December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

LA DA's illegal wiretaps revealed ---LA Times
by David Honig 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Fans of CALEA, take note. Sunday, April 26, 1998 THE STATE Can the L.A. Criminal-Justice System Work Without Trust? By CHARLES L. LINDNER [excerpt] in the wake of the discovery that deputy district attorneys assigned to its narcotics unit have relied on secret wiretaps for years to gather evidence against their clients--and no one, including judges, knew about the practice. Beyond the obvious legal question of whether the district attorney knowingly violated the 4th Amendments's prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure is one that cannot be resolved in court: Can the county's criminal-justice system carry on in an atmosphere of mistrust? ... LAPD officers have avoided revealing the existence of their electronic intercepts using a police procedure known as "the handoff technique." It works like this: Narcotics officers on "Team A" set up a wiretap to gather information on a suspect. Without identifying the source of their information, the officers turn over the wiretap's "intelligence product" to detectives from "Team B," also members of LAPD's narcotics unit. Using the intelligence product, "Team B" officers set about trying to gather facts independently that would provide "probable cause" for a second judge to sign a search warrant targeting another suspect, without the cops disclosing the existence of the first wiretap to the jurist. It is not hard to imagine the potential harm from this police-prosecution malfeasance. If an investigation focused on a pharmacist, for instance, the police would have a taped record of every prescription for every patient and physician who called the pharmacy. By law, these wiretaps are preserved for 10 years, so the potential damage to an innocent citizen having his or her private calls intercepted is significant. What aggravates the misconduct is the likelihood that neither the police nor the "wiretap judge" followed the legal requirement that the police file written progress reports every 72 hours, and that the judge make a decision every 72 hours on whether a tap can continue. There is strong reason to suspect that neither the judiciary nor the Legislature has been "minding the store." For example, a judge issuing a wiretap order must inform any person whose voice was wiretapped within 90 days and supply the person with an inventory of what was recorded. Similarly, Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren is required to provide a detailed report to the Legislature and state Judicial Council each April regarding the number and duration of all wiretaps conducted by every law-enforcement agency in the state. As of last week, neither the Judicial Council nor Chairman John Vasconcellos' Senate Public Safety Committee could find a copy. Finally, no public defender or private criminal lawyer has been given the legally required inventory since 1985, when the secret wiretaps began. According to Public Defender Michael P. Judge, the public record discloses only three reported wiretaps by local law enforcement during 1997--two by the LAPD and one by the county Sheriff's Department. It is simply mind-boggling that, for the last 13 years, on hundreds of occasions when the court or opposing counsel have asked prosecutors whether they have turned over all defendants' and co-defendants' statements, they have been lied to or misled. The danger from these secret wiretaps is not limited to suspected criminals. According to statistics published by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, which oversees "authorized" federal wiretaps, each wiretap order of roughly 40 days in length results in the interception of an average 2,139 conversations involving 84 separate persons. The statistics also note that the average tap produces incriminating information less than 20% of the time, resulting in the arrest of two suspects and the conviction of a single individual. If, as a police narcotics detective testified in the Gaxiola case, there have been hundreds of secret "handoff" taps and electronic intercepts, by extrapolation, thousands of Los Angeles residents have had their private telephone conversations secretly and illegally monitored by LAPD. The public defender has filed an unprecedented class-action habeas corpus petition with Superior Court Presiding Judge Robert W. Parkin on behalf of all past, present and future public defender clients. It seeks to discover whether the prosecution denied thousands of defendants a fair trial by hiding the true source of its information, i.e., secret wiretaps. If secret wiretaps were used and the evidence was concealed from the defense, then thousands of men and women were illegally convicted and incarcerated. Should this unhappy scenario play out, the criminal justice system could well be irreparably damaged, its credibility in the public mind ruined. Yet, even if events keep the convicted behind bars, the loss of trust between prosecutor and defense lawyer may never be fully recovered. The problem defense lawyers and criminal judges face today is that they have never had so many prosecutors lie for so long about so much, which may have resulted in the unconstitutional convictions of so many. http://www.latimes.com/sbin/iawrapper?NS-search-set=/3544b/aaaa004Kx44b35f&N S-doc-offset=0&NS-adv-search=0& ------------------------------------------------------------ David Honig Orbit Technology honig(a)otc.net Intaanetto Jigyoubu "I actually thought Silicon Valley was where women went to get fixed." ---LA Mayor Richard Riordan 98.02.19

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Schneier on Smartcards and Holding Secrets
by David Honig 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Bruce wrote a short letter to a trade mag (Internet world? I've lost it since) worth reporting. The jist was, if a smartcard contains Bank Secrets but is held by customers which do not share the same goals/responsibility as the owner of the secrets, this is *poor security design*. ------------------------------------------------------------ David Honig Orbit Technology honig(a)otc.net Intaanetto Jigyoubu "I actually thought Silicon Valley was where women went to get fixed." ---LA Mayor Richard Riordan 98.02.19

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TruthBore
by TruthMonger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." ~ Bohr

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...and we're here to screw you...
by TruthMonger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." ~ An Opus To Be Named Later

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Defense
by TruthMonger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"The best defense against logic is ignorance." ~ A(H)OL(E)

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Son of Fear
by TruthMonger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Message will arrive in the mail. Destroy before the FBI sees it." ~ FUD D'is

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Weapons
by TruthMonger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Armadillo: To provide weapons to a Spanish pickle.

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ID's
by TruthMonger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere." ~ Robert Heinlein

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Justice
by TruthMonger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Justice is incidental to law and order." ~ J. Edgar Hoover

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IEEE newsletter on Security & Privacy
by Avi Rubin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This is to inform people who are interested of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Security and Privacy's newsletter, CIPHER. The URL for the online version can be found at http://www.itd.nrl.navy.mil/ITD/5540/ieee/cipher/ There is also a text version of the newsletter mailed out to the mailing list about every two months. You can find subscription information as well as the current and back issues at the web site. Here is the table of contents of the April issue: ==================================================================== Newsletter of the IEEE Computer Society's TC on Security and Privacy Electronic Issue 27 April 27, 1998 Avi Rubin and Paul Syverson, Editors Bob Bruen, Book Review Editor Hilarie Orman, Assoc. Editor Mary Ellen Zurko, Assoc. Editor Anish Mathuria, Reader's Guide ==================================================================== http://www.itd.nrl.navy.mil/ITD/5540/ieee/cipher/ Contents: [3354 lines total] o Letter from the TC Chair o Letter from the Editor Final Program and Registration Information for the 1998 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland California USA Preliminary Program of the 1998 IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop, Rockport Mass. USA Security and Privacy Survey by the IEEE Computer Society Security and Privacy News Briefs: o LISTWATCH: Items from security-related lists, by Mary Ellen Zurko o An Update from Asia, by Yongfei Han o Report on Canadian Crypto Policy Framework for Electronic Commerce, by Stewart Baker and Elizabeth Banker o More recent news on Canadian Crypto Policy Framework and other policy news o Denial of service attacks targeting Windows 95/NT machines o Employees buy ORA Canada Commentary and Opinion: Book Reviews o Web Security. A Step-by-step Reference Guide. by Lincoln Stein, reviewed by Bob Bruen Conference Reports: o Workshop on Education in Computer Security (WECS '98) by Cynthia Irvine o Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CFP `98) by Danielle Gallo o Financial Cryptography (FC`98) by Paul Syverson o NSA Network Security Framework Forum (NSFF) by Jeremy Epstein Assessment of security software New reports available via FTP and WWW: a couple New Interesting Links on the Web Who's Where: recent address changes Calls for Papers: HASE, ACSAC, IEEE Internet Computing, Software Practice & Experience, JCS, ACM RBAC Reader's guide to recent security and privacy literature o Conference Papers: Paper lists for FC, NDSS, and Info. Hiding o Journal and Newsletter articles: several Calendar List of Computer Security Academic Positions, maintained by Cynthia Irvine Publications for sale -- CSFW proceedings available TC officers Information for Subscribers and Contributors ********************************************************************* Aviel D. Rubin rubin(a)research.att.com Secure Systems Research Dept. Adjunct Professor at NYU AT&T Labs - Research 180 Park Avenue http://www.research.att.com/~rubin/ Florham Park, NJ 07932-0971 Voice: +1 973 360-8356 USA FAX: +1 973 360-8809 --> Check out http://www.clark.net/pub/mjr/websec/ for a new book on web security (The Web Security Sourcebook). *********************************************************************

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