December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Today's remailer races.
by nobody＠rosebud.ee.uh.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

And they're off! Five ~45K messages each, five seconds apart. And the winners are, 1) elee7h5(a)rosebud.ee.uh.edu 2) hh(a)pmantis.berkeley.edu 3) and 4) tied, ebrandt(a)jarthur.claremont.edu, hfinney(a)shell.portal.com. And hh(a)soda.berkeley.edu has tripped and DIED. Yesterday hh(a)cicada.berkeley.edu died and got back up again today. Looks like either CA has fallen into the Ocean or cicada and soda aren't contenders. Comments anyone? Bets? -Xenon

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Re: 4th ammendment and Cryptography
by koontzd＠lrcs.loral.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From: Phil Karn <karn(a)qualcomm.com> >Once again, I would like to say that tying cryptography to the Second >Amendment is exceptionally bad strategy for the Cypherpunks. I agree with this. I don't agree personally with liberal democrat interpetations of the 2nd Amendment. The first 10 amendments are the 'Bill of Rights' and are individual rights. >Worst of all are the complete loonies (some apparently on this list) >who assert that guns are an essential protection against a tyrannical >US Federal Government. >I am a strong believer in the right to protect one's personal privacy >through strong cryptography and other purely peaceful means. I'm not >trying to violently overthrow the government, and I'd rather not be >associated with gun fetishists who give the strong impression that >they are -- it can only hurt the cause I believe in. I'm not a democrat, republican, socialist or facist. Please don't give my rights away to support your point of view for some other imagined or real right. I am not now nor have I in the past advocated the violent overthrow of the United States. Resolved: The 2nd Amendment has nothing to do with the right to Privacy, with or without respect to cryptography as a means to insure privacy from others or the State. -------- Life Time member of the NRA, who believes Pierre comes on rabid. Libertarian. Gun owner who receives no vicarious pleasure from guns. (They don't qualify as fetish items) -------- A Country that can have a McCarthy era has no business giving more power to its government.

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Put me down as a loony
by Brad Dolan 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Phil Karn suggests that people who care about the second amendment are loonies. Put me down with the loonies. Cypherpunks might want to tie their legal arguments to something else, but they ought to consider that the set of folks hostile to guns and the set of folks hostile to crypto overlap a lot. There may be a common reason. I'll be happy to continue the discussion by e-mail. Brad Dolan bdolan(a)well.sf.ca.us

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Bomb me!
by FORT.WALLY＠forum.va.gov 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Send mail to na48138(a)anon.penet.fi

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Digital Cash - anon. tip
by Stanton McCandlish 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'll pass this anonymous tip on to y'all. Just thought you'd like to know. > A rep from [a banking trade group] told me after hearing John Gage > talk about digital cash and anonymous digital cash on the net in the future > that the banking community has explored the issue. It has also learned > that federal reserve, law enforcement, Treasury, Secret Service are all > very opposed. -- Stanton McCandlish * mech(a)eff.org * Electronic Frontier Found. OnlineActivist F O R M O R E I N F O, E - M A I L T O: I N F O @ E F F . O R G O P E N P L A T F O R M O N L I N E R I G H T S V I R T U A L C U L T U R E C R Y P T O

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2-way anonymous via SASE
by jim＠bilbo.suite.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Here's an idea that was inspired by Tim May's prepaid mailer example. I call it "2-way anonymous communication using Self Addressed Stamped Envelopes". The general idea is that each anonymous messages will include a SASE that can be used to reply to the sender, without revealing the identity of the sender to the message recipient. To reply, the recipient will copy the SASE from the original message and past it into a special section of the reply message. Remailers will examine this section of the reply message and use its contents to route the message back to the sender of the original message. The syntax's for describing the mechanism gets messy fast. I hope I can describe it so others can understand it. Here's how I see it working... Small example: Bob wishes to communicate anonymously with Ted via remailer R1. (With just one remailer, R1 would be able to track who sends to whom, but this is just for example purposes.) Bob constructs: (stuff1)R1 - stuff encrypted with R1's public key Where: stuff1 == Ted, (stuff2)Ted - Ted's address and more stuff encrypted with Ted's public key. stuff2 == msg, SASE - Bob's message and Self Addr Stamped Envlpe All together, it looks like: (Ted, (msg, SASE)Ted)R1 (i.e. msg and SASE, encrypted with Ted's public key, appended to Ted's e-mail address, all encrypted with R1's public key) The SASE contains the information Ted will use to send a reply message back to Bob. It looks like: R1, A, (stuff3)R1 where stuff3 == Bob, B, (stuff4)Bob stuff4 == A', B' all together: R1, A, (Bob, B, (A', B')Bob)R1 expanded R1's address, A - a one-time public-key generated by Bob, ( Bob's address, B - another one-time public-key generated by Bob, ( A' - private key paired with A, B' - private key paired with B ) encrypted with Bob's public key ) encrypted with R1's public key Ok, Bob sends (stuff1)R1 to R1. This is just like using a regular encrypting remailer. R1 decrypts stuff1 and gets: Ted, (stuff2)Ted R1, strips off "Ted" and passes the rest to Ted. Ted receives (stuff2)Ted, decrypts it and gets: msg, SASE Which is really: msg, R1, A, (stuff3)R1 Ted reads the message and decides to reply to whomever sent the message. Ted composes a reply and encrypts it with public-key A, then sends the following to R1 (he sends it to R1 because R1 was in the SASE): (stuff3)R1, (reply)A ==> R1 R1 receives this, decrypts (stuff3) and gets: Bob, B, (stuff4)Bob R1 encrypts (reply)A with public-key B and sends the following to Bob (the guy mentioned inside of stuff3): (stuff4)Bob, ((reply)A)B ==> Bob Bob receives this, decrypts stuff4, obtaining A' and B'. Bobs decrypts ((reply)A)B using B' and A' respectively and gets the reply message. If the reply message contained a SASE generated by TED, then Bob and Ted could continue to converse anonymously by including SASEs in each reply. Expanded example: Bob and Ted use combinations of R1, R2, R3 to communication anonymously Bob write a message and wants to send it to Ted via R1, R2, and R3. He constructs the following: (R2, (R3, (Ted, (msg, SASE)Ted)R3)R2)R1 In this example, the SASE will look like the following: R3, A, (R2, B, (R1, C, (Bob, D, (A', B', C', D')Bob)R1)R2)R3 ASIDE: As you may guess by now, Bob's message will go through R1, then R2, then R3, and Ted's reply will come back via, R3, then R2, then R1. However, the SASE does not have to specify the reverse route of the original message, nor even use the same remailers. Anyways, Bob sends (R2, (R3, (Ted, (msg, SASE)Ted)R3)R2)R1 ==> R1 R1 decrypts it and gets: R2, (R3, (Ted, (msg, SASE)Ted)R3)R2 R1 strips off "R2" and sends the rest to R2. R2 and R3 do similar things. Standard remailer stuff. Eventually Ted will receive (msg, SASE)Ted decrypting obtains: msg, SASE Which is really: msg, R3, A, (R2, B, (R1, C, (Bob, D, (A', B', C', D')Bob)R1)R2)R3 To reply to the sender of the message, Ted does just what he did in the first example. He constructs: (stuff3)R3, (reply)A and sends it to to R3. R3, R2, R1 do their thing and eventually the reply gets back to Bob. When it arrives at Bob it will look like: (A', B', C', D')Bob, ((((reply)A)B)C)D >From this, Bob can recover Ted's reply message, while simultaneously verifying that the remailers correctly routed the reply. If the remailers did not correctly route the reply, or failed to re-encrypt the reply with B,C, and D, then the thing Bob got at the end of the final decrypt would have been garbage. Phew. I wonder if it really works? Jim_Miller(a)suite.com

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4th ammendment and Cryptography
by kevin＠axon.cs.byu.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Phil Karn writes: > Worst of all are the complete loonies (some apparently on this list) > who assert that guns are an essential protection against a tyrannical > US Federal Government. Those "complete loonies" include Thomas Jefferson and many other of the founding fathers. > Those who believe this have apparently never heard of the US Civil War, ...a conflict in which the opposing sides were geographically separate, making it easy to know where to aim an attack. The situation is much more difficult when the enemy is hidden among you. Apparently, you've never heard of the Revolutionary War, the Vietnam War or the Afghanistan War. > I'd rather not be associated with gun fetishists [...] My, my, more name-throwing. You know, it never ceases to amaze me how selective some people can be in the rights they support (and for whom). It always comes back to bite them eventually, though. The South might have successfully seceded if it hadn't been for their nasty habit of keeping slaves. Conservatives who supported property rights but not certain personal rights now find that no-one's property is safe under the civil forfeiture laws, which were passed to fight the War on (Some) Drugs. And those who support the right to use cryptography, but not the right to bear arms, will find that the same argument used against gun owners -- "X is a favored tool of criminals, thus we must ban X" -- will be turned against users of cryptography. You'd better learn to get along with gun owners, Phil. You just might end up sharing a prison cell with one. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kevin S. Van Horn | It is the means that determine the ends. kevin(a)bert.cs.byu.edu |

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re: 4th ammendment and Cryptography
by dave_taffs＠rainbow.mentorg.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

sender: Phil Karn <karn(a)qualcomm.com>: > Worst of all are the complete loonies (some apparently on this list) > who assert that guns are an essential protection against a tyrannical > US Federal Government. Those who believe this have apparently never > heard of the US Civil War, because the South tried exactly this over > 130 years ago. (They failed, BTW.) It succeeded only in destroying > most of an entire generation of Americans, along with much of the > country. And that was before some rather significant advances in US > military weaponry, vis a vis privately owned weapons. > ... > Phil This guy scares me more than any number of "gun nuts"... -- O_O 01234567 dave_taffs(a)mentorg.com | . . ^ "Kolmogorov-Chaitin measures of complexity are | (_:_) MGC != me very exciting." -- Tim May on 12/02/93 |

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re: 4th ammendment and Cryptography
by lefty＠apple.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>sender: Phil Karn <karn(a)qualcomm.com>: > >> Worst of all are the complete loonies (some apparently on this list) >> who assert that guns are an essential protection against a tyrannical >> US Federal Government. Those who believe this have apparently never >> heard of the US Civil War, because the South tried exactly this over >> 130 years ago. (They failed, BTW.) It succeeded only in destroying >> most of an entire generation of Americans, along with much of the >> country. And that was before some rather significant advances in US >> military weaponry, vis a vis privately owned weapons. >> ... >> Phil > >This guy scares me more than any number of "gun nuts"... Perhaps I'm foolish for asking, but what, precisely, has any of this to do with _cryptography_? Could you all go out back and shoot it out, perhaps? -- Lefty (lefty(a)apple.com) C:.M:.C:., D:.O:.D:.

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re: 4th ammendment and Cryptography
by koontzd＠lrcs.loral.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>sender: Phil Karn <karn(a)qualcomm.com>: >> ... >> Phil >This guy scares me more than any number of "gun nuts"... > O_O 01234567 dave_taffs(a)mentorg.com Personally I have a lot of respect for Phil with regards to areas we can at least agree on. Hopefully, we can at least agree on the exercise of free speech. We can see at the very least that the adage "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" doesn't hold true for political polarities. All of us see some threat to rights by government, varying by degree and intent. Instead of bickering (and name calling) perhaps we should seek common ground in this forum: Cryptography. There are those of us who focus on breaking the government monopoly on power by removing money from its exclusive control, promoting digital money with the ability for anonymity. It would be very hard for a government to be oppressive when it doesn't control society through its purse strings. (It makes it hard to unilaterally raise or even have taxes, too.)

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