December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

The Value of Anonymity
by mkj＠october.ducktown.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- The value of anonymity, both on the nets and off, seems to be poorly understood, even among its strongest defenders. The positive value of anonymity is not merely about protecting a few special groups such as sexual-abuse victims and whistleblowers. While these are certainly valuable uses, if I believed that anonymity's positive impact were limited to these outside-the-mainstream groups, then I probably wouldn't accept the benefits of anonymity as outweighing its costs. But in fact, I believe that anonymity has crucially important benefits for nearly everyone. There are several good arguments to be made, but in the interest of brevity I'll focus on only one: The explosive development of such personal data industries as targeted marketing and consumer and demographic profiling, have demonstrated that the business community considers personal data to be of great economic value. (There's a parallel observation to be made here about governments, but I won't go into that now.) There are also myriad uses being made of personal data throughout the professions, from labor negotiators to house burglars. It is something of a truism that anyone who knows enough about you can probably find a way to beat you, either legally or illegally, often at great profit to themselves. In an information-age society without extremely strong privacy protections, the chief factor which makes the difference between winners and losers may be how much information each of us has on others, and how much they have on us. Given this degree of economic and social motivation, it is easy to imagine the sort of panopticon which will soon arise on the Internet (and its descendants), unless the strongest possible protections are adopted. (And it is equally easy to imagine who the biggest winners and losers will be.) Relying on government to protect personal privacy is like appointing the fox to guard the henhouse (or, as I seem to recall John Perry Barlow once putting it, "... getting a peeping tom to install your window blinds," or something like that). In addition to the government's own motivations for eroding privacy, all the above economic considerations enter into government through lobbying, desires to maximize tax revenues, fund-raising considerations, and a whole raft of other avenues. Furthermore, the only tools which government could bring to bear would be a complex web of laws and regulations governing the circulation of personal data. Such laws and regulations would have to constantly shift in a never ending cat-and-mouse game with business; and what's more, many of these laws and regulations would necessarily conflict with the free speech rights of private organizations. Bottom line: Anonymity is the only available tool which puts control over my own privacy firmly into my own hands, where it belongs, and does so without infringing on anyone's freedom of speech. Certainly there are drawbacks, and anonymity may invite some abuses; but we have survived anonymity's problems in the past, and 'tis better to suffer in the hell we know than to be dragged into a new and hotter one. The only society without any crime is a society without any freedom. My ($.02) conclusion: For preserving meaningful privacy, and for preventing an ugly and probably irreversible transformation of our world, anonymity is the best, perhaps the only viable tool we have. --- mkj -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLw+MZF11Wd4tm8clAQHC3QP8DrxVrUAUM+UKKeKzosFmCXGLkuwJYGDS nE+pFEFIDC8cq7/35h99oIrCszmnkIjwso8PhwlwqRzuxFTZPMI3XuK5wt95tJCL 6Iy2oQ7wjCv+xnL2QjdAGNl68WD0ZhmPv9Q62cvWYjzRXnQJJF7dZiES5l14/NM2 Ij4rLh8AdEo= =OGBF -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Remailer Abuse
by lcottrell＠popmail.ucsd.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > >See above. What's the difference between A-->B-->C-->B and A-->B-->C-->D ? >If someone is logging messages and routing, it's less secure, but then so is >the entire remailer system. Prime remailer operators are those who don't >log. > >Maybe message size would tip off snoopers. This can be overcome with minor >tweaking to existing remailer code by tacking on or or eliminating padding >to messages. But logging still makes the whole system extremely vulnerable. > >=D.C. Williams <dcwill(a)ee.unr.edu> > Message size can best be handled by using a remailer which uses messages which never change size. Mixmaster is now ready for testing. It still does not run on Linux or FreeBSD. I don't know what else it does run on. It works great on Sun machines with gcc. Since it is export restricted, send me mail and I will send you the name of the hidden directory to get the file. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQCVAwUBLw+btVVkk3dax7hlAQFW/QP9GZAIODaKt/VYsDGWUExiY4NUapvnQpZ/ FWtucyqX+4v9JnJv318PaKEs5xqHMcqtdq0fGZn6qNe1k5MbSVBb5wzfclMQm3LY J7b3qv8zymedXpcmM2hm6bCnbpJkRivIjJTCDmg2yMKRH1Uv+Le5eN2haRxw3d76 e51KLqZJbh4= =BKtC -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -------------------------------------------------- Lance Cottrell who does not speak for CASS/UCSD loki(a)nately.ucsd.edu PGP 2.6 key available by finger or server. Encrypted mail welcome. Home page http://nately.ucsd.edu/~loki/ Home of "chain" the remailer chaining script. For anon remailer info, mail remailer(a)nately.ucsd.edu Subject: remailer-help "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra. Suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night the ice weasels come." --Nietzsche

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Re: The Value of Anonymity
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- From: mkj(a)october.ducktown.org > The value of anonymity, both on the nets and off, seems to be poorly > understood, even among its strongest defenders. The positive value of > anonymity is not merely about protecting a few special groups such as > sexual-abuse victims and whistleblowers. While these are certainly > valuable uses, if I believed that anonymity's positive impact were > limited to these outside-the-mainstream groups, then I probably > wouldn't accept the benefits of anonymity as outweighing its costs. These are good points. However I think your presentation is a little too oriented towards the libertarian perspective of distrusting government, and also comes off sounding harshly competitive: > It is something of a truism that > anyone who knows enough about you can probably find a way to beat you, > either legally or illegally, often at great profit to themselves. > > In an information-age society without extremely strong privacy > protections, the chief factor which makes the difference between > winners and losers may be how much information each of us has on > others, and how much they have on us. I think most people don't think so much in terms of winners and losers, of beating and being beaten. Rather, I think it will be more acceptable to couch the issue in simple privacy terms. People do value their privacy. I don't think you have to overly justify the value of privacy. A few examples of how little privacy people could actually have in a non-anonymous network of the future should suffice to establish motivation IMO. > Given this degree of economic > and social motivation, it is easy to imagine the sort of panopticon > which will soon arise on the Internet (and its descendants), unless > the strongest possible protections are adopted. I like this phrase! It nicely connotes the transparency of the nets. > Relying on government to protect personal privacy is like appointing > the fox to guard the henhouse (or, as I seem to recall John Perry > Barlow once putting it, "... getting a peeping tom to install your > window blinds," or something like that). In addition to the > government's own motivations for eroding privacy, all the above > economic considerations enter into government through lobbying, > desires to maximize tax revenues, fund-raising considerations, and a > whole raft of other avenues. This is where I think you are getting too libertarian for a broad audience. Also, this wording invites the reader to assume that anonymity will lead to tax avoidance and evading laws. Most people feel that they are paying their own taxes, and if others avoid them then it just increases the burden on themselves. So except to certain selected groups I would avoid playing this angle up. I think your next argument will have wider appeal: > Furthermore, the only tools which government could bring to bear would > be a complex web of laws and regulations governing the circulation of > personal data. Such laws and regulations would have to constantly > shift in a never ending cat-and-mouse game with business; and what's > more, many of these laws and regulations would necessarily conflict > with the free speech rights of private organizations. Be aware that this is in fact the "mainstream" solution to the problem. There was some discussion on comp.org.eff.talk of some kind of committee headed by EFF board member Esther Dyson which issued a statement on privacy protection in the nets. They issued the by-now traditional call for laws along the lines of "information collected for one purpose cannot be used for another purposes". Like, VISA can't sell data on your spending patterns, at least not without telling you. Nobody criticized this point; even the relatively net-aware civil liberties types mostly explicitly endorsed this provision. Laws like this are apparently already in place in Europe. So the momentum is in exactly this direction. I think your arguments are good ones; the government would undoubtedly exempt itself from such rules (the IRS is already starting to use dataveillance and matching to look for discrepencies between tax returns and spending patterns), plus such provisions would seem to require a labyrinth of exceptions, special cases, etc. Eventually I could see laws telling exactly what a business can and cannot do with the names of people who phone or net in for information; yes, they can be kept on a list for up to 6 months and sent additional promotional literature, except that the business must require standard form 11832 to allow the customer to get his name off the list, which must be handled within 5 working days for businesses with more than 100 employees, etc., etc. You could have volumes of this kind of stuff. I think Tim wrote some essays a long time back pointing out the absurdity of this approach, especially if you tried to apply it to private individuals. > Bottom line: Anonymity is the only available tool which puts control > over my own privacy firmly into my own hands, where it belongs, and > does so without infringing on anyone's freedom of speech. Certainly > there are drawbacks, and anonymity may invite some abuses; but we have > survived anonymity's problems in the past, and 'tis better to suffer > in the hell we know than to be dragged into a new and hotter one. The > only society without any crime is a society without any freedom. > > My ($.02) conclusion: For preserving meaningful privacy, and for > preventing an ugly and probably irreversible transformation of our > world, anonymity is the best, perhaps the only viable tool we have. That's a good summary. This is definately an uphill battle, though. I see no significant standards body or organization of influence (except for CPs, to the extent that we have any influence) which is moving in this direction. Add to this the costs of anonymity as Wei has been discussing and it really isn't clear how to proceed. Hal -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQBVAwUBLxAj1xnMLJtOy9MBAQGujQIAqooWk8OsbJzbAGpxIP+EYnPJM0kA7Ojm /3i04Odoq/YZEH1Fv81/RbwsDahe+AGtmqU+VQ1KpjUTJuPfNKJ4dQ== =w/FH -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Too Much!
by L. Todd Masco 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Paul J. Ste. Marie writes: > At 01:16 AM 1/7/95 -0500, L. Todd Masco wrote: > >You might want to try reading it from NNTP, via c2.org or hks.net. You > >can then use Kill files. > > At that point, isn't the mailing list simply becoming a newsgroup? For that > matter, is there some reason that escapes me why it ISN'T a newsgroup? I > suppose the proportion of net.kooks is higher in a newsgroup than a mailing > list, but arguably we're ALL net.kooks here. Not really, not until a huge number of hosts carry it as a newsgroup. As for why cypherpunks isn't a newsgroup... IMO, it would end up carrying too much traffic and be way too high profile. As is, the people who really want to find it will and a hordes of riff-raff (not all, mind you) are less likely to bother with it. -- Todd - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBLxBD/yoZzwIn1bdtAQHMrAF8ChmS332TabEbGslXsxzOLqIHEBOnJBYs KIdzflR9PJWsYuNJBH6LrHtBWK/q7ejP =T4k6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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remailers
by Raul Deluth Miller 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm wondering if I understand this remailer debate. Here's my summary (based not so much on reading of cypherpunk traffic, but on my understanding of the basic principles): (*) define an encrypting mailer protocol (basically, just PGP or some such). When a mailer receives an encrypted message, it unpacks (0) a message which may have been doubly encoded (once by originator, once by prior remailer to disguise padding) -- if so, must decrypt twice. (1) the message to be forwarded, annotated with control info (e.g. padding, delay, key to reencrypt under) (2) payment information in whatever format is advertised for that remailer. As I understand it the problem with digital cash is defining physical link for the "cash", without compromising the identity of whoever payed into the account. The proposal-to-date involves a guild of remailers. As I see it, this would be primarily of value for shuffling cash around -- call it a build of bankers instead. Once you've established your "cash"-net, presumably with related services such as drop-boxes and temporary accounts, you could use more flexible mechanisms for anonymous mail, which feed off the cash net where necessary. I've not read Chaum(sp?)'s work on encrypted cash, so perhaps I've ignored some terribly obvious issues. [No PGP signature -- at the moment, I don't have a host sufficiently secure to be worth bothering with.] -- Raul D. Miller N=:((*/pq)&|)@ NB. public e, y, n=:*/pq <rockwell(a)nova.umd.edu> P=:*N/@:# NB. */-.,e e.&factors t=:*/<:pq 1=t|e*d NB. (,-:<:)pq is four large primes, e medium x-:d P,:y=:e P,:x NB. (d P,:y)-:D P*:N^:(i.#D)y [. D=:|.@#.d

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Re: The Value of Anonymity
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hear, hear! mkj's article on anonymity is worth reading. >From my perspective, the most important thing cryptography offers us is not just the ability to have private conversations without eavesdroppers; it's the ability to change the balance of power from the centralized control and accumulation of information that computers bring back to a level where _you_ can control what happens to your personal data. Do you _like_ starting transactions by giving some big company your Social Security Number which lets them, and everyone else, know everything you've ever done, where you live, how you vote, what you buy? We can move to a society where you can give the other party as much information as they need to do business with you, without having to give them everything else, or connect this transaction to all your others. Sometimes that means giving people more detail than you give them now, usually less. Cryptography becomes the technical glue to control how much you tell somebody on each transaction, anywhere from total anonymity to deep personal information, to let you have a driver's license that says "yes this person is a safe driver" without it becoming the key to your bank account of you lose your wallet, to have voter's registration that doesn't permit fraud but doesn't require universal identification. Some good technical references are the set of papers that David Chaum published about blind signatures and anonymous credentials. Bill

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Re: From me to me to you...The Actual Article
by Erik Selberg 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Carol Anne Braddock writes: > This is the article, and what I did with it. It is complete in it's > entireity, from the bang paths, to the crosspostings. Please study them > Now, the article, > Date: Sat, 7 Jan 1995 01:26:26 -0600 > From: Carol Anne Braddock <carolann(a)vortex.mm.com> > To: carolann(a)vortex.mm.com > Newsgroups: soc.support.transgendered, alt.transgendered, > mn.general, alt.sex.femdom, alt.artcom, alt.sex.bondage, alt.sex, > comp.infosystems.www.users, alt.dreams.lucid, alt.dreams > Subject: (fwd) Re: Phil Zimmermann So, I don't read any of those groups, and I could be dead wrong on all of this. But I'll yap away anyway. Off the cuff, I'd say your article could be inappropriate. Granted it's a good cause, and you're not advertising for yourself but for a charity. However, charitable spam is still spam (and I'm not calling your article spam... spam lite, maybe). I understand your point about feeling a sense of community with the above groups; however, I think that massive "Please help..." postings can be just as annoying as the MAKE.MONEY.FAST postings. Erik Selberg "I get by with a little help selberg(a)cs.washington.edu from my friends." http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/selberg

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Re: Latency, bandwidth, and anonymity
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

My initial reaction to "Anonymous video conferencing" was "That's when you wear black ski masks and use voice scramblers and call from video payphones", i.e. not very useful. ("Subcomandata Marcos here...") On the other hand, Wei Dai's followup message about > In the longer term, anonymous communication is in danger of being used > only by fringe groups if it falls too much behind the non-anonymous kind > in terms of latency and bandwidth (and cost, I guess). Maybe ONLY drug > dealers, nuclear terrorists, etc., will use anonymous remailers when full > sensory virtual interaction is the must popular way for most people to > communicate and remailers are still the only choice for the > anonymity-conscious. puts a different spin on it. It's a real problem, if not now, then maybe in 5-10 years. I realize that those of us in the Phone Company who have predicted universal Picturephone in the past have been over-optimistic :-), but the video compression people and the faster-chip people keep bringing us closer to having good-quality low-bandwidth video, and ISDN and fast modems are bringing available loop-end bandwidth up to the point that reasonably-priced circuits can carry it. (Long-haul raw bits have been cheap enough for a while; it's the distribution and switching technology that have a lot of the cost, and providing cheap high-bandwidth circuits makes it hard to make money on voice calls.) The approaches to anonymous video conferencing will depend a bit on whether the technology takes off on the nets or the phone system, if those two are still different by then. It's easier to obscure the origins of a call on the nets, where users own large parts, than it is on the phone system, where the Phone Companies own and operate most of it; the latter environment would require Phone Remailers, such as PBXs you call into on T1 lines and get shuffled out on other circuits - it's hard to get adequate mixing except in rather large environments.... Recircuiting on the nets will be left as an excercise to the reader. I suspect the harder parts of the job may be doing the faces and voices right - anonymous voice conference bridges are ok if the participants mostly don't know each other, but they're less useful if people know each other and cops with computerized voiceprint equipment may be eavesdropping (not common now, though computers and models of the human voice are improving; I suppose voice disguisers may improve from the kid's-toy quality to something better if there's a market, or if computers with full-duplex soundcards become more common.) Faces are harder, and they're not really a crypto problem - how do you fake them well? It's not too hard to do a "quayletool" quality solution that generates moving lips in front of a static picture, even timed with an audio feed, but that won't play too well in the business world, and having the camera pointing at your calendar or home page is only semi-useful. If video-calling evolves on the nets, there'll be a lot more need for speed-matching services, and it may be that computer-enhanced video receiving for high-bandwidth users will fund the technology development for face-simulation? If so, maybe you can use it to start with fake stills instead of real ones? Bill

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Re: Data Haven problems
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

dfloyd asks for ideas about preventing spamming in data havens, for the code that he's working on. It's a hard job. A related problem is how to prevent your data haven from becoming the porno-ftp site of the week, and either being swamped with traffic or raided by the Post Office Reactionary Neighborhood Police. One way to stop spamming is to charge sufficient money for the service that using it always pays for itself - spamming is then reduced to a source of profit, e.g. no problem. If people want to hire you to store spam, it's their money they're wasting. But that requires an anonymous digital cash infrastructure, which we don't really have yet. And it's a lot less interesting academically (:-) than finding solutions which can also work in a cooperative system, or at least a system that doesn't charge per transaction. Probably the most important step you can take is to build in operator-selectable filtering, because the problems keep changing. Operators probably need to be able to block storage and retrieval by specific users and sites (It's easier to prevent access by president(a)whitehouse.gov than it is to detect forged requests, and you probably want to keep both real and fake Cantor&Siegel users off, plus the bozo of the month and the broken-remailer of the day.) Some operators may find it useful to limit the amount of data that can be stored or retrieved by a specific user or site, though this is less useful with anonymous and pseudonymous remailers around, since "a specific user" becomes vaguer. Filtering by filename and type can also be useful - if you don't allow files named *.gif and *.jpg, users may be less likely to spam you with pornography. Namespace control in general is an issue - do users get to choose filenames, or list directories, or do they have to know the names of files to retrieve. Another issue is whether files can only be retrieved by the sender - probably a local policy issue. Some sites may only accept encrypted files, which reduces the spam potential considerably, as well as reducing your exposure to the porn police, though it's difficult to do anything about files that are encrypted with a public key whose private key has been posted to the net, or fake crypto headers in an otherwise unencrypted file, unless you put in lots more code to check the insides of files and watch the net for such postings, which is unrealistic. There's also the problem that PGP and especially RIPEM files are non-stealthy, and users may not want to leave even keyids in their files. Bill

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Re: Can someone verify this conjecture for me?
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> From: nelson(a)crynwr.com (Russell Nelson) > > It seems like it solves two separate problems: 1) foiling traffic > > analysis, and 2) foiling a cheater remailer. The problems are > > separate, really, because if you really, really trust the remailer (as > > many people do Julf), then 2) isn't a problem. All you need to do is > > solve 1. Or, you can solve 1) by using a single remailer. A > > necessary but not sufficient step to foil traffic analysis is to strip > > headers. There are a couple of advantages of chaining multiple remailers. One is that traffic analysis is an art, rather than a science, and to really foil it, you've got to know how good it is, which is hard. Long-term patterns may show up even though the traffic mixes are pretty good in the short run, and if you can spread out the remailer use and increase the traffic load, plus constantly sending encrypted traffic between remailers, it does make the job harder. If the Bad Guys can isolate their target to a few remailer users, they can often find the real one by rubber-hose or a small number of wiretaps at the user locations instead of the remailers; that's impractical if there are thousands of potential users in multiple countries across the remailer-chain. Another is that if one good trustable remailer can foil traffic analysis, then multiple remailers increases the chance that at least one of them is good. Sure, Julf's a good guy, but what if the KGB has kidnapped his grandmother, or the CIA has planted wiretaps inside his computer - will you know if it's compromised? There's also the reliability issue - what if the Finnish Phone Company decides Julf is using too much of their resources and cuts him off, or the Mafia steals one of your police-informants' remailers, or the California Public Utilities Commission declares email to be a common carrier and insists on auditing all transactions? Multiple remailer in a strongest-link chain reduce the risks. Bill

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