December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

smuggling currency
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

U>The basic thrust is this: You can't transport a monetary instrument U>worth more than $ 10,000 without filling out the appropriate customs U>report. Of course they have to be able to prove that you did so. Cash cards raise real proof problems. U>If you bring the money in with the intent to avoid taxes, you have a U>second count, There are no tax consequences to cash per se. The issue is whether the cash constitutes unreported income or not. A separate issue. U>All your transaction does (unfortunately) is delay the importation U>of the "currency" until after the plane trip. You're still required U>to report the transaction, the card just makes it easier to get U>away with it. However, by spreading the "importation" out over time, cash cards reduce the chances that a "structuring" count could be proved against you. The whole cash card thing really mixes up the exact location of the money. What if you are overseas and buy a VISA USA cash card and then bring it into the US. Is this a reportable transaction? Presumably the payment for the card was wired by your overseas institution to VISA USA, a bank wire is not reportable. In any case, the overseas institution may not link you with its purchase of a VISA Cash Card from the US. Complications. DCF --- WinQwk 2.0b#1165

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Privacy, Property, Cryptography (long)
by Dark 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I guess this is particularly political, but I thought it interesting enough to attach to cypherpunks. Subject matter appropriateness flames by E-Mail please. Questions of Privacy and Property: How Encryption narrows the focus. - -> There is no right to privacy in this country. The much touted "Right to privacy" is a common law conception and invention that, for the most part, has little foundation. There are constitutional provisions that _suggest_ privacy, but none that "assure" it. To enforce a right to privacy in court, judges have to do a lot of reaching. I can't recall who it was, but some cypherpunk mentioned that they had not consented to the "social contract" or "convention" that gave the government the right to "violate" their "privacy" or collect data on them. I agree with you on principal (oh, unnamed privacy patron) but unfortunately logically I can't. Your natural rights approach to the rights of privacy is limited in that, unlike other rights founded in a Natural Rights / Victorian legal thought fashion, privacy has no logical precedent in the state of nature. When you see assertions of Natural Rights concepts, they tend to work down from grand principals. In the past, these principals have their root in a concept of the "State of Nature" or the Creation myth. e.g., Property exists and is enforceable because God created the Earth for common use, and what you take, and can reasonably put to use, becomes yours by means of the labor you put into it (Locke). How to find these precedents with regards to privacy is quite beyond me. It seems almost ingrained in the culture of Natural Rights that the Divine was all knowing. It leaves little basis to find a protection for privacy in Natural Rights theory. So move to the more progressive social convention theories. These are almost always more empowering to the judicial system, with a concept that the judge was not just a tool to enforce law, but to shape it as well. In the 1920's-30's we begin to see more and more frequent legal applications of nebulous "balancing tests" to replace the bright line rules as a result. Unfortunately the departure of the formalist approach takes with it the notion of the public and private spheres distinction. The progressive movement began to blend the spheres, and what distinction was left between them was gelded by the notion that the public sphere was the larger and more important of the two. Farewell individual rights, hello good of the collective. I think this is much of the reason that the appeal to the absolute right of privacy gets little attention today. Instead we see privacy taking a back seat to public elements like the war on drugs and national security. Avoiding for a moment the basic conflict between security and liberty, so long as the "establishment" can assert that a particular action is for the good of the public, it will justify the removal of any right or privilege. Turn for a second to the nature of right and privilege. Privacy is really not a right to begin with but a privilege. Before you get up in arms, and make analogies to driver's licenses, consider the following, courtesy of Hohfield. Every entitlement is either a right or a privilege. All rights have corresponding duties, (by definition in Hohfield's explanation) privileges by contrast are met on the other side by the existence of a no-right. For example: If I verbally assault Tom on the street, he has no legal recourse. I have the privilege of verbal assault, and Tom has a no-right relationship with my privilege. He has no right to redress. If I burn down Tom's house, Tom has had his right (to use and enjoyment of land) violated, and as a result, I have a duty not to infringe on that right. Privacy in the past has fit nicely into the privilege hole. It wasn't that you had a right to privacy, but rather that everyone else had no-right to pry. Privacy was in a Hohfieldian manner, a privilege. Today this changes. Privacy, or more accurately LACK OF PRIVACY, is now a duty. The social security administration has a RIGHT to assign you a number. The IRS has a RIGHT to poke around. The FBI has a RIGHT to tap your phone (with cause, [or not]). We have gone from a privilege to the opposite side of a right, a duty in effect. Enter cryptography. Now we have the means to protect our information. Technology makes it easier to avoid the "duty" of disclosure. One way or another, something will give. Privacy is on the fence right now with a movement to a government entitlement against it. Cryptography will either force the hand, or force a backdown. Which one is a matter of conjecture. Personally I would like to see the elements of privacy become guarded by right to privacy, with the typical bundle of property rights that follows such a designation. Right to use, right to exclude, right to transfer the property of information, personal or proprietary. This opens the door for more radical injunctive and money damage relief for the violation of these rights than is currently available. It is with this goal in mind that I approach my support of cypherpunks and cryptography. No one in my mind has a right to intrude and it is entirely counterintuitive to expect citizens to submit to a duty of disclosure as is the current practice and direction. Even with respect to business and banking, the only reason identity has become important is with the rise of the credit transaction. There is simply no need for identity disclosure with cash transactions. Numbered bank accounts and even lines of credit exist and will continue to prosper. Thank you for your time and attention. :) - -uni- (Dark) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3 iQCVAgUBLOFzGxibHbaiMfO5AQHSqAP/Z/yfWAOAA7vh1+KqaRbBgiRa2wnt59As 2Y+K0KvhZCdwBScR/Ft4ewAvHnu3JFKG4NYUSJ1IYlasQ23YjYZOkE0YxatDMY35 X/P2AF5oX3WTV0zGNsMFX88uUeJUTx83yCt24o+ZgX+FxM5aNDuNME1LDH2voatP mFdiGatQhS4= =7SjQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Big Mother can't protect our privacy
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In article <199311101900.LAA22288(a)mail.netcom.com> tcmay(a)netcom.com writes: > let me say that the intent is psychological, not political. The > famoous questions about believing in God, having homosexual > experiences, washing one's hands, and so on, are devised by shrinks, > not designed to ferret out atheists and homos. The MMPI has been in > wide use since the 1950s, though it's use is declining as people file > lawsuits over it.) Read 'The straight dope' on how these questions are scored. Anyone who doesn't believe in God, for example, comes off very badly. There are many very nasty assumptions all through it that reflect the prejudices of the shrinks you refer to. It might as well have been written by god-freaks and gay-bashers. (Usually the same thing in my experience) > In Britain, in case there are some of you out there who haven't heard > about this, they got concerned about corporations compiling records on > people. Sounds like a valid concern, right? Well, the result was the > Data Privacy Act (or somesuch), which outlaws such records unless the > compiler notifies _all_ of the targets _and the government_. Close but your wording is misleading. People compiling lists in this country do *not* notify the people on the lists. The latter have to know who is compiling data on them, then put in a request (like a FOIA request) asking to be told what that data is. The public register just says 'company X keeps data' - it doesn't say on whom. In order to find out who is holding data on you, you would have to request it off every company registered with the DPA - and at about 10 pounds per request, that's a good way to go broke fast. The Data Protection Act would be better renamed the Data Secrecy Act - it primarily protects the large list of exempt bodies who not only do not register but are also immune from seaches; and any searches by other means are illegal. For instance, town councils, the police, banks, ... - just about anyone you would actually want to find out what they have on you. > The result is that anyone who saves computer files--like this list, > which of course contains e-mail addresses of hundreds of people--is > technically in violation of the law. Companies are finding it tough to > go about their business. And so on. This may well be true; it's been posited that anyone with a usenet feed should be registered since people post personal details in .sigs, and the data can be searched automatically in the mail spool. No-one to my knowlege has done so though, and no-one is asking them to. It's a big bone of contention at the moment whether BBSes should register - some see it as a way of squeezing them out of the BBS game. Again, most of them don't, and no-one complains. However it's always at the back of peoples' minds that the DPA could be used against them as an excuse if they were ever targeted for other reasons (such as unpopular political speech). G -- Personal mail to gtoal(a)gtoal.com (I read it in the evenings) Business mail to gtoal(a)an-teallach.com (Be careful with the spelling!) Faxes to An Teallach Limited: +44 31 662 4678 Voice: +44 31 668 1550 x212

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Re: Privacy, Property, Cryptography (long)
by Dark 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-> And this intuition of yours seems to be reflected in law and statute to a greater degree than you're allowing elsewhere in your essay. For example, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said that the "right to be left alone is the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men."[1]Yet y our opening lines are <- The only statues giving any kind of "Right to privacy" that have any weight at all are full of holes. For the most part a right to privacy has been EXTRACTED from them, usually without much basis. Even Brandeis has his reservations (International News Service v. Associated Press) Again, the right to privacy is not constitutionally reserved, and is almost entirely a construction of common law. > Privacy was in a Hohfieldian manner, a privilege. Hohfield sounds like an interesting read. Can you give a reference? <- Let me dig up the bio on him and drop it here. -uni- (Dark)

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Re: Should we oppose the Data Superhighway/NII?
by doug＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Mike Godwin <mnemonic(a)eff.org> said: >Perry writes: >> Seems to me that bandwidth is >> going to be nearly free in both directions in a few years whether >> government intervenes or not. > >I agree about the potential for it to be free, but, I gotta tell you, the >monopolists running the cable systems in this country have no inclination >to share that nearly free bandwidth with you, even if you're willing to >pay for access to it. I hate to disagree, considering that I prefer to agree with the philosophy here, but it *can't* work that way, regardless of what we wish. The problem is that bandwidth is a highly limited resource, just like real estate is a limited resource. Eventually we will complete saturate network bandwidth no matter what technology is used. This has been discussed in various forums for many years. Once optical fiber optic bandwidth peaks, you have to move to ultraviolet for greater channel capacity. Then that is exhausted, and we will continue pushing...gamma ray bandwidth fiber optic (or line of sight transmission) will eventually be a target, despite its extreme difficulties even in theory. At the same time we will be laying fiber and raising dishes to beat the band. But no matter how well all that goes, we will *very* quickly reach a saturation point of facilities as each new technology is introduced. These days it's easy to be optimistic, because bandwidth is growing geometrically. The problem is that there is no way in hell that that trend can continue indefinitely. One or two decades hence we will saturate theoretical limits. Bandwidth is and will always remain a scarce and precious resource. On the other hand, if you mean "slow channels by comparison with state of the art channels," then yeah, *that* may as well be free at any given point. Right this instant one could make an argument for 110 baud channels being free. >In order to get to a world in which free markets can meet our demand for >high-bandwidth connectivity, we have to dig ourselves out from the >market-failure position we're in now. And because government is part of >the problem, changing government policy is part of the solution. So, >that's one of the major thrusts of EFF's NII policy. I agree, but this seems to be a subject change. Doug

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L. Detweiler's latest rant on comp.risks
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In article <9311110637.AA19911(a)ah.com> hughes(a)ah.com writes: > >G.Broiles, A.Chandler, J.Dinkelacker, H.Finney, E.Hughes, M.Landry, > >T.C.May, N.Szabo Hey, can't I be somebody too, pretty please?!!! G (aka Sy Verpunc, until he installed procmail) -- Personal mail to gtoal(a)gtoal.com (I read it in the evenings) Business mail to gtoal(a)an-teallach.com (Be careful with the spelling!) Faxes to An Teallach Limited: +44 31 662 4678 Voice: +44 31 668 1550 x212

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A short response to L. Detweiler: 'I exist as myself.'
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In article <9311110714.AA19967(a)ah.com> hughes(a)ah.com writes: > L. Detweiler's recent article on the RISKS of confusing an online > identity with a potentially knowable physical one are quite > interesting, if hypothetical. > > I would be interested in hearing of situations where this practice > has actually occurred. If any RISKS members know of any such > incidents from first-hand experience, please share them with the > readership. I can tell a fascinating tale about spoofed identities that happened on a mailing list I was on a couple of years ago; but it's a *very* long story and I haven't the time. Maybe if I'm idle over the christmas holidays I'll pull up a log, sit down, and tell the story (if I'm bribed with enough drinks first :-) ) G (For anyone else here who's on that list, it's the story of Mahalingam et al...) PS Also I'm aware of quite a culture of 'she-males' in certain groups and IRC where men pose as women - usually lesbians - usually to get other real lesbians to confide in them (for the purposes of their own arousal...) -- Personal mail to gtoal(a)gtoal.com (I read it in the evenings) Business mail to gtoal(a)an-teallach.com (Be careful with the spelling!) Faxes to An Teallach Limited: +44 31 662 4678 Voice: +44 31 668 1550 x212

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Re: Government Accounting Office Report on Communications Privacy
by djw＠eff.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 8:38 AM 11/11/93 -0500, Paul Ferguson x2044 wrote: >> >> A few days ago, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) -- a pretty sharp > >[...] > > >Not to pick nits, but the GAO is the General Accounting Office, not >"Government" Accounting Office. > Thanks for the correction. That's what happens when I post too early in the morning. ...................................................................... Daniel J. Weitzner, Senior Staff Counsel <djw(a)eff.org> Electronic Frontier Foundation 202-347-5400 (v) 1001 G St, NW Suite 950 East 202-393-5509 (f) Washington, DC 20001 *** Join EFF!!! Send mail to membership(a)eff.org for information ***

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AT&T Encryption Product
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

NCR - An AT&T Company ____________________________________INTRA CORPORATION From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart(a)pleasantonca.ncr.com> Location: Pleasanton District To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Location: The Real World,or at least Cyberspace Subject: AT&T Encryption Product Well, it was interesting to see Philippe Nave's posting about an AT&T encryption software product (using the government's digital signature and secure hash standards instead of RSA and MD-5, so it won't be PGP- or PEM-compatible). Prices seemed a bit high, though not bad for AT&T, who are cutting some new market turf as well as typically pricey, and the encrypted Zmodem software may be useful. Does anybody know if there are any other SHA / government-signature products out? (I'm assuming there won't be much freeware because of the patent issue; people who don't mind violating RSA's patent generally use PGP.) Bill

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Re: Should we oppose the Data Superhighway/NII?v
by doug＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. May) >Freedom to associate, to pick one's friends and customers, and all >that. > >Yes, I even support the radical idea that stores can refuse service to >purple Martians, to Lesbian cats, to homeless bums, to blacks, >whatever. We may not like it, but freedom to pick one's associates is >as fundamental a right as one can imagine. On that subject: my company receives substantial money from a government agency (that prefers that we call it "DARPA" in public), to develop technologies that are up our alley but not otherwise commercially viable. That is, they're paying us to adapt our commercial technology to applications that don't pay off in the market place, because they want those non-viable applications for their own use. As a result of this, it turns out that the government requires all contractors and subcontractors to undergo not just financial audits, but also Equal Opportunity Employment audits. In preparing for an audit of that sort, we discovered that, not only is it a Bad Thing to discriminate on the basis of race, sex, etc, etc, which we all know by now, but it is also a Bad Thing to discriminate on the basis of *personality*. To turn away an interviewee because they would not fit into the existing group personality-wise apparently is a Very Bad Thing Indeed. I was flabbergasted. I had no idea that political correctness of this extreme had been enshrined into federal policy. On the flip side of the issue, I admit that I can see the point that even...ah...personality-challenged people need to work so they can eat. But still...yikes! There go your "fundamental rights". Granted this (as far as I know) only applies to government contractors at the moment. But what do you want to bet but that this will soon apply to all businesses? Doug

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