December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Scientologys Attempts
by danisch＠ira.uka.de 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I just had a view into the alt.religion.scientology and alt.clearing.technology newsgroups. There are some messages about a Scientology decision to shut down every internet traffic about Scientology. If the messages are true, Scientology sent rmgroup Control messages to remove the groups. The request to stop the remailers seems to come from the same people... Hadmut

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Re: Another problem w/Data Havens...
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Michael wrote: > This entire discussion is completely unnecessary. There are ways > of removing operator liability without examining the submission at all. Liability is a legal issue, not a technical one. (Catchability is a technical issue.) The basic ways to remove liability are to either run your system where the local laws don't object to information storage, or to reduce the operator's involvement to levels that the local legal system will tolerate. The former case is easy, if you can rent computer space in a country with a non-meddling government and good net access (or an easily rentable government :-).) For those of us in the latter situation, the discussion's still useful... On Mon, 16 Jan 1995, Johnathan Corgan wrote: > > It just occurred to me when reading this another method for ensuring > > the "I can't tell what's in it" condition with a data haven operator. > > Why not use a secret sharing system where the contraband data is > > split into a number of pieces and sent to different havens? Good, but still has most of the same old risks. Alice asks Dave's Data Haven to store stuff, and later retrieves it. Dave doesn't want to be able to know what's in it. There are three main threat periods - at receipt of the data, during storage, and at retrieval. Secret sharing is great for the storage period, assuming the data havens are in different jurisdictions and the cops can't force the operator (Dave) to go retrieve all the pieces. However, at receipt of the data, it's all in one place, Dave's inbox. If Alice encrypted it safely, or secret-shared it herself, great! But if Alice is a narc trying to entrap Dave with plaintext ThoughtCrime, or Alice's key has been compromised, anything in Dave's inbox is still toast, even if anything that's been split and stored is safer than if it had been stored unsplit. So he either needs to split it fast, shortening the window, or find a way to blind his mail before processing it, or split it before reading it. Splitting before reading isn't impossible in a stream environment. Define a protocol that looks like SMTP, but opens up three outgoing streams as well as an incoming stream, and uses standard mail formats. While reading the headers from Alice (either the real contents or just the handshakes at the beginning), Dave's receiver thinks about them and sends some meaningful headers to Moe, Larry, and Curly. Once the message body starts, instead of storing the incoming bytes, Dave sends every other byte to Moe or Larry, and the xors to Curly.* If he wants to get fancy, he can even encrypt the data with a stream cypher as he goes along, giving half the key to each of them. That way, Dave's system really only has knowledge of the headers, plus one line at a time of incriminating data on the fly. And his partners can't give anything away either; they're just stooges. * If the connections to and storage by Moe and Larry are reliable enough, Curly doesn't really need to be involved, but the xor business lets you reconstruct everything from just two parts. Bill "Privacy is not a crime!"

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Re: Abuse and Remailer Ethics
by pstemari＠erinet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:27 PM 1/16/95 -0500, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: > ... So I'm tempted to say "tough luck" to newsgroups that >don't like receiving anonymous posts. The alternative is for people >interested to create a moderated newsgroup, where of course the moderator >could refuse to allow anonymosu posts with or without the remailer >operators cooperation. ... Another, and less onerous alternative, is to simply stick encrypted reply-to blocks on messages to newsgroups. At that point there's no real difference between the anon post and a post from a system that doesn't provide real name<->userid mappings, and the flames can go straight from the newsgroup to the instigator without involving the remailer op. --Paul J. Ste. Marie pstemari(a)well.sf.ca.us, pstemari(a)erinet.com

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Re: Scientologys Attempts
by danisch＠ira.uka.de 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> After reading the lawyer's threatening letter I tried to check out the > two newsgroups mentioned, and was told they do not exist. (This is not a > local filter here; Eskimo does not censor newsgroups.) They still exist at our local server (E.I.S.S., University of Karlsruhe, Germany) and contain messages (even from America). Seems as they were successfull in deleting the group at some servers. > So have they been > deleted? If so, by whom and how? Find out... > What is 'rmgroup' and The usenet method to remove groups. A special message with a control line in the header. > who has the > authority to remove alt. groups? Don't know... Hadmut

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Re: Jude Milhon in WIRED
by ddt＠lsd.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anyone with any dang sense left at all knows that St. Jude is the secret CypherGoddess behind this whole eff-in' thing, besides being the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes... ;) dave _________________________________________________________________________ "There are three sides to every issue: my side, your side and the side of the truth." -Babatunde Olatunji

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Premail PGP Keys
by Michael L. Acklin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Ralf, I hate to bother you, but I am setting up your premail program and tried the "premail -getkeys" but it never works. I tried to manually finger Matt's Pub Key area, but looks like he is down or has a different address. Is there somewhere else I can try to get the PGP Keys for the remailers, or does Matt have a different address? Any help would really be appreciated. Also does anyone have a patch for PINE 3.9X to get premail to work. I know I am kinda behind but just starting out and would really appreciate any help I can get. Again Thanks in Advance.... Mike Acklin ----------------------> hroller(a)metronet.com

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Re: Abuse and Remailer Ethics
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Tue, 17 Jan 1995 anonymous-remailer(a)xs4all.nl (Name withheld on request) said: >This comment is grossly unfair. Obviously Homer is going to a lot of effort to >operate his remailer in the best way possible. > >It's easy for others to be critical. "head on a plate" is a strong term to >use, given Homer made it clear he would not reveal the identity of an anonymous >user without a court order. Also, one wonders to what end remailers are being >put by people who are worried about being "sold out". > >It's always been a good policy to use a foreign mailer in a chain where >anonymity is critically important. That doesn't mean it's OK to make Homer the >whipping boy. I agree that it's a bit much to expect the remailer operator to heroically perform beyond what any of us would do in the same lonely spot under duress. Tim has written recently on another list that the USG grabs enemies in other domains when the national interests are at stake -- the 800-pounder can define any of its actions legal, or to hell with legal niceties as the Beast opts, the picky lawyers can sort it out later, or never. Does not Duncan and others have wisdom on this: Don't roll over out of ignorance and faint-heartedness, but do carefully protect your keister, with feet-on-ground planning, mercury-technology and out-wits. Watch for signs of sneak attack through the guy being squeezed next door, or by a cahoots-machine zipping psy-war toot-alarms to foster fearful quiescence. Some warning examples may be in the offing in the rising heat of dreaded horse-threats to civil society. If so, some will be arranged by provocateurs like past G-guy tricks. So it goes. So what. Nesta said, it's fun to lance swollen infected over-controlling heads.

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Scientology and remailers.
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Posting the truth about Scientology, in the face of harassment and threats by scientologists, is an excellent example of the legitimate use of remailers, as is alt.abuse.recovery, and talk.politics.china --------------------------------------------------------------------- We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this right, not from James A. Donald the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. jamesd(a)netcom.com http://www.catalog.com/jamesd/

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Re: Abuse and Remailer Ethics
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>This thread illustrates (at least if setup's like this are >worthy of a place in Raph's list) that penet.fi is the safest >way to go for the moment. I would just hate it to have my >head on the plate of a remailer operator who takes an interest >in subtile ethical discussion of whether to sell me out or not. If you chain it through 3 or 4 remailers with PGP, then pretty much all 3 or 4 of them have got to decide to sell you out. I trust Julf a lot, but I'm not sure I trust him four times as much as much as every other remailer operator. Or something like that. You can also probably use penet as a link on your larger chain, although I've never tried this to see how it works. And I would note that the "subtle ethical discussion" seemed to consist of the operator trying to figure out what he should do in the future about this sort of thing, and he never even seemed to consider turning over the name of the anon user. Although he did acknowledge that in the future he might, or might work with other operators to try and discover a True Name. *shrug*

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Re: Does encrypted equal safe?
by pstemari＠erinet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:28 PM 1/17/95 -0800, Eric Hughes wrote: > ... Meaning is subjective. If I see encrypted text, am I to be held >responsible for having seen through an encryption for which I hold not >the key? Merely because someone knows a transformation into a >disapproved form does not mean that I do. ... Which is exactly why the encrypt on receipt or decrypt on delivery ideas won't work. You have to be provably ignorant of the data. --Paul J. Ste. Marie pstemari(a)well.sf.ca.us, pstemari(a)erinet.com

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