December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Postal Service and IRS mull national identity cards (fwd)
by harry＠starbase.sj.unisys.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I know you are interested in electronic privacy issues, so I thought you would like to see the following article. Yikes! -- Harry Subject: Postal Service and IRS mull national identity cards Forwarded-by: bostic(a)vangogh.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic) Forwarded-by: kole(a)hydra.convex.com (John P. Kole) Forwarded-by: cavasin(a)bach.convex.com (Vince Cavasin) >From Digital Media, May 9, 1994. EVER FEEL LIKE YOU'RE BEING WATCHED? YOU WILL.... Postal Service and IRS mull national identity cards, Clinton to sign orders Digital Media has learned that the Clinton administration is debating not if, but how, to create a card that every American will need in order to interact with any federal government agency. Combined with two potential executive orders and the Postal Service's designs on putting its stamp on personal and business electronic transactions, the card could open a window on every nuance of American personal and business life. The wrangling among the administration, the U.S. Postal Service, the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Defense, emerged into the public eye at this April's CardTech/SecureTech Conference. The gathering of security experts was convened to discuss applications for smart card and PCMCIA memory card technologies in business and government. The Postal Service, at the conference presented a proposal for a "general purpose U.S. services smartcard," which individuals and companies would use to authenticate their identities when sending and receiving electronic mail, transferring funds and interacting with government agencies, such as the I.R.S., Veterans Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services. President Clinton is also considering signing two executive orders that would greatly expand the government's access to personal records, including an order that would allow the I.R.S. to monitor individual bank accounts and automatically collect taxes based on the results, said sources close to the White House. The collection service will be presented as a convenient way to avoid filling out a tax return. The White House did not respond to requests for comments about this report. The Post Office: We deliver for you. The Postal Service's U.S. Card would be designed to use either smart cards (plastic cards with an embedded microprocessor carrying a unique number that can be read by a electromagnetic scanner and linked to computerized records stored on a network) or PCMCIA cards, which can contain megabytes of personal information. (You've probably seen this type card in AT&T's "You Will" ad campaign, which shows a doctor inserting a woman's card in a reader in order to access a recording of a sonogram). The Postal Service said it is considering AT&T and other companies' smart card technologies. In a slide presentation at the conference, Postal representative Chuck Chamberlain outlined how an individual's U.S. Card would be automatically connected with the Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Treasury, the I.R.S., the banking system, and a central database of digital signatures for use in authenticating electronic mail and transactions. The U.S. Card is only a proposal, Chamberlain insists. Yet the Postal Service is prepared to put more than a hundred million of the cards in citizens' pockets within months of administration approval, he said. "We've been trying to convince people [in the different agencies] to do just one card, otherwise, we're going to end up with two or three cards," said Chamberlain. He said in addition to the healthcare card proposed by President Clinton last year, various government agencies are forwarding plans for a personal records card and a transactions (or "e-purse") card. Chamberlain said the I.R.S in particular is pursuing plans for an identity card for taxpayers. Don't leave home without it. Though he did not name the U.S. Card at the time, Postmaster General Marvin Runyon suggested that the Postal Service offer electronic mail certification services during testimony before the Senate Governmental Affairs Subcommittee in March. The proposal is clearly intended as a way to sustain the Postal Service's national role in the information age, since it would give the agency a role in virtually every legally-binding electronic transaction made by U.S. citizens. For instance: % When sending or receiving electronic mail, U.S. Card users would be able to check the authenticity of a digital signature to screen out impostors. % Banking transactions (notably credit card purchases) that depend on authentication of the participants identities and an audit trail, would be registered in Postal Service systems. % Veterans, or for that matter college students and welfare recipients, could check their federal benefits using the identification data on their U.S. Cards. % Visitors to an emergency room would have instant access to medical records at other hospitals, as well as their health insurance information. These examples may seem benign separately, but collectively they paint a picture of a citizen's or business's existence that could be meddlesome at best and downright totalitarian at worst. Will buying a book at a gay bookstore with a credit card that authenticates the transaction through the Postal Service open a Naval officer up to court martial? If you have lunch with a business associate on a Saturday at a family restaurant, will the IRS rule the expense non-deductible before you can even claim it? "There won't be anything you do in business that won't be collected and analyzed by the government," said William Murray, an information system security consultant to Deloitte and Touche who saw Chamberlain's presentation. "This [National Information Infrastructure] is a better surveillance mechanism than Orwell or the government could have imagined. This goddamned thing is so pervasive and the propensity to connect to it is so great that it's unstoppable." Deep Roots; Deep Pockets; Long History. Chamberlain said the Postal Service has been working for "a couple years" on the information system to back up the U.S. Card. He said the project was initiated by the Department of Defense, which wanted a civilian agency to create a national electronic communications certification authority that could be connected to its Defense Messaging System. Chamberlain said the Postal Service has also consulted with the National Security Agency, proponents of the Clipper encryption chip which hides the contents of messages from all but government agencies, like law enforcement. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Laboratories in Mountain View, Calif. carried out the research and development work for Clipper. "We're designing a national framework for supporting business-quality authentication," said John Yin, the engineer heading up the U.S. Card- related research for NASA Ames' advanced networking applications group. "This is not specifically with just the Postal Service. We'll be offering services to other agencies and to third-party commercial companies that want to build other services on the card." For example, VISA or American Express could link their credit services to the U.S. Card. Yin, who works on Defense Messaging Systems applications, said his group has collaborated with "elements of Department of Defense" for the past year, but would not confirm the participation of the National Security Agency, a Department of Defense agency. The NSA is specifically prohibited from creating public encryption systems by the Computer Security Act of 1987. Yin also would not comment on the budget for the project, which other sources said was quite large and has spanned more than two years. A false sense of security? According to Yin, the cards would allow individuals or businesses to choose any encryption technology. "It's not our approach to say, 'Here's the standard, take it our leave it,'" he said. "We're not trying to create a monopoly, rather it's an infrastructure for interoperability on which a whole variety of services can be built." Yet, NASA, which is a participant in the CommerceNet electric marketplace consortium will "suggest" to its partners that they adopt the U.S. Card certification infrastructure, he said. The reality is that government agencies' buying power usually drives the market to adopt a particular technology -- not unlike the way the Texas Board of Education, the largest single purchaser of textbooks in the U.S., sets the standard for the content of American classroom curricula. Since, the administration has already mandated use of Clipper and its data-oriented sibling, the Tesserae chip, in federal systems it's fairly certain that the law enforcement-endorsed chips will find their way into most, if not all, U.S. Cards. Even in the unlikely event that one government agency should weather the pressure and pass on the Clipper chip, it's still possible to trace the source, destination, duration and time of transactions conducted between Clippered and non-Clippered devices. "Most of this shift [in privacy policy] is apparently being done by executive order at the initiative of bureaucracy, and without any Congressional oversight or Congressional concurrence, " Murray said. "They are not likely to fail. You know, Orwell said that bureaucrats, simply doing what bureaucrats do, without motivation or intent, will use technology to enslave the people." EDITOR'S NOTE: Digital Media has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for Clinton and Bush Administration, Postal Service, NSA, Department of Defense, NASA, I.R.S. and other documents related to the creation of the U.S. Card proposal. -- Mitch Ratcliffe Copyright 1994 by Mitch Ratcliffe and Seybold Publications. Digital Media: A Seybold Report 444 De Haro St., Ste. 128 San Francisco, Calif. 94107 415.575.3775 dmedia(a)netcom.com Mitch Ratcliffe Editor in Chief 415.575.3775 office 206.581.1892 home godsdog(a)netcom.com

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remailer abuse
by Eli Brandt 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The jarthur remailer is presently down because of a twit who blitzed much of Caltech and JPL with a car-repair ad. A Caltech postmaster has advised me that he has moved on to using rebma. Remailer admins who don't need this kind of hassle may wish to block messages with "BARKEV'S AUTO CENTER" in the body. Eli ebrandt(a)hmc.edu finger for PGP key.

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NSA Chief Counsel in Wired, to appear on AOL
by Richard Johnson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The guy in charge of marginalizing crypto users and privacy seekers for the NSA, Stuart Baker, tries his hand at logical arguments with a minimum of name-calling. Do his arguments stand up? Not really. Note how he avoids the issue of how easy it's getting for authorities to do 'drift-net' fishing - trotting out the tired old 'no new capabilities' line. He also seems to believe that requiring court authorization for wiretaps provides good protection against their abuse (NSA has its own pet court). ------- Forwarded Message Copyright and distribution policy attached to the end of document. FYI. X-within-URL: http://www.wired.com/Etext/2.06/Features/nsa.clipper.html NSA'S CHIEF COUNSEL TO APPEAR ONLINE Stewart A. Baker, Chief Counsel for the National Security Agency and featured writer in WIRED 2.06 will host a Q&A session on the Clipper Chip. He will appear on America Online in Center Stage (from AOL type keyword: "center stage") on Thursday May 26, 1994, from 7-9 p.m. EST. Baker is the NSA's top lawyer and supports the Clipper Initiative. He worked briefly as Deputy General Counsel of the Education Department under President Jimmy Carter. His article "Don't Worry Be Happy" refutes seven myths of key escrow encryption and is a WIRED Exclusive. _________________________________________________________________ DON'T WORRY BE HAPPY Why Clipper Is Good For You By Stewart A. Baker, Chief Counsel for the NSA _________________________________________________________________ With all the enthusiasm of Baptist ministers turning their Sunday pulpits over to the Devil, the editors of WIRED have offered me the opportunity to respond to some of the urban folklore that has grown up around key escrow encryption -- also known as the Clipper Chip. Recently the Clinton administration has announced that federal agencies will be able to buy a new kind of encryption hardware that is sixteen million times stronger than the existing federal standard known as DES. But this new potency comes with a caveat. If one of these new encryption devices is used, for example, to encode a phone conversation that is subject to a lawful government wiretap, the government can get access to that device's encryption keys. Separate parts of each key are held by two independent "escrow agents," who will release keys only to authorized agencies under safeguards approved by the attorney general. Private use of the new encryption hardware is welcome but not required. That's a pretty modest proposal. Its critics, though, have generated at least seven myths about key escrow encryption that deserve answers. MYTH NUMBER ONE: Key escrow encryption will create a brave new world of government intrusion into the privacy of Americans. Opponents of key escrow encryption usually begin by talking about government invading the privacy of American citizens. None of us likes the idea of the government intruding willy-nilly on communications that are meant to be private. But the key escrow proposal is not about increasing government's authority to invade the privacy of its citizens. All that key escrow does is preserve the government's current ability to conduct wiretaps under existing authorities. Even if key escrow were the only form of encryption available, the world would look only a little different from the one we live in now. In fact, it's the proponents of widespread unbreakable encryption who want to create a brave new world, one in which all of us -- crooks included -- have a guarantee that the government can't tap our phones. Yet these proponents have done nothing to show us that the new world they seek will really be a better one. In fact, even a civil libertarian might prefer a world where wiretaps are possible. If we want to catch and convict the leaders of criminal organizations, there are usually only two good ways to do it. We can "turn" a gang member -- get him to testify against his leaders. Or we can wiretap the leaders as they plan the crime. I once did a human rights report on the criminal justice system in El Salvador. I didn't expect the Salvadorans to teach me much about human rights. But I learned that, unlike the US, El Salvador greatly restricts the testimony of "turned" co-conspirators. Why? Because the co-conspirator is usually "turned" either by a threat of mistreatment or by an offer to reduce his punishment. Either way, the process raises moral questions -- and creates an incentive for false accusations. Wiretaps have no such potential for coercive use. The defendant is convicted or freed on the basis of his own, unarguable words. In addition, the world will be a safer place if criminals cannot take advantage of a ubiquitous, standardized encryption infrastructure that is immune from any conceivable law enforcement wiretap. Even if you're worried about illegal government taps, key escrow reinforces the existing requirement that every wiretap and every decryption must be lawfully authorized. The key escrow system means that proof of authority to tap must be certified and audited, so that illegal wiretapping by a rogue prosecutor or police officer is, as a practical matter, impossible. MYTH NUMBER TWO: Unreadable encryption is the key to our future liberty. Of course there are people who aren't prepared to trust the escrow agents, or the courts that issue warrants, or the officials who oversee the system, or anybody else for that matter. Rather than rely on laws to protect us, they say, let's make wiretapping impossible; then we'll be safe no matter who gets elected. This sort of reasoning is the long-delayed revenge of people who couldn't go to Woodstock because they had too much trig homework. It reflects a wide -- and kind of endearing -- streak of romantic high-tech anarchism that crops up throughout the computer world. The problem with all this romanticism is that its most likely beneficiaries are predators. Take for example the campaign to distribute PGP ("Pretty Good Privacy") encryption on the Internet. Some argue that widespread availability of this encryption will help Latvian freedom fighters today and American freedom fighters tomorrow. Well, not quite. Rather, one of the earliest users of PGP was a high-tech pedophile in Santa Clara, California. He used PGP to encrypt files that, police suspect, include a diary of his contacts with susceptible young boys using computer bulletin boards all over the country. "What really bothers me," says Detective Brian Kennedy of the Sacramento, California, Sheriff's Department, "is that there could be kids out there who need help badly, but thanks to this encryption, we'll never reach them." If unescrowed encryption becomes ubiquitous, there will be many more stories like this. We can't afford as a society to protect pedophiles and criminals today just to keep alive the far-fetched notion that some future tyrant will be brought down by guerrillas wearing bandoleers and pocket protectors and sending PGP-encrypted messages to each other across cyberspace. MYTH NUMBER THREE: Encryption is the key to preserving privacy in a digital world. Even people who don't believe that they are likely to be part of future resistance movements have nonetheless been persuaded that encryption is the key to preserving privacy in a networked, wireless world, and that we need strong encryption for this reason. This isn't completely wrong, but it is not an argument against Clipper. If you want to keep your neighbors from listening in on your cordless phone, if you want to keep unscrupulous competitors from stealing your secrets, even if you want to keep foreign governments from knowing your business plans, key escrow encryption will provide all the security you need, and more. But I can't help pointing out that encryption has been vastly oversold as a privacy protector. The biggest threats to our privacy in a digital world come not from what we keep secret but from what we reveal willingly. We lose privacy in a digital world because it becomes cheap and easy to collate and transmit data, so that information you willingly gave a bank to get a mortgage suddenly ends up in the hands of a business rival or your ex-spouse's lawyer. Restricting these invasions of privacy is a challenge, but it isn't a job for encryption. Encryption can't protect you from the misuse of data you surrendered willingly. What about the rise of networks? Surely encryption can help prevent password attacks like the recent Internet virus, or the interception of credit card numbers as they're sent from one digital assistant to another? Well, maybe. In fact, encryption is, at best, a small part of network security. The real key to network security is making sure that only the right people get access to particular data. That's why a digital signature is so much more important to future network security than encryption. If everyone on a net has a unique identifier that others cannot forge, there's no need to send credit card numbers -- and so nothing to intercept. And if everyone has a digital signature, stealing passwords off the Net is pointless. That's why the Clinton administration is determined to put digital signature technology in the public domain. It's part of a strategy to improve the security of the information infrastructure in ways that don't endanger government's ability to enforce the law. MYTH NUMBER FOUR: Key escrow will never work. Crooks won't use it if it's voluntary. There must be a secret plan to make key escrow encryption mandatory. This is probably the most common and frustrating of all the myths that abound about key escrow. The administration has said time and again that it will not force key escrow on manufacturers and companies in the private sector. In a Catch-22 response, critics then insist that if key escrow isn't mandated it won't work. That misunderstands the nature of the problem we are trying to solve. Encryption is available today. But it isn't easy for criminals to use; especially in telecommunications. Why? Because as long as encryption is not standardized and ubiquitous, using encryption means buying and distributing expensive gear to all the key members of the conspiracy. Up to now only a few criminals have had the resources, sophistication, and discipline to use specialized encryption systems. What worries law enforcement agencies --what should worry them -- is a world where encryption is standardized and ubiquitous: a world where anyone who buys an US$80 phone gets an "encrypt" button that interoperates with everyone else's; a world where every fax machine and every modem automatically encodes its transmissions without asking whether that is necessary. In such a world, every criminal will gain a guaranteed refuge from the police without lifting a finger. The purpose of the key escrow initiative is to provide an alternative form of encryption that can meet legitimate security concerns without building a web of standardized encryption that shuts law enforcement agencies out. If banks and corporations and government agencies buy key escrow encryption, criminals won't get a free ride. They'll have to build their own systems -- as they do now. And their devices won't interact with the devices that much of the rest of society uses. As one of my friends in the FBI puts it, "Nobody will build secure phones just to sell to the Gambino family." In short, as long as legitimate businesses use key escrow, we can stave off a future in which acts of terror and organized crime are planned with impunity on the public telecommunications system. Of course, whenever we say that, the critics of key escrow trot out their fifth myth: MYTH NUMBER FIVE: The government is interfering with the free market by forcing key escrow on the private sector. Industry should be left alone to develop and sell whatever form of encryption succeeds in the market. In fact, opponents of key escrow fear that businesses may actually prefer key escrow encryption. Why? Because the brave new world that unreadable encryption buffs want to create isn't just a world with communications immunity for crooks. It's a world of uncharted liability. What if a company supplies unreadable encryption to all its employees, and a couple of them use it to steal from customers or to encrypt customer data and hold it hostage? As a lawyer, I can say it's almost certain that the customers will sue the company that supplied the encryption to its employees. And that company in turn will sue the software and hardware firms that built a "security" system without safeguards against such an obvious abuse. The only encryption system that doesn't conjure up images of a lawyers' feeding frenzy is key escrow. But there's a second and even more compelling reason why the key escrow initiative can't fairly be characterized as interfering with private enterprise: The encryption market has been more or less created and sustained by government. Much of the market for encryption devices is in the public sector, and much of the encryption technology now in widespread use in the private sector was funded, perfected, or endorsed by the federal government. And not by accident, either. Good encryption is expensive. It isn't just a matter of coming up with a strong algorithm, although testing the strength of an algorithm can be enormously time-consuming. The entire system must be checked for bugs and weaknesses, a laborious and unglamorous process. Generally, only the federal government has been willing to pay what it costs to develop secure communications gear. That's because we can't afford to have our adversaries reading our military and diplomatic communications. That's led to a common pattern. First, the government develops, tests, or perfects encryption systems for itself. Then the private sector drafts along behind the government, adopting government standards on the assumption that if it's good enough for the government's information, it's good enough to protect industry's. As encryption technology gets cheaper and more common, though, we face the real prospect that the federal government's own research, its own standards, its own purchases will help create the future I described earlier -- one in which criminals use ubiquitous encryption to hide their activities. How can anyone expect the standard-setting arms of government to use their power to destroy the capabilities of law enforcement -- especially at a time when the threat of crime and terror seems to be rising dramatically? By adopting key escrow encryption instead, the federal government has simply made the reasonable judgment that its own purchases will reflect all of society's values, not just the single-minded pursuit of total privacy. So where does this leave industry, especially those companies that don't like either the 1970s-vintage DES or key escrow? It leaves them where they ought to be -- standing on their own two feet. Companies that want to develop and sell new forms of unescrowed encryption won't be able to sell products that bear the federal seal of approval. They won't be able to ride piggyback on federal research efforts. And they won't be able to sell a single unreadable encryption product to both private and government customers. Well, so what? If companies want to develop and sell competing, unescrowed systems to other Americans, if they insist on hastening a brave new world of criminal immunity, they can still do so -- as long as they're willing to use their own money. That's what the free market is all about. Of course, a free market in the US doesn't mean freedom to export encryption that may damage US national security. As our experience in World War II shows, encryption is the kind of technology that wins and loses wars. With that in mind, we must be careful about exports of encryption. This isn't the place for a detailed discussion of controls, but one thing should be clear: They don't limit the encryption that Americans can buy or use. The government allows Americans to take even the most sophisticated encryption abroad for their own protection. Nor do controls require that software or hardware companies "dumb down" their US products. Software firms have complained that it's inconvenient to develop a second encryption scheme for export, but they already have to make changes from one country to the next -- in language, alphabet, date systems, and handwriting recognition, to take just a few examples. And they'd still have to develop multiple encryption programs even if the US abolished export controls, because a wide variety of national restrictions on encryption are already in place in countries from Europe to Asia. MYTH NUMBER SIX: The National Security Agency is a spy agency; it has no business worrying about domestic encryption policy. Since the National Security Agency has an intelligence mission, its role in helping to develop key escrow encryption is usually treated as evidence that key escrow must be bad security. In reality, though, NSA has two missions. It does indeed gather intelligence, in part by breaking codes. But it has a second, and oddly complementary, mission. It develops the best possible encryption for the US government's classified information. With code breakers and code makers all in the same agency, NSA has more expertise in cryptography than any other entity in the country, public or private. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that NSA had the know- how to develop an encryption technique that provides users great security without compromising law enforcement access. To say that NSA shouldn't be involved in this issue is to say the government should try to solve this difficult technical and social problem with both hands tied behind its back. MYTH NUMBER SEVEN: This entire initiative was studied in secret and implemented without any opportunity for industry or the public to be heard. This is an old objection, and one that had some force in April of 1993, when the introduction of a new AT&T telephone encryption device required that the government move more quickly than it otherwise would have. Key escrow was a new idea at that time, and it was reasonable for the public to want more details and a chance to be heard before policies were set in concrete. But since April 1993, the public and industry have had many opportunities to express their views. The government's computer security and privacy advisory board held several days of public hearings. The National Security Council met repeatedly with industry groups. The Justice Department held briefings for congressional staff on its plans for escrow procedures well in advance of its final decision. And the Commerce Department took public comment on the proposed key escrow standard for 60 days. After all this consultation, the government went forward with key escrow, not because the key escrow proposal received a universally warm reception, but because none of the proposal's critics was able to suggest a better way to accommodate society's interests in both privacy and law enforcement. Unless somebody comes up with one, key escrow is likely to be around for quite a while. That's because the only alternative being proposed today is for the government to design or endorse encryption systems that will cripple law enforcement when the technology migrates -- as it surely will -- to the private sector. And that alternative is simply irresponsible. For more information on the Clipper standard you can access WIRED's Clipper archive via the following WIRED Online services. * WIRED Infodroid e-mail server: Send e-mail to infodroid(a)wired.com containing the words "send clipper/index" on a single line inside the message body. * WIRED Gopher: Gopher to gopher.wired.com and select "Clipper Archive." * WIRED on World Wide Web: http://www.wired.com select "Clipper Archive." * WIRED on America Online: The keyword is WIRED. * WIRED on the Well: Type "go wired" from any "OK" prompt. _________________________________________________________________ Stewart A. Baker is the National Security Agency's top lawyer. He worked briefly as Deputy General Counsel of the Education Department under President Jimmy Carter, and he practiced international law at Steptoe & Johnson, in Washington, DC. He has been at the NSA since 1992. _________________________________________________________________ WIRED Online Copyright Notice Copyright 1993,4 Ventures USA Ltd. All rights reserved. This article may be redistributed provided that the article and this notice remain intact. This article may not under any circumstances be resold or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from Wired Ventures, Ltd. If you have any questions about these terms, or would like information about licensing materials from WIRED Online, please contact us via telephone (+1 (415) 904 0660) or email (info(a)wired.com) WIRED and WIRED Online are trademarks of Wired Ventures, Ltd. ------- End of Forwarded Message

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Archives, FAQ, and Why Things are the Way they Are
by tcmay＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(This message has two parts. First, a discussion of archives, the FAQ, etc. Second, why encryption and remailers have been such successes and why things like digicash and other more exotic protocols have not.) I received half a dozen requests for ftp posting of articles, for archive sites, etc. This was in response to my comment about "golden oldies." We are in a tower of Babel these days. Dozens of computer platforms, from mainframes to workstations to Macs to Windows to Amigas. Dozens of mail programs (hence the fragmented support for something so basic as PGP), dozens of newsreaders, dozens of etc. The point: There is no easy solution to the problem of how newcomers can come up to speed on this list. Some miscellaneous points: * Yes, a FAQ would help. I am working on one. A long one, as is my wont. I hope to have a version out soon for comments and further submissions. I expect to either put it up for ftp at my site, or at the soda/csuu(?) site, or to just mail it to folks who request to be early commenters (I don't want the early versions ricocheting through cyberspace). * However, many people are demonstrably unwilling or unable to read the sci.crypt FAQ (else why some of the questions we get?) or to acquire Schneier. ("What's Schneier?" is one of the FUQs--Frequently Unanswered Questions.) * My best articles (in my opinion) and the best articles of others are scattered in 200 folders/directories, arranged thematically. I use Eudora's sorting capabilities to sort the mail into topics I think are related (such as Crypto/Technical/One Time Pads). Then I index the articles with "On Location," which allows me to pull up each article that has key words, such as "uranium" anywhere in the message. My own personal research tool. I mention this because I have no plans to collect these articles (either mine or those of others) and put them up for ftp access. Just too much work for too little gain. * Newcomers should be patient. Read the list for a while. I notice that one newcomer has announced that he is leaving the list after 3 days (!!) because his question on analog encryption went unanswered. Oh well. * The "Cypherpunks Archives" comes up from time to time. While we all have our own personal archives (I have 40 MB of Eudora files devoted more or less to Cypherpunks), many believe a browsable archive of _all_ posts would be nice. - this has some downsides: inspection by prosecutors and the like for seditious, infringement-inducing posts, etc. (Yes, they could subscribe and see much the same things, but making a browsable site accessible to one and all seems risky, given the political climate.) Also, the 50 or 100 MB (rough estimate) of Cypherpunk mail would be unreadable except in dribbles and dabs. (The Bible is only 10 MB!) - and recall that Cypherpunks has no budget, no organized structure, and no means of accomplishing such goals as making archives available except insofar as the volunteer efforts of folks like Hugh Daniel and Eric Hughes go. And the toad.com machine is John Gilmore's personal machine, for which we should be thankful we have any access to at all. - a real archive, maintained by real people, would require time commitments and budgetary commitments I don't see materializing anytime soon. * Meanwhile, we face the "tower of Babel." Only text messages, like this one, cut across all systems, all mailers, all readers, and can be encrypted (into _other_ text blocks, which is why some interoperability exists at all). Many things that are "possible" in the malleable and Protean world of computers simply never gets done. For while many things are "possible," time and energy limits mean these things don't get done. To the Unix jocks who send me their idea of helpful messages, suggesting that I use MIME-compliant agents and HTML URLs for the FAQ (or somesuch...), or that a few pages of perl would fix these problems....thanks, but no thanks! (I get a fair number of messages suggesting that my complaints about foo would vanish if I gave up the Macintosh and adopted the One True Way, be it BSD, or XWindow, or perl, or whatever.) (I do have access to "lynx," a stunning character-based form of Mosaic, and I've been cruising around webspace with this. But I intend to distribute the FAQ as a simple text doc, not as a WWW/Mosaic/HTML/URL/lynx thingamajig. I know this will be disappointing to some fraction of you, but we can't all be pioneers with arrows in our backs. I actually have some expectation that WWW and Mosaic are the Next Big Thing, and that groups like our list will eventually migrate to webspace, with Cypherpunks being a virtual meeting place in webspace. But not in the next year or two.) AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT,... One final word: My point about only the text block being the lingua franca of e-mail and the Internet (with a few images and sound files gaining strength) is an important clue to what works and what doesn't work in the world of crypto: * simple encryption works because everybody conceptually understands the concept of the encrypted message, which remains a text block. * remailers have worked for the same reason: everybody understands the idea of readdressing a letter, and the underlying data structure for the system remains a text block. * other protocols, like digicash, reputation servers, anonymous markets, and so on, have languished because of the tower of Babel effect--too many layers of protocol communication, negotiation, and cross-platform incompatibilities. And the "semantics" of these protocols are far from clear. (Try playing the roles of Banker, Customer, and Shop in a 3-entity digital cash protocol, with messages, signatures, blinded signatures, and "money objects" flowing back and forth. It gets confusing, even to those who've pored over the Chaum papers. Now try to _automate_ the protocol to run with little human intervention on a mix of platforms, e-mail systems, etc. This is the "protocol problem" that I happen to think needs a _lot_ more work. A big C or perl problem will not necessarily be the solution.) So, our early successes (use of encryption and remailers) is not too surprising, and that's why these successes came early on. What's next is a much harder problem. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: low-quality posts
by Cyber City 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Derek Upham <upham(a)cs.ubc.ca> wrote: > There are two ways to filter for content: filter at the newsgroup > source via moderators, or filter at the newsgroup destinations via > killfiles. Moderating does seem to get rid of most of the cruft, but > the moderators are required to read every post that comes through, > and, worse, make judgements with some degree of impartiality (which is > not always possible). There's a simpler solution. Using the majordomo hack I posted earlier, mail from known abusers would be bounced to the moderator for his approval or rejection. This would be a small volume, which should be within the capabilities of one moderator. It's important to note that even abusive posters have their moments of lucidity. For example, one or two of Detwelier's posts were actually worth reading. So a wholesale and automatic filtering would be wrong. As for the marginal stuff, it should be passed for redistribution, and the end-users should be educated on means to do their own filtering. For example, here's a simple scheme to employ the filter distributed with ELM: .forward file: "|/path/to/filter -vo $HOME/.elm/filter-errors" .elm/filter-rules file: if (from = "lassie") then save "~/mail/nal" if (to contains "cypherpunks") then save "~/mail/Cypher" -- Alex Brock

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The Wisdom of Stuart A. Baker
by perry＠imsi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Says Stewart A. Baker, Chief Counsel for the NSA, writes in Wired: MYTH NUMBER TWO: Unreadable encryption is the key to our future liberty. Of course there are people who aren't prepared to trust the escrow agents, or the courts that issue warrants, or the officials who oversee the system, or anybody else for that matter. Rather than rely on laws to protect us, they say, let's make wiretapping impossible; then we'll be safe no matter who gets elected. This sort of reasoning is the long-delayed revenge of people who couldn't go to Woodstock because they had too much trig homework. It reflects a wide -- and kind of endearing -- streak of romantic high-tech anarchism that crops up throughout the computer world. Don't you just love the finely tuned reasoning here? The absense of ad hominem attacks? This is obviously a rapier sharp logician we have here. I, for one, doubt I could ever produce any counterarguments. We must implement a police state, ladies and gentlemen, because its opponents were more interested in studying than in goofing off at a famous rock festival. I see no possible counterargument. Perry Metzger Who's bothered to read his history books instead of making fun of people who know how to read.

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more from RISKS
by dat＠ebt.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

More from Risks... Amos Shapir's point below is well taken -- if indeed computer capacity is growing exponentially, which from all accounts it seems to be, then any code can be broken in linear time! ------------------------------ RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest Weds 11 May 1994 Volume 16 : Issue 05 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 May 1994 15:37:05 -0400 From: pcw(a)access.digex.net (Peter Wayner) Subject: Re: Elevators, Car bumpers and Cryptography... I once talked to a major elevator company about doing just what the Schindler Elevator Corp. is accused of doing by the Toronto government. (RISKS-16.04). The company told me that they were in the habit of selling the elevators at a loss so they could make up the money in service contracts. Then they found themselves battling independent service companies who undercut their prices. They hoped to use cryptography to lock out any other service provider without the right key. Of course, this loss-lead approach is common in many businesses. Car companies often sell their cars at a low price and hope to make it up selling spare parts later. That is why I discovered that a spare bumper for my car cost over $500. The difference is that other companies are now making duplicate parts. The major automakers can try and discourage them, but they can't lock them out of the business. Cryptographic locks, though, are a different story. They probably can't be broken in a reasonable amount of time. (See also 16-04) I'm not sure of the case law on this, but I would suspect that it might fall under questionable or illegal trade practices. At least in the US. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 May 94 19:33:36 PDT From: Fredrick B. Cohen <fc(a)Jupiter.SAIC.Com> Subject: Re: Bellcore cracks 129-digit RSA encryption code (RISKS-16.04) I think a lot of people are missing the real point about the RSA. On my pocket PC, I can create a code that requires 5,000 MIP years to break in a matter of seconds. If I am willing to use several more seconds, I can make a code that takes 10^25 MIPS years to break. Compare this to any other encryption scheme, and you will find that the workload amplification of the RSA is quite good. And Shannon told us in 1949 that any non-perfect information transform can be broken with enough cyphertext - and developed the concept of workload for evaluating cryptosystems. If we want perfect cryptosystems we know how to get them, but it requires secure distribution. On the other hand, the RSA provides any degree of complexity we wish to generate (finite) and a fantastic complexity amplification factor, and the advantages of a dual public key system that can be used for both encryption and authentication. The point is that the RSA has not been broken, rather it has shown just how much of a David is required to defeat a given Goliath. After all, in terms of that story, David would have been a MIP second and Goliath 5,000 MIP years in relative sizes for a break-even fight. I'll take that David any day. FC ------------------------------ Date: 11 May 1994 15:19:01 GMT From: amos(a)CS.HUJI.AC.IL (Amos Shapir) Subject: Re: Bellcore cracks 129-digit RSA encryption code (RISKS-16.04) > So where does the 40 quadrillion figure come from? It comes from this very table. 10^9 is a billion, not a trillion, in the US system, and 40 quadrillion is 4 x 10^16, which is even less than what I get by interpolating to 425 bits (can anyone who has access to the original RSA article verify this?). There seems to be an interesting risk here: most encryption methods rely on "hard" problems, i.e. problems whose "brute force" solutions require computation resources which are an exponential function of the key length. But in a world in which computing power grows exponentially, such problems can be solved in polynomial (or even linear) time! Amos Shapir, The Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem, Dept. of Comp. Science. Givat-Ram, Jerusalem 91904, Israel +972 2 585706,586950 amos(a)cs.huji.ac.il ------------------------------

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Encryption metaphor in Monty Python
by Phil Karn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Recently I watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail again for the Nth time. At the very end of the movie, as the police arrest King Arthur and Sir Bedevere and break up the attack against the French castle, one of the officers accosts a knight. Grabbing the knight's shield, the officer says "Hey, that's an offensive weapon, that is!" I'd say that pretty much sums up the government's attitude toward cryptography, doesn't it? :-) Phil

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Case law re ITAR and export control
by greg＠ideath.goldenbear.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I've been reading more about export controls, and found these cases which may be of interest: US v Elder, 579 F.2d 516 (9th Cir, 1978). Prohibition on export of technical data includes provision of assistance to foreign manufacturers of items which would be on the Munitions List if manufactured domestically. This prohibition does not interfere with First Amend. free speech protection when narrowly interpreted to apply only to tech. data "significantly and directly related" to items on the Munitions List. Conviction under 22 USCA 1934 (since repealed, but similar to 22 USCA 2778, which applies now) requires that where tech data has both military and nonmilitary uses, prosecution must establish accused knew or had reason to know of its application towards a prohibited purpose. US v Van Hee, 531 F.2d 354 (6th Cir, 1976). Personal knowledge can constitute "technical data" for purposes of regulations restricting export of munitions. Exemption applying to "public domain" technical data applies only to technical data in published form. Exemption for public domain tech data must be claimed at time of export, not at trial, and package/letter must be marked as claimed exempt. US v. Donas-Botto, 363 F.Supp 191 (E.D.Mich, S.D. 1973). "Technical data" as used in the ITAR includes "technical knowledge", and its transmission is not protected by the First Amendment. The US also claims the right to prosecute for violations of the ITAR committed by non-citizens while located in foreign countries, even where the subject matter is owned by a foreign government. See US v Evans, 667 F.Supp 974 (S.D.N.Y, 1987) for a chilling story indeed. I'm going to be on vacation for a few weeks, and probably won't be checking the list; in order to avoid misunderstanding, the summaries above are my own and I believe they're accurate. I haven't found anything which overturns or disagrees with the above. My own ideas about "freedom of speech" don't match the above, but that's probably not surprising. My questions about the above: o When does export take place? When the technical data leaves the country, or when it is transferred to a foreign party? (my guess is the latter, at least with respect to "technical knowledge") o Do I need a license from the State Department if I know how to do RSA and I want to go bar-hopping in Tijuana? (just kidding, but there's a real question in there somewhere.) Discussion on the list about export regulation has focussed on violations of the ITAR; but prosecution is also possible under 22 USC 2778, with maximum penalties of $1M and 10 years in prison. Ouch. If there's going to be an LA-area C-punks meeting, will someone please send E-mail? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.5 iQCVAgUBLdKAqX3YhjZY3fMNAQEXWQP9H+WGzXZYki4BXYJI1C4dYQItXHIxAj/9 rKpu5qvnLk3F/cG+vwBB7d6C9g/hRAJQwYSxw1OEI/GG4Es6rqDmpaD7oQeu+mX0 IV/B89gUQuP/YbARLlgH2nTbpxk8gXNQnRDXQlhjJzIzs+yiRGrL9ggTNfNTYh9R AOkTBh7aRTg= =/0G2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Yet Another T-Shirt Proposal
by perry＠imsi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Should I ever run in to Stewart A. Baker, I want to be wearing a T-Shirt that says "I oppose Clipper because I'm a bitter guy who couldn't go to Woodstock". (Actually, something pithier would be nice, but you get the idea. Maybe "Mad at the NSA for making me do my Trig Homework"?) Perry

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