December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Clinton's NWO
by Toto 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Clinton just had to announce Global Law while I was reading: http://www.nebonet.com/headhome/dadmisc/trojan.htm I suspect Clinton's speech in regard to nations co-operating in making their citizens subject to deportation to face charges in foreign countries was designed to keep me from fleeing my 'Dog At Large' charges in Bienfait. Seiing as how the Queen's Gestapo was wearing Keblar when they upped the ante for charge to four years in prison, I guess I must be a desperate ASCII character. Toto

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Announcing ZDNet Mail !!
by announce＠zdnetmail.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Announcing ZDNet Mail - the best free email on the Web! ZDNet is pleased to announce the launch of ZDNet Mail, the best free email on the Web. Because you're a valued member of the ZDNet community, we're providing you with a free, secure, email account, that you can access from any Internet connection, anytime or anywhere. As a current ZDNet member, your email account is already set up -- you can start using it today! Just log on to ZDNet Mail at: http://www.zdnetmail.com and enter your current ZDNet user name and password as shown below: User Name: cypherpunks Password: cypherpunks and you'll find a Welcome letter with all the information you'll need to take start using your new account. ZDNet Mail gives you easy access, security, and a permanent address (even if you change ISPs). It's everything you need in an email account and it's all provided free of charge. Just click below to get started! http://www.zdnetmail.com The ZDNet Mail Team

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Nobody's Home!
by StanSqncrs 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I got only 1 anon. comment worth responding to - ===== Subj: Date: 5/12/98 2:41:44 PM Central Daylight Time From: nobody(a)nsm.htp.org To: stansqncrs(a)aol.com "A cultist is one who has a strong belief in the Bible and the Second Coming of Christ; who frequently attends Bible studies; who has a high level of financial giving to a Christian cause; who home schools for their children; who has accumulated survival foods and has a strong belief in the Second Amendment; and who distrusts big government. Any of these may qualify [a person as a cultist] but certainly more than one [of these] would cause us to look at this person as a threat, and his family as being in a risk situation that qualified for government interference." -Attorney General Janet Reno, Interview on 60 Minutes, June 26, 1994 ===== "One man's religion is another man's cult" - me Stan, The 'Wall of Reality' http/members.aol.com/RealityWal/

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No Subject
by Mixmaster 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[cons0005(a)algnet.algonquinc.on.ca wrote:] I was wondering if anyone knows of such a creature that I could send email to with an URL, and I would get a reply of that HTML file? example I email bot(a)somewhere.com with the Subject:http://www.hotmail.com and I will get an email of the HTML file at www.hotmail.com This would be handy because I don't have a broswer (2 meg RAM (I know)) and also for anonymity, cookies etc I couldn't be traced. ----- Actually you can do that really very easily. If you are interested in such Bot's. I really recommend you get O'Reilly's book: Web Client Programming, with Perl. It discusses to a large degree what your wanting to do. It has full source code as well, so you can take that and just fiddle with a bit until it suits your needs. Provided you or someone you know can program in Perl. I think one method you could do is to just use a majordomo server and tinker with it to suit the reception needs. Or you could on your own box, or a friends box. Make an account to the name you want, set up a resident program, with nohup or a simple cron job. Or do some script, that would serve equally as well. That could handle the reception facilities well enough. Then just use the modified bot to handle the HTML queries and sending and there you go. Although sending things back to the HTTP server in question might... interesting. If that place GET and POST methods for CGI scripts and dynamic pages, that raises some questions. Particularly, if the bot sends you the HTML doc that it requested, you view the page, yadda yadda yadda. It depends on how you want to work it and do it, you have to ask yourself. Do I want to send my request (whatever that maybe)from my machine? The request would go through. But it would be through your machine, and that would invalidate your anonymity. So thats a Bad Thing(tm) and out of the question. Or in cases like yours, the user might not have a browser. So that leaves it to us sending our request back to our automated little daemon and it does it for us. It would require just a little bit of handling and work to do the GET and POST methods for the CGI program your interacting with, but that would be minimal I think. I could be wrong however. In effect your using the bot as a kind of proxy for HTTP requests. If your really, REALLY desperate I might be able to quickly just put something together for you and post it here for you(or if another cypherpunk thats into Perl wants to do it, or if anyone else has any ideas). But you should be able to modify the code to suit whatever you want it to do. I've been experimenting with something similar, only on a slightly different note. If your patient, you can just subscribe to a majordomo "admin-help" list. Where the details of running such a thing are discussed by people that do. I'm sure one quite possibly exists somewhere. Then log on to a Bot mailing list and after hanging out on both for a while, asking a few questions perhaps you should be able to put something together I expect. Or as mgraffam(a)mhv.net suggests you could log into those machines and do it that way. Which gives me another idea, you could have the bot run lynx remotely and then pipe the output from that to the letter it would send you and visa versa. But that makes things more complicated as well too. I question the value of doing that as well, I think the overhead would be a bit much, as well as being a slight hassle. I think over all, the easiest thing to do would be to possibly follow mgraffam's suggestion and just do that. Those are my thoughts on things at least. I hope they help. I think the security possibilities of such a bot could be useful and could make a interesting discussion perhaps. There was one thread earlier that was discussing one such robot. From a government location, that was keeping tabs on crypto related sources. Crawling from link to link, from behind a firewall etc, etc, etc. If theres any more news relating to that thread, thats been uncovered I'd be interested in hearing more on it. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

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FW: "... would cause us to look at this person as a threat"
by Trei, Peter 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The earliest online citation I can find is in the May 1997 Newsletter of the Melbourne Seventh-day Adventist Church, at http://www.spacey.net/bwillard/News0597.html Considering it's content, I have no doubt that it is manufactured - it carefully written to offend millenialist Christians, such as the SDAs. I've written the page owner to see if I can find out more. Deja News shows this quote first in alt.war.civil.usa, on March 18 1998. Since then, it's been banging around various Christian and political groups. It also seems to be on the website http://www.sightings.com/political/renowords.htm, but I have not confirmed this, nor can I tell if this cites an earlier source. Peter Trei > -----Original Message----- > From: Tim May [SMTP:tcmay@got.net] > Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 1998 2:45 PM > To: cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net > Subject: "... would cause us to look at this person as a threat" > > > > I just saw this on one of the newsgroups: > > > "A cultist is one who has a strong belief in the Bible and the Second > Coming of Christ; who frequently attends Bible studies; who has a high > level of financial giving to a Christian cause; who home schools for > their children; who has accumulated survival foods and has a strong > belief in the Second Amendment; and who distrusts big government. Any > of these may qualify [a person as a cultist] but certainly more than one > [of these] would cause us to look at this person as a threat, and his > family as being in a risk situation that qualified for government > interference." > -Attorney General Janet Reno, Interview on 60 Minutes, June 26, 1994 >

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EPIC Analysis of E-Privacy Act
by David Banisar 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

==================================================================== EPIC Preliminary Analysis of E-PRIVACY Act May 12, 1998 Washington, DC Senators John Ashcroft (R-MO) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) today introduced the "Encryption Protects the Rights of Individuals from Violation and Abuse in Cyberspace (E-PRIVACY) Act." The proposed legislation is the latest in a series of congressional measures designed to resolve the debate surrounding current U.S. encryption policy. Like the SAFE Act (H.R. 695) now pending in the House, the E-PRIVACY Act seeks to relax existing controls on the export of encryption products. Controls would be lifted for encryption products that are deemed to be "generally available" within the international market. Exporters would be given new procedural rights to obtain expedited determinations on the exportability of their products. The bill also contains several provisions that would preserve the right of Americans to use encryption techniques and that would enhance the privacy protections currently accorded to personal communications and stored data. Among its positive features, the bill: * Reiterates the right of Americans to use, develop, manufacture, sell, distribute, or import any encryption product, regardless of the algorithm selected, key length, or the existence of key recovery capabilities; * Prohibits government-compelled key escrow or key recovery; * Prohibits government agencies from creating any linkage between cryptographic methods used for authentication and those used for confidentiality; * Prohibits the federal government from purchasing key recovery encryption systems that are not interoperable with other commercial encryption products; and * Provides enhanced privacy protections for stored electronic data held by third parties, location information generated by wireless communications services, and transactional information obtained from pen registers and trap and trace devices; The bill contains two provisions that raise significant civil liberties and privacy concerns. The Criminalization Provision The bill would make the use of encryption to conceal "incriminating" communications or information during the commission of a crime a new and independent criminal offense. While well-intended, the provision could have several unintended consequences that would easily undermine the other desirable features of the bill. We believe it is a mistake to create criminal penalties for the use of a particular technique or device. Such a provision tends to draw attention away from the underlying criminal act and casts a shadow over a valuable technology that should not be criminalized. It may, for instance, be the case that a typewritten ransom note poses a more difficult challenge for forensic investigators than a handwritten note. But it would be a mistake to criminalize the use of a typewriter simply because it could make it more difficult to investigate crime in some circumstances. Additionally, a provision which criminalizes the use of encryption, even in furtherance of a crime, would give prosecutors wide latitude to investigate activity where the only indicia of criminal conduct may be the mere presence of encrypted data. In the digital age, where techniques to protect privacy and security will be widely deployed, we cannot afford to view encryption as the potential instrumentality of a crime, just as we would not today view the use of a typewriter with suspicion. Finally, the provision could also operate as a substantial disincentive to the widespread adoption of strong encryption techniques in the communications infrastructure. Given that the availability of strong encryption is one of the best ways to reduce the risk of crime and to promote public safety, the retention of this provision in the legislation will send a mixed message to users and businesses -- that we want people to be free to use encryption but will be suspicious when it is used. If the concern is that encryption techniques may be used to obstruct access to evidence relevant to criminal investigations, we submit that the better approach may be to rely on other provisions in the federal and state criminal codes (including sections relating to obstruction of justice or concealment) to address this problem if it arises. The "NET Center" The bill creates within the Department of Justice a National Electronic Technology Center (NET Center) to "serve as a center for . . . law enforcement authorities for information and assistance regarding decryption and other access requirements." The NET Center would have a broad mandate and could spawn a new domestic surveillance bureaucracy within the Department of Justice. Among other powers, the bill authorizes the NET Center to: * Examine encryption techniques and methods to facilitate the ability of law enforcement to gain efficient access to plaintext of communications and electronic information; * Conduct research to develop efficient methods, and improve the efficiency of existing methods, of accessing plaintext of communications and electronic information; * Investigate and research new and emerging techniques and technologies to facilitate access to communications and electronic information; and * Obtain information regarding the most current hardware, software, telecommunications, and other capabilities to understand how to access digitized information transmitted across networks. The mission of the NET Center is made more troubling by the bill's authorization of "assistance" from other federal agencies, including the detailing of personnel to the new entity. In light of the fact that existing federal expertise in the areas of electronic surveillance and decryption resides at the National Security Agency (NSA), the bill in effect authorizes unprecedented NSA involvement in domestic law enforcement activities. Such a result would be contrary to a half-century-old consensus that intelligence agencies must be strictly constrained from engaging in domestic "police functions." That consensus arose from the recognition that intelligence agencies created to operate abroad are ill-suited for domestic activities, where U.S. citizens enjoy constitutional protections against governmental intrusions. In 1975, Sen. Frank Church led a congressional investigation into the activities of NSA. He noted that Congress had a "particular obligation to examine the NSA, in light of its tremendous potential for abuse. ... The danger lies in the ability of NSA to turn its awesome technology against domestic communications." In 1987, Congress enacted the Computer Security Act, which sought to vest civilian computer security authority in the Commerce Department and to limit the domestic role of NSA. The House Report on the Computer Security Act cited congressional concern over a Reagan Administration directive that "gave NSA the authority to use its considerable foreign intelligence expertise within this country." The report noted that such authority was "particularly troubling" since NSA "has, on occasion, improperly targeted American citizens for surveillance." The NET Center proposal, if approved, would constitute a fundamental re-definition of the relationship between intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement. Such an approach would ignore 50 years of experience and would pose a serious threat to the privacy and constitutional rights of Americans. EPIC looks forward to working with the legislation's sponsors and other interested parties to address these issues and develop a national encryption policy that will ensure the widespread availability of robust encryption products and the preservation of constitutional rights. Such a result will be critical for both our nation's continued leadership of the information industry and the protection of personal privacy in the next century.

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No Subject
by Josh Schoof 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Re:"... would cause us to look at this person as a threat"
by StanSqncrs 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In a message dated 5/12/98 4:37:47 PM Central Daylight Time, ptrei(a)securitydynamics.com writes: << ... Considering it's content, I have no doubt that it is manufactured - it carefully written to offend millenialist Christians, such as the SDAs. I've written the page owner to see if I can find out more. ... >> Not only that, it seems to be "spam" (the repetitive list type). You see 2 days ago we welcomed a guest to my list (FreeGroup), and in his first batch, guess what was there. Another FreeGroupie had a great response to it, I include it - ===== ... writes: > Well howdy 'yall, i'm mighty proud to have someone to chat wdith and share > ideas and some news, both good and bad. > here's some bad news to start off the day > > RE: Janet Reno, Attorney General of these United States of America > > Subject: Janet Reno Quote > > Date: Wednesday, May 06, 1998 10:54 > > > > A friend sent me this...sure would like to see the interview in context, > > but at any rate a very scary statement. > > > > Subject: Cults and Government? > > > > "Just ran across this quote from AG Janet Reno. From a person of such > > high power, these are scary words. --------- " <snip - the "spam"> > > "-Attorney General Janet Reno, Interview on 60 Minutes, June 26, > > 1994" > > Bad *NEWS*??? This purports to be an item that's nearly 4 years old. What's the news? I guess the news is that we're getting this 3rd hand--at a minimum, with no idea if it's true or not. But hey! This is the internet. So, again, I ask, *NEWS*???? Bad beginning, Sir Will. The willingness to pass along material of dubious authenticity is not a good sign in my book. As Mr. Natural would say, "Check your source." So, what *IS* your source? ===== Thanks for your excellent research on the origins of that, Peter! Stan, FreeGroup - "Just Say It!" http://members.aol.com/WhtsAMetaU/freegroup.html

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Bitslice DES S-boxes
by mkwan＠preston.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

After 6 weeks of number crunching, I've finally produced a new set of bitslice DES S-boxes using non-standard logic gates. Numbers are as follows - S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 S8 Avg 56 50 53 39 56 53 51 50 51 Details at http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~mkwan/bitslice There won't be any more improvements in the foreseeable future, since I've run out of ideas. Feel free to use this code in the RSA DES II challenge, but remember to give credit where it's due. mkwan

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Chaffing and winnowing
by Mark Rosen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have just been notified that chaffing and winnowing does, indeed, violate the export regulations. You can read them for yourself at http://www.bxa.doc.gov/Encryption/encreg.htm, but here are a few parts a. Designed or modified to use ``cryptography'' employing digital techniques to ensure ``information security''; b. Designed or modified to perform cryptanalytic functions; c. Designed or modified to use ``cryptography'' employing analog techniques to ensure ``information security''; ... Note: 5A002 does not control the following: b. Equipment containing ``fixed'' data compression or coding techniques; ... g. Data authentication equipment that calculates a Message Authentication Code (MAC) or similar result to ensure no alteration of text has taken place, or to authenticate users, but does not allow for encryption of data, text or other media other than that needed for the authentication; So it seems 5A002.a and 5A002.g cover such encryption technologies as chaffing and winnowing. Interestingly enough, 5A002.b allows such functions as the package transform (keyless coding), even though it uses encryption algorithms. - Mark Rosen http://www.mach5.com/

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