December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Bet e$ on how long it will take for PGPFone to make it overseas!
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:20 PM 8/13/95 -0400, you wrote: >I bet e$50 that PGPFone will have been exported 24 hours after its final >release has been announced to this list. Who is willing to take the bet? >Perhaps someone is willing to bet at less time? Not a chance I'd take this bet! 1) My e$ haven't arrived.... 2) If there were a serious risk of you losing, I know you're a good law-abiding guy, but you might have a "friend" who would help you out by exporting it in a hurry :-) 3) 24 hours sounds like a reasonably safe upper limit for the export time. #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #--- Storyteller makes no choice - soon you will not hear his voice. His job was to shed light, and not to master. RIP, Jerry

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Re: Bet e$ on how long it will take for PGPFone to make it overseas!
by carolann＠censored.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- <giggles> 24 minutes was a more reasonably safe upper limit. I just wondered why Alex got to have all the fun! Maybe I should move across the water or something? </giggles> >3) 24 hours sounds like a reasonably safe upper limit for the export time. ># Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect <sadness> RIP, Mick RIP, Jerry </sadness> Love Always, Carol Anne -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMC8QSIrpjEWs1wBlAQHEGAP+J+jnpkQGsSFYzc2zrZuDztjKEatcxiWK ShfjjYvfjZKRMyuk1A6vl3UjMKjZaevdLcC2slgRzzU2KKCclwM7rQLcmgTrJKkZ 4v71bKnqDxBqx8WlPAKjj8RhACy296X7KX2AqetmBLoZGl2dwCxzbuZ1l7Zw7pQ9 jeuahRi4raw= =lN/A -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Member Internet Society - Certified BETSI Programmer - Webmistress *********************************************************************** Carol Anne Braddock (cab8) carolann(a)censored.org 206.42.112.96 My Homepage The Cyberdoc *********************************************************************** ------------------ PGP.ZIP Part [017/713] ------------------- M8H,),S$8G>&.WP(8IRA`-M['+`Q%&_C"">5-F%LX@<_Q$;*P'',Q$Z/AA[8M MF=O0H+*%(-S%&>S%+FS&<LS%3(Q&#W1"<]2%`H^;,]^1C$'HBN8PX$4SYAU^ MPGD<Q0ZLA0D+,`MCT!LA**4M[-JPAK9F?40!AJ,CW"'%DR#:'9?Q)3[%<DQ` ------------------------------------------------------------- for next chunk to export --> http://dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/export/

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How to launder money (internationally) (fwd)
by jcaldwel＠iquest.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-------- Forwarded message -------- Date: Sat, 12 Aug 1995 13:37:24 est From: Gary Livermore <gary.livermore(a)p4.f507.n300.z1.aen.org> To: Multiple recipients of list CHAT <CHAT(a)AEN.ORG> Subject: How to launder money (internationally) How dirty drug money is laundered internationally: [From National Geographic, Vol.183, No.1 Jan.1993, pg105] Titled: The Power of Money, by Peter T White, Asst. Editor, quoting his sources as the "Centre for International Documentation of Organized and Economic Crime, located in Cambridge, England. [begin this section] ================================================================== This as a real-life example: A U.S. organized crime group with a lot of hot cash forms a cozy relationship with the central bank of a British Commonwealth country. Diplomats of that country carry the cash out of the U.S. If it's $10,000 or more, they are supposed to report that to U.S. Customs, but they don't; they "externalize" the cash. It goes into the central bank and then into various dummy companies in different countries in return for shares in those companies. The money is thus "agitated," so it'll be just about impossible for investigators to follow. Then, to "repatriate" the money, dummy companies in the U.S. sell their worthless shares to investors in Britain - who are in fact in on the scam - and behold, the money is back in the U.S., clean! Now it buys legitimate businesses, banks, political power. An operation like this, involving highly placed officials, and businessmen, will cost quite a bit, maybe 35 percent, but once the system is in place, people will want to use it - not only drug profiteers but also arms dealers, terrorist organizations, intelligence agencies... A prime haven for such shady customers was BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, headquartered in Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands with branches in 72 countries. It is said to have secretly controlled the First American Bank of Washington, D.C. After BCCI collapsed in 1991, having defrauded depositors of several billion dollars, it became known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminal International. ================================================================= [End, this section] Can you say Mena - Clinton - Whitewater, 3 times real fast?!? In the very next section, there is an interesting little number used by the bank/finance crowds, it's number "72". [begin this section] =========================================================== - the rule of 72. No one is certain who first developed the rule, but the principle is quite simple: Divide any number into 72 and the answer tells how long it will take for a sum to double in financial terms. Are you charged 18 percent interest on the unpaid balance of your credit card account? Eighteen goes into 72 four times - so the debt would double in four years. Say your annual raise is 6 percent; that number goes into 72 twelve times, so in twelve years your salary will double. The same holds true of any investment. And what if inflation runs at 6 percent a year? Then after a dozen years your money will be worth half as much, so in a sense you'll be back where you started. =============================================================== [end this section] Gee, now I wonder if the money-changers figured this into setting annual inflation rates! Kind of keeps the middle class down, and stuck in a rut. *****My footer********************************************************* "We conclude that the Reserve Banks are not federal instrumentalities for purposes of the FTCA (Federal Tort Claims Act), but are independent, privately owned and locally controlled corporations" Lewis v. U.S. F.2d (1982) *********************************************************************** ... Those who follow like sheep deserve to get fleeced. --- PPoint 1.92 * Origin: Arizona's West Coast. My Point, Exactly! (1:300/507.4) SEEN-BY: 102/975 106/64 108/155 124/4014 132/209 133/1007 138/179 147/3032 SEEN-BY: 203/8888 231/110 511 955 236/48 260/104 300/507 704 356/3 369/85 372/5

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Changes in Operation..
by Flame Remailer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

ATTENTION: The anonymous remailer operators at vishnu.alias.net and spook,alias.net have decided to activate the reordering option on both the Type-I (original cypherpunk) and Type-II (MixMaster). This means that there will be at least 5 messages in the outbound queue and they will be delivered randomly.

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Australia crypto ill news: pointers
by aba＠dcs.exeter.ac.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The following URL was posted by Ross Anderson (the author of the article quoted in RISKS): http://commerce.anu.edu.au/comm/staff/RogerC/Info_Infrastructure/Orlowski.h… This is a pointer for the full text of the Orlowski paper (the cause of much discussion on the future of crypto in Australia). Also Roger Clark's home page contains lots of interesting references for crypto policy, privacy, some info on CFP, etc, very interesting reading I found: http://commerce.anu.edu.au/comm/staff/RogerC/RogersHome.html Adam -- HAVE *YOU* EXPORTED RSA TODAY? --> http://dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ --rsa--------------------------8<------------------------------- #!/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-3-lines-PERL $m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo "16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2%Sa 2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]\EszlXx++p|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print pack('H*',$_)while read(STDIN,$m,($w=2*$d-1+length($n)&~1)/2) -------------------------------8<------------------------------- TRY: rsa -k=3 -n=7537d365 < msg | rsa -d -k=4e243e33 -n=7537d365

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votelink - some discussions on Phil Z & ITAR
by aba＠dcs.exeter.ac.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A short time ago on cpunks someone posted this pointer: http://www.votelink.com/ as there was a vote and associated discussion forum being offered on the subject of Phil Z, the (somewhat leading - incorrectly leading) question: "Should Phil Zimmermann be prosecuted for allowing release of his PGP encryption program on the Internet?" (The comment on leading question being prompted of course by the fact that Phil did not himself export PGP, nor put it on the internet, nor even put it on US BBSes. The way I understand the story was that a friend of Phil's posted the code to US BBSes, and that an unknown 3rd party posted it from there to the Internet. He is being investigated for "making PGP available in a form in which it could be exported", something different to what is implied by the question. In this light I find it difficult to understand how he could be held to have "allowed it's release on the Internet", something which even the State Department investigation is not I think accusing him of. Several people pointed this out in the discussion forum. A more accurate phrasing would perhaps have been: "Should Phil Zimmermann be persecuted for writing PGP?" but then that is no doubt biased in the opposite direction.) An interesting vote in any case, and the balance so far is: YES: 000,172 | ABSTAIN: 000,096 | NO: 001,508 The abstainers I think could be partly explained by the worry that the question was leading or incorrect, as this opinion was voiced in the discussion forum. Also an interesting thread was generated in the (WWW hosted) discussion forum about the legal problems implied by me posting these two snippetts of code (which I posted to the forum earlier): #!/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-3-lines-PERL $m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo "16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2%Sa 2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]\EszlXx++p|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print pack('H*',$_)while read(STDIN,$m,($w=2*$d-1+length($n)&~1)/2) ------------------ PGP.ZIP Part [024/713] ------------------- M!4HD";*K"$$=/!<29+_A`K9C/2+@"4<,5G(N0M`47K#'`T6"[&>M83PL=@FR 8ES%:6Q"(F9A#)K!&_;X4TXZ?(T]6(]`>$*.^]3K*K["(239)\@F MHA\"<%"5(%N->/2!'>X3XPU<0!Y,F``58RK(F;K#XD2,^`F[L09CT1>MH,7/ ------------------------------------------------------------- (hmm it seems that their WWW conversion chopped out some parts of it presumably due to it containing < and > symbols, so perhaps their fears were even further unfounded). They were alarmed by the implication that their WWW server now contained PGP code which they did not feel qualified to judge the implications, or correctness of. This prompted the posting to the forum of a rather worried sounding disclaimer by a votelink representative, to the effect that they were abiding by the Prodigy ruling, and so felt unable to remove the offending piece of ITAR breakage, and yet felt rather unconfortable with it's presence. I hastened to explain (after a certain cpunk kindly drew by attention to the discussion which I had neglected to check out after posting the 1st message) that the same dilema applies to numerous other forums, such as USENET news distribution sites, sci.crypt archives, cpunks archives, etc, etc. Generated some interesting discussion anyway. Adam

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Re: Q's on Number Theory/Quadriatic Residues
by danisch＠ira.uka.de 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> >Bzzt! Try Again. If you use bc, you will notice that 9^2 mod 35 == 11 > >and 8^2 mod 35 == 29... You should go take your number theory class! > > Definitely. Is there an easy way to get from the 29 to the 8? I can see how > it goes > the other way, but what I didnt' see was how, if given 29, I could get the > 8? (Euclid's?) You can get the square root mod p (p prime) easily, if p+1 is divisible by 4. You (should) know that x ^ (p-1) equals to 1 mod p for every given x > 0. Therefore x ^ ( (p-1)/2 ) is either +1 or -1 mod p. Now you have a given x^2 and want to find x (one of both, there are two..) ( x^2 ) ^ ((p+1)/4) = x ^ ( (p+1)/2 ) = x * x ^( (p-1)/2 ) = +/- x . If p+1 is not divisible by 4, it's a little bit more difficult... In your example, 35+1 is luckily divisible by 4. But this doesn't help, because 35 is not a prime. 35 = 5*7 , you can use the chinese remainder and find the root mod 5 and the root mod 7. 7+1 is divisible by 4, you can use the trick: ( 8 ^ 2 ) ^ 2 mod 7 = +/- 1. (which is correct since 8 = 1 mod 7); +1 and -1 are the roots of (8^2) modulo 7. Modulo 5 we can't use the trick, but we guess the roots of (8^2) = 4 mod 5 as 2 and 3. Back to the main problem: You want to have the root of (8^2) mod 35. We found the roots 1 and 6 as roots of (8^2) mod 7 and the roots 2 and 3 as roots of (8^2) mod 5. Now solve the Chinese remainder for each possible pair (1,2), (1,3), (6,2), (6,3), and you get the _four_ roots of (8^2) mod 35. Two of them will be 8 and -8, and there are another two. BTW: This is one way to do a mental coin flipping. Hadmut :-)

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premail www interface
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have worked the kinks out and now announce the premail www interface. The interface uses preamil to send you mail anonymously without fuss or muss. If you are not familiar with premail, check the page out and see what is all about. You can find the premail script on Raph's pinging page. The interface should be bug free, but if you find any, let me know. I welcome comments/flames/criticisms. If there are suggestions for upgrades or future ideas, let me know. The cpremailer that I have up is still there. These two www interfaces should serve many people well. The suggestions I received for the cpremailer have been implemented so that you, the user, selects the number of remailers to use. No more hardwiring and there is nothing that forces you to chain. http://miso.wwa.com/~dochobbs/premail.html <-premail interface http://miso.wwa.com/~dochobbs/cpremailer.html <- nate's www remailer If anyone has designed a similar remailer interface for premail, let me know. I would like to know how you did it differently. Of course this email is coming to you from the premail gate. Michael Hobbs dochobbs(a)wwa.com

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CoS Raid on "Copyright Terrorist"
by futplex＠pseudonym.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Some CoS news: This past Saturday (95/08/12) a prominent Church of Scientology litigator, Helena Kobrin, and some U.S. federal marshals raided the home of Arnaldo Lerma, seizing pretty much all his computer hardware, disks, etc. It seems that back in 1993, CoS was suing someone named Steven Fishman. As part of the legal proceedings he filed a "declaration", which routinely became part of the public record of the business of the court. This happens to have included some of the OT documents which the CoS claims as both copyrighted trade secrets and sacred texts. As with other unsealed court documents, copies of the Fishman declaration are available by snail mail from the court for 50 cents/page. Lerma ordered a copy from the court, then posted it to alt.religion.scientology. Now CoS is claiming copyright infringement. Helena Kobrin apparently wants to advance the state of the art in Infocalypse hyperbole; she is quoted in a wire service story as saying, in reference to Lerma's posting, "What he was engaging in was a form of copyright terrorism" Meanwhile, various sites have started carrying copies of the Fishman declaration, made available by http, ftp, gopher, finger, etc. A site in China was one of these data havens, until the resultant traffic load forced it to shut down. David Touretzky, a member of the CS faculty at Carnegie-Mellon, had a complete copy on his Web pages at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Fishman/ until CMU's legal counsel received a fax from Helena Kobrin, demanding their removal. Pending review by the CMU legal staff, he has taken them off. However, he is maintaining a list of links to sites that still carry copies of the declaration, along with pointers to some other relevant sites, and his own comments on the situation. Apparently quite a few other a.r.s folks and their ISPs have received similar warning letters from HKK. Someone did a fairly competent forgery on a.r.s of a version of the warning letter, purportedly from Helena Kobrin to the entire net. I found it disturbingly plausible. Also, someone forged cancels of various articles including parts of the Fishman declaration, and of at least one which quoted no more than Touretzky's URL. A couple of other interesting sources for information on the Scientology/Net situation I've found recently are: http://amazing.cinenet.net/scientology.html and http://www.clark.net/pub/jcblal/jcbcos.html Freedom Magazine Vol 27, Issue 4, published by the CoS RTC, has some articles online dealing with copyright, anonymity, privacy, and cryptography. As I've said before, I'm scared of getting slapped with a frivolous lawsuit by some arm of the CoS, so I won't quote anything from the articles. Perhaps some of the other vocal people on the list who think CoS wouldn't hurt a fly will distribute some choice Fair Use quotes. http://www.theta.com/goodman/hijack.htm argues for pre-emption of new govt. regulation of anonymity on the net by application of existing law, although it fails to recognize some of the protections for anonymity in said law. It also quotes some criticism by Bruce Koball of the 40-bit export restriction on RC4, and Clipper. The article editorializes against govt. suppression of strong crypto. http://www.theta.com/goodman/lies.htm is entitled "Solutions to On-Line Lies", and advocates forcing remailer operators to know the identities of their users/customers, and holding them liable for the content of remailed messages. It generally urges intolerance of unpopular online speech, and remarkably laments Microsoft's inability to sue for defamation over the Microsoft-to-buy- Catholic-Church spoof. http://www.theta.com/goodman/crime.htm offers some case histories of net.criminals (according to them), including Kevin Mitnick, some guys accused of rape (stuck under the moniker of `child pornographers'), and Dennis Ehrlich, subject of a CoS-inspired February raid by the copyright police. The juxtaposition of these figures is strikingly absurd. There's more, but this should give you a taste for what's there. -Futplex <futplex(a)pseudonym.com>

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Data Secrecy Rift
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This seems worth posting in full: ---------- The New York Times, August 14, 1995, pp. D1, D8. Rift Emerges Over Computer Data Secrecy Issue By John Markoff Some of biggest names in the computer industry sent separate letters to the White House last week in pre-emptive moves aimed at a proposed regulation originally intended to insure that law-enforcement officials have access to encoded telephone and computer communications. The proposal may be released as soon as this week. But as the Government's task force on the encryption issue prepared to disclose the closely held details of the proposal -- the latest version of a measure revealed more than three years ago but subsequently reconsidered in the face of industry opposition -- unexpected divisions emerged from the last-minute, scattershot lobbying. The splits are developing at a crucial moment, with the Government's interagency task force also apparently divided between those favoring maximum governmental access to communications and those who support a loosening of export restrictions. Most industry executives had hoped to present a united front in favor of the more liberal position -- a goal that now appears to be in jeopardy. The two major groups sending letters to Vice President Al Gore, the Administration's point man on technology issues, were a group of computer hardware manufacturers and a group of the largest makers of software. In a letter sent to the Vice President last Thursday, eight executives, including James Treybig, chairman of Tandem Computers Inc.; Gil F. Amelio, chairman of the National Semiconductor Corporation; Edward McCracken, chairman of Silicon Graphics Inc.; Eugene Shanks Jr. president of the Bankers Trust New York Corporation, which conducts international electronic commerce, and Stephen T. Walker, chairman of Trusted Information Systems, urged that the Government immediately establish a new standard to control the export of technology that is used to encode communications, so that outsiders cannot tap in. A day later, however, a group of software publishers, including William H. Gates, chairman of the Microsoft Corporation; Jim P. Manzi, president of the Lotus Development Corporation and a senior vice president of I.B.M., Robert Frankenberg, chairman of Novell Inc.; Mark B. Hoffman, chairman of Sybase Inc., and Carol Bartz, chairwoman of Autodesk Inc., wrote arguing that the possible restrictive regulations that may soon be offered by the Government would fail to remove the current obstacles that keep American companies from competing in lucrative international markets. Many off-the-shelf programs cannot be marketed abroad without alteration under current regulations. For example, before American publishers can sell the popular Lotus Notes program abroad, they must replace its encoding system with a weakened version so that foreign communications can be monitored by American intelligence agencies. These restrictions date to the 1970's when advanced computer technology was treated as the equivalent of military technology and subject to the same strict controls. The software publishers have been able to sell their highly effective communications encoding products in this country, while sales abroad, they contend, have been hurt. Their letter also said that although the Administration agreed last year to work with industry toward a compromise, "there has been only minimal consultation with the software industry with respect to basic questions." "We're worried the Government is about to announce the son of Clipper," said Robert W. Holleyman 2d, president of the Business Software Alliance, referring to the Government's original proposal for changing the standard. This proposal, released in April 1993, would have replaced the cold war-era restrictions with a coding standard that allowed sales of strong encryption programs, but would have given United States law-enforcement agencies access to all communications through a back door with a numerical key. "The Administration has been trying to resolve how to keep U.S. companies competitive, but there remain individuals in the Government who want to do anything they can to slow the proliferation of new encryption technologies," Mr. Holleyman said. In April 1992, the Administration proposed a hardware-based system for protecting the privacy of telephone calls and computer data transmissions. The standard, known as the Clipper Chip, included a special "backdoor" that would permit law-enforcement officials to listen to conversations and monitor data exchanges. The original Clipper system called for a two-part key for decoding scrambled conversations. The two parts of the key -- actually two large numbers -- were to be held by two independent Government agencies. Under the plan, when a law-enforcement agency had a warrant to listen to a conversation encoded by Clipper, it would obtain the keys from the separate agencies. By merging the keys, it could obtain a key that would unlock the coded conversation. The Clipper proposal met with angry opposition both from advocates for civil liberties, who argued it would undermine the right to privacy, and by high-technology executives who said Clipper would be unacceptable for foreign users who would not want their conversations to be readable by the United States Government. The announcement of the new proposal may be imminent. Two trade associations, the Software Publishers Association and the American Electronic Association, are planning a conference on cryptography policy for Friday. Several people familiar with Administration policy discussions said the Government had until recently remained divided and that the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Louis J. Freeh, has been the most vocal advocate of placing strict limits on any use of unsanctioned encryption technology. After the bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City, the F.B.I., circulated a proposed antiterrorism bill on Capitol Hill that would have banned even the domestic use of coding software except for systems approved by the Government. [End]

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