you saw a 48 volt vacuum cleaner? It's the tyranny of the installed base. That's why, you know, all computers are Windows or MS-DOS computers or Macintoshes. It's something that, if it's out there and it's -- deployment wins, in other words. Well, the government is not the only ones that can change the facts on the ground. I can change the facts on the ground. I've already done that to some extent. And I'm going to do it some more. You know if we wake up one morning with 100 million Clipper Phones installed it's going to be too late to worry about changing government policy. It doesn't matter who we elect President. We could have somebody elected President that says, "Elect me and I promise to get rid of all these Clipper Phones." It won't do any good at all. The installed base and the technology infrastructure is more powerful than a government, is more powerful than government policy. There is no way we could change, you know, our power standards. There is no way that a government can decide that we're not going to use PC's anymore or something like that. So that's what they hope to do with Clipper. Well right now PGP, Pretty Good Privacy, a program that I wrote that does E-mail encryption using Public Key Cryptography and using other algorithms that were chosen from the academic literature, the most powerful algorithms, the ones that had been the best peer reviewed, not my own home grown invented algorithms, because those had not been through the kind of peer review it takes to stand up to major governments. PGP uses the best algorithms in the academic literature. PGP has become the most widely used program in the world for E-mail encryption, bar none. Nothing else comes even close. It's used all over the world. It's used in Burma by political opposition groups in Burma, freedom fighters in Burma. Burma has an absolutely wretched government. They torture and kill thousands of people. They have a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate in custody in Burma. They're being trained to use PGP in Burma in jungle training camps on portable computers. They take this knowledge to other jungle training camps and teach them too. I talked to somebody who's connected with those groups and they tell me that it's raised morale quite a bit because before PGP came along captured documents would lead directly to the arrest and torture and execution of entire families. I talked with a guy who was a human rights worker in Central America. This was at the offices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington. They have a human rights group there. And he told me that he was documenting atrocities, death squads, and he encrypts his files with PGP. But if the government found his files they would go and kill all his witnesses, probably not very fast either. PGP is saving lives there. I gave him a few pointers on good disk hygiene, how to keep his stuff clean, not just -- using PGP alone isn't enough. Well, my next project is a secure voice project. I just a couple of nights ago spent about a half an hour talking to one of my lawyers over it. I haven't put the encryption in yet. It does it all without encryption. But you talk into your personal com- puter with a SoundBlaster board that compresses your voice, digi- tizes, compresses and encrypts your voice, sends it out through a modem, and at the other end it reverses those steps. So we have this in test now, and I hope to release this through M.I.T. M.I.T. is the current official publisher of PGP. They have what is known as an FTP (ph) site. That's something on the InterNet. It means that anybody can get a file from their computer by just reaching in and grabbing it. But their FTP site is structured in such a way that people outside the United States can't do that. They won't let people in from outside the United States. And not only that, even if you're inside the United States it makes you answer a questionnaire saying that you are an American, that you're not going to export this and promise not to export it, and if you answer yes to the right questions it will let you get PGP. It didn't take very long before PGP showed up in Europe after that, probably the same day. Information wants to be free. Apparently that applies to free software more than anything else. PGP was published in June of 1991 initially. It spread like dandelion seeds blowing in the wind. It didn't take very long for it to spread to Europe. Now M.I.T. with their lawyers and their prestige is standing there publishing PGP in a way identical to the encryption methods that they have used for publishing other encryption software without any previous harassment by the federal government on their doing it improperly, so they haven't gotten any complaints about the way they're publishing PGP either. All future versions of PGP for the foreseeable future are going to be pub- lished that way, so I hope that that will protect it. You [Corn-Revere] mentioned the Carr (ph) case. There is a book by Bruce Schneider called Applied Cryptography, and it has encryption algorithms in it. I liked it. I like the book, the preface of the book. It's good. He says, "There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: the kind that can prevent your kid sister from reading your messages and the kind that can prevent major governments from reading your messages. This book is about the latter." You know, I wanted to steal that line for my book because he stole many lines from my book in his book without an attribution. But that's okay because information wants to be free and I like to be quoted even if he doesn't credit. So I might call up Bruce and ask him if I could put that in my preface for that book. A guy named Phil Carr took Bruce Schneider's book and applied for an export license. Actually he applied for a commodities jurisdiction grant by the State Department that the book can be -- that this item can be exported. It was immediately granted, because it was a book. He then applied for a CJ, commo- dities jurisdiction, to export a floppy disk containing the same source code in the book, exactly byte for byte the same source code, and they said no. He has appealed it. They said no again. Members of my own legal defense team are helping in his appeal. This is a multifront war. You know, it's funny. The number of lawyer jokes that I've told has gone down in the last year. I'm starting to run into lawyers that are actually men of conscience. It's great. I'm about to publish the source code for PGP in a book through M.I.T. Press. Books may be exported. I'm going to put it in an OCR font. We're going to apply for a commodities jurisdic- tion. We're probably going to get it, we presume. If they don't it's going to be the first time that it was ever declined for a book and I think the press would probably make much of that. They probably know that, and they'll probably take that into their calculations when they decide whether to grant this jurisdiction. If they do that then I'll also publish the secure voice project I'm working on in a book through M.I.T. press and see what happens with that. The government is -- you know, I found this interesting, the point about the different media affecting what the government tries to say, what we have free speech in. When telephones were first invented there was an attitude in the government that you could wiretap these things without a court order because they didn't go into your house to do it. It was not a violation of the Fourth Amendment of unreasonable search and seizure because they could just go down the block and attach their alligator clips to the copper and that would be all that's needed. So it took fifty years of litigation to come up with the idea, or rather to establish the idea that you need a court order to do a wiretap. Well, we're facing the same thing again on the InterNet. When the Founding Fathers made the Constitution they didn't think it was necessary to say that we had a right to a private conversa- tion, because there was no technology at the time that made it hard to have a private conversation. If you want to just go talk behind the barn with somebody you can say whatever you want and you don't have to worry. You don't have to codify it in the Constitution that you're allowed to do that. But now most of our conversations are over copper or glass fiber. Most of the people I talk to I've never seen the face. Maybe I will when they have those AT&T things. Have you ever had a $10,000 phone bill? I know I don't plan on installing a videophone in my house, because most of my East Coast clients think that I wear a suit all the time. They don't know how I work. I ought to be able to whisper in your ear even if your ear is 1,000 miles away. And the government says I can't do that, and that's what this whole thing is about, removing all of our communication from vibrating air molecules to photons. As more and more of our traffic switches to electronic media it becomes more and more lucrative to tap into it. You can't read all the paper mail. The government can't read it all. They can read one per- son's paper mail if they target somebody, but they can't read it all. It's too much work to read everyone's paper mail. But they can read everyone's E-mail. A single government computer could scan every single piece of E-mail in the country, all of it, every day, constantly. Now I'm not saying they do that, but the technology exists that they could. And it could scan for subversive key words and it could look for political troublemakers. It could look for, you know, the next anti-Vietnam War protesters or the next civil rights protesters or the next environmental protesters, whatever the issue of the day is. Some unpopular war or something like that could come up again, and they'll be able to find people who are talking about it. What could Joe McCarthy have done with these kinds of tools? What about traffic analysis? What about all these E-mail headers that say who it's from, who it's to, what the subject is and so on? I think this means that we should try to encrypt all of our E-mail, because that's the only way to put it back the way it was with paper mail. In fact it puts it beyond that. This is not a black and white issue, because there are some downsides to this. There's never been a time in our history where it's been possible to place information beyond the reach of the collective efforts of society, but with modern cryptography you can. You know, if you put information in a bank vault you can always get it out with dynamite or welding torches or something like that. I remember in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, you know, the dynamite, where it's raining money, you know? Used enough dynamite there, Butch? You can always get that information when it's physically protected. But it's now possible for the first time in history to place information beyond the reach of the collective efforts of society. The Gross National Product is not enough to get it out. It takes less energy to make a round trip to the nearest solar system than it does to compute the prime factors of some large composite number. I'm going to read you a quote that I got from a guy in Latvia. I always read this quote, so to those of you who've heard me speak before I apologize for the repetition. I got this, it was sent to me by E-mail, on the day that Boris Yeltsin was shelling his Parliament building in October of '93. It says, "Phil, I wish you to know. Let it never be, but if dictatorship takes over Russia your PGP is widespread from Baltic to Far East now and will help democratic people if necessary. Thanks." That's the best mail I've ever gotten on PGP. I want to read you a quote that Louis Fried (ph), FBI Director Louis Fried, said recently at a conference on global cryptography, on September 26th. Steven Levy (ph) put a question to him about what would happen if Clipper doesn't catch on, doesn't get wide acceptance. What would the FBI do in response to that. Would they outlaw other kinds of cryptography? Here's a transcript of this: At first they didn't understand this question. "You mean if the software that we write doesn't work?" He said, "No. If all you get is encrypted forms and you can't decipher them." "The terms of encryption being a voluntary standard?" Steven Levy said, "Yes." The answer from Louis Fried, FBI Director, was, "Oh, yeah, definitely. If five years from now we solve the access problem but what we're hearing is all encrypted, I'll probably if I'm still here be talking about that in a very different way. The objective is the same. The objective is for us to get those conversations, whether they're by an alligator clipped on ones and zeros [it's kind of garbled, I think] ... whoever they are, whatever they are, I need them." It was obvious to everyone there who got a little bit clearer view of it than the transcriber of the transcript here that what he was talking about is that he would seek legislative relief, in other words outlaw other kinds of cryptography. This is the first time an Administration official has said something along these lines. Just a couple of weeks back the FBI Wiretap Bill passed requiring phone companies to build all their equipment wiretap ready. The analogy to this is requiring new home builders to put video cameras wired to a police station, with a promise to only turn them on with a court order. The assumption is that as we build a new technology infrastructure we have to guarantee to the police, to the government, that they will have access to our private communications. This is a dangerous precedent. The FBI Wiretap Bill passed without too much trouble, largely in part because of the efforts of the Electronic Frontier Foundation I'm disappointed to say. John Curry Barlow (ph) made the remark that he could have changed the vote of one of the Senators, and he told him to go ahead and vote for it because it was in the EFF's view the best deal they could get. I think that we could have stopped it. Last year it was introduced and it didn't get a single sponsor. This year it had money in it for the phone companies to pay for the infrastructure changes. The phone companies stopped opposing it for that reason. We can't let some future legislation come down that will slip by us that outlaws other kinds of cryptography. Cryptography is our one guarantor of privacy on the Information Superhighway, the Infoban. I was talking to a Swedish reporter recently and I used the word "Infoban," and he said, "Oh, I wish you wouldn't use that word. It sounds too German. So I understand the new word is I-way. I saw that in Wired. It's a little too hip for me. We have to stop this. There's only one chance to fill with this technology niche. You see, your voice is going to be digitized at your telephone not down at the office, so there's going to be a computer in your phone. And once it's digitized it's practically free to encrypt it. It will be encrypted. The question is will it be encrypted with technology that we control or technology the government controls. If we build a technology infrastructure that some future government might inherit, a future government that could be a bad government -- you know, sometimes economies change. Germany in the 1930's, Russia in the 1990's, we don't know where our economy will be twenty years from now, thirty years from now. A government could emerge with fascist tendencies. If they inherit a technology infrastructure that allows them to monitor every movement of their political opposition, every transaction, every conversation and every communication, every bit of travel, then they'll be able to hold onto power. It could very well be the last government we ever elect. I think if you're trying to analyze technology policy you should ask yourselves what kinds of technologies would strengthen the hand of a police state, and then don't deploy those technolo- gies. This is a matter of good civic hygiene. So that's about all I have to say. I guess we can have our question and answer period. * * *

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Censorship In Cyberspace 6/6
by rarachel＠photon.poly.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

MODERATOR: I think first I'm going to give the membeQ of the panel the opportunity to ask any questions that they want of each other. Does anybody have a question for another panelist? Okay. Well, then, the floor is open for questions. Yes. Q: Miss Lafontaine, your student editor, Kristin, why didn't she tell the teacher in Palestine to (inaudible)? I mean the children were the ones that submitted the material. Their free expressions had already gone out. What did she care what they said? LAFONTAINE: Because it took her about a year to be able to get a contact in the Palestinian schools. See, that's one thing that we don't understand. In a school to get even a modem in and then to get a network and to get $100 maybe a year to do this is miraculous, and then to find the contacts for partner schools is even more miraculous. And this school has been working on this for five years. Q: Didn't they cut their nose off to spite their face? Cut themselves off from (inaudible)? LAFONTAINE: Yeah, I think that this particular person, the teacher in the Palestinian occupied territories, would have said, "That's it. We're not communicating anymore." And, you know, it was really her vision to get some communication. MODERATOR: Yes. Q: Mr. Corn-Revere, with respect to the problems that Mr. Zimmermann was raising just now with respect to the Clipper Chip, I wonder if there isn't some way to find this legislation unconstitutional, as burdening the rights to interstate commerce or the right to travel? CORN-REVERE: Not really, because it's an extension of a legal structure that's existed for some time. It's quite right in talking about the problem of wiretapping being one as old as tele- phones, and the Supreme Court really first addressed it in 1928 and at the time the only Justice who really understood what was going on was Louis Brandeis, who basically said it's not going to stop with wiretapping. Some day the government may develop even more advanced technological means of rifling through drawers, obtaining access to peoples' papers without having to go inside their homes, which is exactly what we're talking about. But in terms of the Constitutionality, at the time the Court said that wiretapping isn't a search in violation of the Fourth Amendment because there's no physical intrusion. They reversed themselves in 1967, but as with all or most Constitutional rights, or particularly Fourth Amendment rights, because it says you can't do an unreasonable search without getting a warrant, you really just need a legal structure that defines when you need to get a warrant. The latest Wiretap Bill extends that into newer technologies, but again it does require the cooperation of the phone companies. It requires them to be wiretap ready. The condi- tions for getting a warrant, which is what the Constitution speaks to, are the same. Q: But what I'm wondering is if requiring that techno- logy, that the actual product be structured in a certain way or include a certain feature, I wonder if that wouldn't even infringe individuals' right to contract, to have a certain kind of, to not be able to buy a certain kind of product. I don't want this product in my phone. It seems like the government is entering into some kind of monopoly with the phone company. So I'm wondering if it's possible -- CORN-REVERE: They've been doing that for some time. Q: -- to come at this from something other than just a Fourth Amendment and First Amendment perspective. CORN-REVERE: Yeah. I understand the point. I don't know that there's a Constitutional right to buy a particular kind of product. But a good first step would be for people to under- stand exactly what's going on with this legislation. I think, you know, what Phil Zimmermann was talking about is the best first step, for people to really understand the implications of this, because I think they're truly frightening. Q: I agree with the distaste for the Information Superhighway metaphor. I was wondering if any of you had ideas about a better metaphor, because -- VAN DER LEUN: I'd like to just kill all these metaphors now. The whole medium is in the throes of these metaphors, and then people take them generally in a much more concrete way and we have just endless tedious discussions talking about what the metaphors mean, what they don't mean. I was thinking about this this morning. There's a problem -- occasionally The Well, my own system, has these global problems that all the users get involved in, and one is currently going on, and I'm just watching everybody stumble over all the metaphors that we've sort of pulled up over the years to discuss what we do there, and I felt myself yearning for people just to sweep these metaphors away and just actually look at the actual medium, which is sort of characters on a blue screen, almost down on that level, to try and become fresh again. I know, as you say, the dissatisfaction, especially for the Information Superhighway, is basically because this is the year in which every mind open to the media is going to be paved over by this concept. And it's just tedious. It's like blather and spew. CORN-REVERE: But I'm not talking about just words in a literary vein. Lawyers deal in concepts, usually not very well, but also in terms of very broad concepts, in broad generalities, and metaphors are important in abstract reasoning process. And so when you're describing what is possible under the law the metaphors you use are very important, which is what happened in broadcasting. VAN DER LEUN: Legal fictions. CORN-REVERE: Yeah, legal fictions. They deal with legal fictions all the time and give them definitions, and to the extent that it gets pigeonholed, whatever "it" is, by these legal constructs and descriptions and metaphors that it limits what's possible legally to do then. Now I agree that ultimately tech- nology wins. But government can slow it down. Q: The problem is that that metaphor has inhabited the space of the discussion, so that, you know, Al Gore or whoever, you know, appeals to it and it catches in peoples' minds until you displace it with another and better metaphor, which would be a very creative thing to describe. I was wondering if in the history of this kind of technology whether you could look at how other meta- phors have been used to describe printing or film -- VAN DER LEUN: I think it's very difficult right now because at the same time we have this metaphor about the Information Superhighway that is displayed around and everyone's tired of you have to realize that that arises out of a sort of shared mental substrate that we're all consciously or not in right now, which has to do with the tendency to describe everything that's going on in the world in sort of terms of the computer, much in the way that the universe used to be discussed as a large clock. Now the universe is a large sort of computer with lots of disks, and God has RAM as big as all outdoors. So that metaphor exists within this sort of larger substrate. This is how -- it's the dominant -- the computer itself is immensely sort of loaded with metaphoric possibilities and possibilities for analogy, so I don't see this being done away with any time soon because something else will just -- Q: The thought just occurs to me hearing you speak, something like Minsky's notion of society. It would be much harder for people to agree with the Al Gore (Inaudible; overlap) MODERATOR: This is now becoming sort of a very interest- ing conversation,ut perhaps a conversation that might be carried on at the wine and cheese party. Did you have a question? Q: Yes. I saw a conflict emerging between the optimism of Mr. Van Der Leun's the technology is going to beat efforts to suppress and Mr. Zimmermann's conversations about all the ways that the government can suppress it by using technology to encrypt, to, as you say, to put in our computers what's the equivalent of the voltage system. I was wondering if somehow you could discuss it or resolve it or expand on this. Between the two of you, which -- ZIMMERMANN: I'd like to say something about that. I run into people all the time who say that the war is over. It's just a matter of mopping up now. I don't think it is. The government can pass laws against things and put people in jail, and Louis Fried's comments indicate that if he tries to press for legislative relief they could pass it, like they passed the FBI Wiretapping. What happened there, I mean a friend of mine who was active in the Nuclear Freeze said, "You know, you guys are totally unorganized. How could you possibly let something as big as the FBI Wiretap Bill just said right on past? Where were all the letters to the Congressmen? Where were all the phone calls? Congress didn't hear a peep out of anybody about this. How did this happen?" If we're asleep at the switch while we all talk to each other in our little tiny private news groups, you know, with our little inbred little circles of friends, we're not going to affect Congressional policy, Congressional laws, legislative activity. What happens the next time when they pass a law outlawing other kinds of cryptography except for escrowed (ph) encryption systems? That could happen. The ship of state has a very large turning radius. We're going to have to start trying to turn this super- tanker right now. It may take years before they pass legislation outlawing other kinds of cryptography. I don't know. Certainly it's going to be at least a year, but it could be five years. But we have to start now. We have to really start pressing and not just talk amongst ourselves in InterNet news groups. VAN DER LEUN: Of course I was around with the EFF for a lot of this thing, but I certainly disagree with the need for constantly being citizen active. Where was everyone? Well, like I said, I think the EFF became sort of a luncheon lobby. It basically lost the grassroots support when it made certain policy turns a while back. I mean I was sort of shocked to hear -- did Barlow really tell you that he could have changed the vote of a Senator but he didn't because that law was best they could get? I mean that can't -- ZIMMERMANN: No, he didn't tell me that. Steve Levy told me that. I think he read it on the Net, so -- VAN DER LEUN: If that's true (Inaudible) -- you know, I mean there was a -- not that EFF is particularly powerful about this, but it was for a while until they started going in another direction. We certainly have to deal with this but I think, you know, everybody talks from what I like to call the illusion of central position and I think that obviously we're going to go forward and do what we can to resist government moves on this point but I don't think the rest of the Net is going to slow down. I mean without the Net would there be a Zimmermann? Would there be a Net in the future without a Zimmermann? You know I think the two are almost symbiotic, or probably will turn out to be in the future. Tools, not rules, and -- but that doesn't mean we quit trying to shape the rules. You know, I think the other thing is it's just a big blip on most Americans' horizons. CORN-REVERE: That's the problem. VAN DER LEUN: Well, but maybe that is not something we're going to do by just waving our modem and saying it's important. CORN-REVERE: True, but that's what you have groups like EFF for ideally. Unfortunately, being based in Washington you tend to get absorbed into the atmosphere, the environment of Washington. If you want to be a player you go for the best you can get, which is what happens to lobbying groups all the time. They figure if they want anyone to listen to them they'll make the compromises that they need to make. The problem is politically that on the Hill who's going to say no to the FBI? People don't vote against FBI-backed measures. It's not just in the days of J. Edgar Hoover. It continues today. It was true in the '80's when they rewrote the Wiretapping Law for the first time then to include digital communication. It started out as a fairly decent bill, and then the Justice Department and the FBI got hold of it and riddled it with exceptions. So now it's up again, and the next bill will be the encryption bill. And it's not that every citizen everywhere has to constantly be marching in picket lines saying this is the most important issue in the world. It's just that when you have a group that's supposed to pay attention to these things I think it helps if they take a principled position and at least makes these issues known to the extent that they can. But if their mission is to have lunch with lobbyists and get the best deal that they can, then there's nobody watching the store. ZIMMERMANN: The Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, EPIC, is a real, committed, true blue, principled organization dedicated to trying to hold the line on these issues. They used to be Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, but they had a Washington office which specialized in electronic privacy and so they created this special group out there. If you want to support somebody who's really consistent on this, they're a good one to support. Q: The Electronic Privacy Information Center? ZIMMERMANN: Yes. VAN DER LEUN: They're much more principled about it than EFF. They're always quick. They're always on a very strong and positive side of the issues. The tragedy is they're not as well funded as the EFF group. MODERATOR: I would like to suggest that not everybody who really feels principally concerned about this issue is on-line, and it's possible that if an effort was made to get in touch with people like Feminists for Free Expression or the Civil Liberties Union or something like that rather than relying on on-line communication -- I didn't even know that the Bill was up until I was at a meeting and somebody said, "The Senate is voting at seven o'clock, right now. And the House has passed it." And it wasn't in the paper. I think that a lot of people who would have protested it just didn't know. VAN DER LEUN: I'm in the Net all the time and I didn't know. I didn't see it on the Net. I don't snoop around in those groups. Q: On that same note people who haven't even been on the InterNet or any sort of electronic medium are affected. There are instances that I've heard of, that I've read about, where the federal and state governments are avoiding FOIA, Freedom of Information Act requirements, and Sunshine Laws by holding elec- tronic conferences. I was wondering if Congress has addressed that at all, if anyone can answer that question. [Inaudible - no response] MODERATOR: The gentleman in the back? Q: The problem with the philosophy (inaudible) to the UseNet is that what it fails to do is it fails to teach us how to form a consensus and how to form a coalition. While the Net has all these great individuals that might lead the fight, it doesn't do a very good job on building networks, and that's really a problem. The problem is that we've lost sight that the idea of free speech is not merely that you can be a talking head but that speech is a tool for persuasion. If we don't address this problem of consensus, organizations like the FBI don't even care about consensus will always (inaudible). ZIMMERMANN: Yeah. You become marginalized, where you only talk to people that believe the same thing that you do. In fact these news groups are especially designed for that. The technology of the news groups is especially designed to isolate people from each other. People with the same interests are drawn together in the news groups, but they're isolated movements in society. MODERATOR: Yes? Oh, I'm being signalled from the back and I believe that I'm being signalled because it is time for our discussion to end. Is that the case? Yes. The lady with laryn- gitis is nodding her head. One minute. One more question. Yes. Q: I just wanted to ask, at the risk of sounding naive I'm very alarmed by some of the things here that Mr. Zimmermann has said and I'd like to know if you have any suggestions of what we can. Why didn't we know about this? I didn't know that they can now put something in our phones that allows them to easily wiretap. How do we get this out to the public? Do any of you have any suggestions about this? I mean I don't want to leave here feeling helpless. VAN DER LEUN: It hasn't been an under reported item. I mean I don't want to give anyone the impression this is like some secret document or technology handed out in a back room. It has been noted in the Wall Street Journal, in the New York Times, on television. ZIMMERMANN: Yeah, but what can you do is the question. I think that you should write letters to the editor, talk to your Congressman, especially your Congressman, and to your Senator of course, too. You know, I've been so focussed on my specialty that I thought everyone else was going to try to cover the Wiretap Bill. It's all I can do to juggle with all the set of chainsaws that I've got in my hands right now. My arms are getting tired. So I just assumed that somebody else would handle the FBI Wiretap Bill, and in fact a lot of us have come to rely on the EFF to handle these things. So getting the watchdog to take a nap certainly was a highly effective means of getting that one to sail right on through. CORN-REVERE: You mentioned your specialty. And we all come from different specialties. I mean my background isn't computers. I've recently started getting into some on-line services, but that isn't my background. I started as a communi- cations lawyer doing broadcast law and cable television law and things like that. My main interest is in making sure that tech- nology doesn't determine what the legal structure is and it doesn't determine what your Constitutional rights are, and so I'm moving naturally towards these areas. There is more than just a conver- gence of technology going on and a convergence of media. There's a convergence of specialties. It takes people from our respective disciplines getting together to try and get at these issues. ZIMMERMANN: You know I think we're in need of a real political movement to get started on privacy. You know, we've got these very small lobbying organizations and 501(C)(3) educational organizations like EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and I think EPIC does a good job for what they do. But what we need is, drawing back to the experience of the Nuclear Freeze era it's going to be hard to get that kind of groundswell. You're not going to get a million people marching in Central Park for elec- tronic privacy. But you can get a big grassroots thing going if you really work at it. You know, in the early days of the Nuclear Freeze you'd have meetings that were very sparsely populated like this one. But as a few years went by and Reagan was rattling the saber and talking Evil Empire and (inaudible) with enough shovels and things like that the churches began to fill up. MODERATOR: Well, that's a good note for us to offer, since we are sparsely populated, a glass of wine. Come and join us for some wine and cheese. [END OF MEETING]

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[Bay Area] Meet the Ecash developers today
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The folks from DigiCash are demonstrating Ecash, smartcard payment systems, and other goodies at the Cardtech West exhibition in the Santa Clara convention center. Today, Thursday, is the last day of the show, so get on out there. The show will be open from 10 am through 3 pm. No, Chaum himself won't be there. -- Lucky Green <shamrock(a)netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred. "The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that's good." <George Washington>

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Re: Hazards of encouraging forged dig sigs
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- "L. McCarthy" wrote: >Now that Eric has made it abundantly clear he envisions syntactic but not >semantic checks of sigs, I am opposed to the proposition. I foresee a >situation in which a large portion of the list traffic uses forged or >meaningless signing-server-appended dig sigs. Perhaps, though I doubt it. I still think that "incentivising" (I just love this word) the use of crypto on this list will lead to better tools and therefore to more people in the world at large using crypto. Since that is what we all want, can't we at least give it a try? There is nothing to lose and everything to gain. - -- Lucky Green <shamrock(a)netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred. "The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that's good." <George Washington> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6ui iQCVAgUBLt1xxASQkem38rwFAQGELwP+Ms7eKLCysRTLeLITah2aoGYo1cvrkoNh XMfv6E7qdLIrwoQaFgaREtFFp3RkTP6lPmzJePgvC4Rkl+SBIKM8eFxgOa3scJ9t QaEE5D5Rz9zZpD3D13thRQnshk9PdIc8LDv6FoEvfDGXtChEyiXWVUiRTRRJob1b LZmyV7Hed0Y= =Uo3r -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Effects of Marking/Delaying Nonsigned Posts
by jamiel＠sybase.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:34 AM 11/30/94, Eric Hughes wrote: >Does a mark or a delay constitute an "effective bar" from >participation on this list? I think not, although I'm entertaining >arguments. I don't think marking or delaying constitutes an effective bar from the list. I do think that marks are redundant (as Tim said, it is pretty obvious who signs and who doesn't), and that delays will degrade the quality of discussion on the list (time lag for only some has a way fragmenting discussion, as anyone with a sometimes-slow link can attest). Degrading the list value, I would think, not your intended goal and would punish the rest of the list members for a non-signer's sins, so to speak. This, of course, depends on the lag - 5 minutes won't matter, but why bother? 1 day would (IMHO) kill quite a bit of discussion. Somewhere in between (the 2-4 hours you mentioned in one post) could head either way. If you are set on this idea, may I echo someone else's suggestion of an autoresponder to annoy those posting without signing? Doesn't impact the list, we all still know who is not signing, and the culprit gets to delete a message informing them of where to find the latest version of PGP. >Eric -j

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Re: Authentication at toad.com: WTF?
by The new cypherpunks signature checking agent 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The below message was found to have a valid signature from "JEFF LICQUIA (CEI) " JLICQUIA(a)mhc.uiuc.edu. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I trust that this will illustrate my point a little more effectively. It's being sent to cypherpunks as well for informational purpose: to spoof to the entire list would require a slight amount more sophistication. -- Todd -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLtzwSTER5KvPRd0NAQEHBwQAmM9Gk7q6Ieh/QAw+2ardAgMrhUJWLVpG FByPwJGhm/OIvya6Bx+A1en9Asdlkjaso819A/jaAOOISDcalAL77YhaIk7f9s+a ShsZ8asdIU8hfGhY7u8JK94HhhSDY7Sk93KjjkPosj8Hjkhk+asdJ87l/aDHjDj1 FssfdkqoFJw= =nziF -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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