December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: InfoWar
by koontz＠MasPar.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Industry representatives played down the privacy loopholes. >Ronald Plesser, a Washington attorney who represents online >services and direct marketing firms, said, "I know of no >example of anybody trafficking in e-mail descriptions." A >spokeswoman for Hughes Electronics Corp.'s DirecTV said, "We >do not release names of customers that ordered movies. The name of the customer of a video tape rental may be disclosed only under narrow constraints (USC 18 Chap 121 2710): * (b) Video Tape Rental and Sale Records. - (1) A video tape service provider who knowingly discloses, to any person, personally identifiable information concerning any consumer of such provider shall be liable to the aggrieved person for the relief provided in subsection (d). (2) A video tape service provider may disclose personally identifiable information concerning any consumer - o (A) to the consumer; o (B) to any person with the informed, written consent of the consumer given at the time the disclosure is sought; o (C) to a law enforcement agency pursuant to a warrant issued under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, an equivalent State warrant, a grand jury subpoena, or a court order; o (D) to any person if the disclosure is solely of the names and addresses of consumers and if - + (i) the video tape service provider has provided the consumer with the opportunity, in a clear and conspicuous manner, to prohibit such disclosure; and + (ii) the disclosure does not identify the title, description, or subject matter of any video tapes or other audio visual material; however, the subject matter of such materials may be disclosed if the disclosure is for the exclusive use of marketing goods and services directly to the consumer; o (E) to any person if the disclosure is incident to the ordinary course of business of the video tape service provider; or o (F) pursuant to a court order, in a civil proceeding upon a showing of compelling need for the information that cannot be accommodated by any other means, if - + (i) the consumer is given reasonable notice, by the person seeking the disclosure, of the court proceeding relevant to the issuance of the court order; and + (ii) the consumer is afforded the opportunity to appear and contest the claim of the person seeking the disclosure. If an order is granted pursuant to subparagraph (C) or (F), the court shall impose appropriate safeguards against unauthorized disclosure. (3) Court orders authorizing disclosure under subparagraph (C) shall issue only with prior notice to the consumer and only if the law enforcement agency shows that there is probable cause to believe that the records or other information sought are relevant to a legitimate law enforcement inquiry. In the case of a State government authority, such a court order shall not issue if prohibited by the law of such State. A court issuing an order pursuant to this section, on a motion made promptly by the video tape service provider, may quash or modify such order if the information or records requested are unreasonably voluminous in nature or if compliance with such order otherwise would cause an unreasonable burden on such provider. * (c) Civil Action. - (1) Any person aggrieved by any act of a person in violation of this section may bring a civil action in a United States district court. In other words it can be a federal crime to release personal info. (Without regard to ordering movies over the internet)

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FWD: Electronic Warfare (from the digitaliberty list)
by Fen Labalme 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Interesting (if a bit mild for this list) article from another list some of you might be interested in (or already subscribed to).... ---- Forwarded Message ---- From: owner-digitaliberty(a)phantom.com Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 01:00:06 -0500 To: digitaliberty-digest(a)piltdown.phantom.com Subject: digitaliberty V1 #13 digitaliberty Tuesday, 31 October 1995 Volume 01 : Number 013 In this issue: Test Electronic Warfare See the end of the digest for information on subscribing to the Digitaliberty or Digitaliberty-Digest mailing lists. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bill Frezza (via RadioMail) <frezza(a)radiomail.net> Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 13:14:58 -0800 Subject: Test This is a test. <sigh> ------------------------------ From: DigitaLib(a)aol.com Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 18:02:17 -0500 Subject: Electronic Warfare Folks, Attached is a column that ran on the op-ed page of today's Communications Week. I have agreed to do bi-weekly opinion pieces for them focussing on the impact of technology on society, politics, and culture - all with a DigitaLibertarian slant (of course). My hope is that this fiesty group can keep me fed with grist for these pieces. For anyone that lives in NYC, I will be carrying the DigitaLiberty banner on a panel on digital commerce at the Multimedia Design conference at the Javits center Friday 11/3 at 3:30pm. Stop by and say hello. Regards, Bill - --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ELECTRONIC WARFARE WAGES ON - AND YOU'RE THE TARGET Although the flap over the Clinton administration's attempt to promote escrowed-key encryption systems like Clipper has temporarily faded, the war on electronic privacy continues. As proceedings at the Fourth International Conference on Money Laundering, Forfeiture, Asset Recovery, Offshore Investments, the Pacific Rim, and International Financial Crimes reveal, there has been no let up in our government's efforts to blockade the cyber-frontier. No, you won't learn much from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, written by journalist-generalists who have no clue about where this technology is heading. The Feds have become so skilled at manipulating the Old Media that stories about electronic privacy invariably center on the latest drug kingpin, pedophile, or domestic terrorist. Attacking these universally abhorred enemies of the people not only makes for good headlines but keeps privacy advocates off balance as they are forced to defend abstract rights using loathsome examples. But if you tune in to the Cypherpunks mailing list (majordomo(a)toad.com) you can get some excellent first hand reports from the front. In the relatively short period since the passage of the Bank Secrecy Act, which, among other things, obliges banks to file Suspicious Activity Reports on its customers, banks have become virtual deputies in the treasury department's war on uncontrolled financial transactions. And this war is increasingly spilling into cyberspace. The conference underscored the fact that, paradoxically, we are heading not toward more specific and well defined transaction monitoring regulations, but less. How so? The problem with making regulations precise is that what software algorithms can define, other algorithms can evade. Instead, regulation by "raised eyebrow" is becoming the norm. Federal bank examiners have been given significant latitude to invoke draconian penalties against uncooperative banks. Because bank officers have few due-process protections under this regime, it is no surprise that most of them have become sniveling toadies. The objective is to insure that banks "voluntarily" introduce even more aggressive, unpredictable, and intrusive monitoring than the government would ever dare mandate. And to make sure nothing slips through the cracks, human surveillance will be supplemented with artificial-intelligence agents that can perform pattern analysis on the aggregate flow of electronic transactions, flagging anything remotely suspicious. George Orwell would be impressed. Lest you think that all of this is motivated solely by the drug war, a visit to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) homepage (http://www.ustreas.gov/treasury/bureaus/fincen/facts.html) should open your eyes. This battle is not just about drug prohibition, a crime the Treasury Department would have to invent if it didn't already exist. The real struggle is about the future of tax compliance, and it has you in its sights. A famous Revolutionary War era pamphleteer, writing under the pseudonym "Brutus", perhaps said it best 200 years ago when he wrote - "The national government through its taxing power will introduce itself into every corner of the city and country. It will take cognizance of the professional man in his office or his study; it will watch the merchant in his store; it will follow the mechanic to his shop and his work, and will haunt him in his family and his bed; it will be the constant companion to the industrious farmer in his labour; it will penetrate into the most obscure cottage; and finally it will light upon the head of every person in the United States. To all these different classes of people and in all these circumstances on which it will attend them, the language in which it will address them will be GIVE! GIVE!" What Brutus didn't know and what the cypherpunks foresee is that one day strong encryption will make it impossible to spy on our activities in cyberspace. Heightened conflict is inevitable. Expect the rhetoric to get a lot hotter as the government spinmeisters labor to keep us focused on public enemies while frantically trying to keep its hand in every citizens pocket and its eyes on every bankbook. # # # COPYRIGHT CMP PUBLICATIONS 1995 Bill Frezza is president at Wireless Computing Associates and co-founder of the online forum DigitaLiberty. The opinions expresses are his own. Frezza can be reached at frezza(a)interramp.com. ------------------------------ End of digitaliberty V1 #13 *************************** To subscribe to Digitaliberty-Digest, send the command: subscribe digitaliberty-digest in the body of a message to "Majordomo(a)phantom.COM". If you want to subscribe something other than the account the mail is coming from, such as a local redistribution list, then append that address to the "subscribe" command; for example, to subscribe "local-digitaliberty": subscribe digitaliberty-digest local-digitaliberty(a)your.domain.net A non-digest (direct mail) version of this list is also available; to subscribe to that instead, replace all instances of "digitaliberty-digest" in the commands above with "digitaliberty". ---- End Forwarded Message ----

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Using Holographic Memory Crystals for Encryption
by Aleph One 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

*WARNING* I have not idea about what Iam about to talk. This is a midnight rant. Take it as it is. *WARNING* I just finished reading the article on Holographic Memories on the latest Scientific America by Demetri Psaltis and Fai Mok. At the end they mention that "Given a hologram, either one of the two beams that interfered to create it can be used to reconstruct the other. What this means, in a holographic memory, is that it is possible not only to orient a reference beam into the crystal at a certain angle to select an individual holographic page but also to accomplish the reverse. Illuminating a crystal with one of the stored images gives rise to an approximation of the associated reference beam, reproduced as a plane wave emanating from the crystal at the appropriate angle." I was thinking this is simply a kind of XOR here given one image you can obtain the other. No this convined with the fact that you need to know the right angle could make for some interesting stuff. You could make a system where you give it the initial angle and password which is illuminated into the cristal to reveal the encoded data add to this some feadback mechanism where the angle changes depending on some function of the data and things get interesting. Its late and Iam tired. But if anyone has any ideas I woulkd love to heard them. Good nite. Aleph One / aleph1(a)dfw.net http://underground.org/ KeyID 1024/948FD6B5 Fingerprint EE C9 E8 AA CB AF 09 61 8C 39 EA 47 A8 6A B8 01

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Digicash on Scientific American
by Aleph One 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Another thing before I go to bed. On the November issue of Scientific American the Essay column writen by Anne Eisenberg is titled "Doing Busioness on the Net". Its short (one page), but metions PK crypto, touches upon the dangers that online transcations pose to privacy, and talks a bit about ecash. Sadly there is no mention of ITAR *sight* Aleph One / aleph1(a)dfw.net http://underground.org/ KeyID 1024/948FD6B5 Fingerprint EE C9 E8 AA CB AF 09 61 8C 39 EA 47 A8 6A B8 01

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"Dr." Fred
by anon-remailer＠utopia.hacktic.nl 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The most charitable explanation for "Dr." Fred is that he's degenerated into the professional equivalent of those pathetic aging former chess masters who try to eek out a subsistence living by charging five bucks a game. People often play with them out of sympathy, or for the novelty of having lost to a past great. It's part of the chess culture, and it's basically harmless and sort of quaint. The difference, of course, is that its almost impossible to have sympathy for Dr. Fred. His hustle is for a hell of a lot more than subsistence. He was also never actually a master of his field, a fact that becomes increasingly obvious as our exposure to him goes on. Now he's reduced himself to trying to collect someone else's winnings.

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Re: Important Digital Cash Question...
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>I think that the bankers name should be Ethel however. >Wait, wait! I have another one. I call digital cash bankers "underwriters", >because they're basically underwriting digital certificates, like an >underwriter in the capital markets does. >So, we need a "U" name... Obviously Alice and Bob are banking with Chaum.... #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

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Re: ecash remailer
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sameer and Hal both suggested ecash-laundering methods to provide payee anonymity using methods like this: >Enterprising cypherpunk, Ed sets up the Ecash Remailer. >Alice pays Bob e$15. Alice is anonymous. >Bob sends Ed the e$15 >Ed cashes the e$ into his ecash mint account, withdraws e$13.50 >then pays Bob those e$14 .. Bob can now spend those e$ at will. > Bob is now anonymous. As implemented here, Ed is strictly in the money-laundering businesss, and can expect a visit from the Feds as soon as they can break through the chain of digital mixes and crypto he uses to operate alt.money.laundry, or follow the money when _he_ tries to deposit it. On the other hand, he could operate a strictly legitimate business, selling financial assets such as bearer bonds or low-commission lottery tickets, or converting funds between different e-banks, or simply offering anonymous bank accounts with currencies in multiple denominations - Bob can set up an account with Ed's Eurocurrency Exchange in the name "Public Key nnnnn", deposit his $15, and withdraw US$14.95 worth of Yen or Deutschmarks or Kongbucks. Aside from Bob's need to trust Ed, and his need to trust Alice not to double-spend (since laundering used bills is much harder than laundering marked bills) it first looked to me like Ed has a serious risk that he'd be nabbed by the Feds as soon as he tried to spend the bills, so he has to trust Bob not to be spending ransom money or pharmaceutical profits. But as near as I can tell, _any_ merchant has that risk, because there's no way for Ed to distinguish between cash that Bob withdrew himself and cash that Bob got from someone else. Does this mean that anybody who sells goods to anonymous clients is automatically a money-launderer? If so, either the bogus money-laundering laws have to go (yay!) or laws against selling to anonymous clients will get written (boo!) or selective enforcement and entrapment will become increasingly popular, leading merchants to refuse to do anonymous business just to defend themselves against extortionists\\\\\\\\\\\\legitimate needs of law enforcement? #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

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Internet World Boston
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

David Fox has me on a panel discussion he's leading tomorrow (November 1) at Internet World in Boston in the Harborview Ballroom from 10:15 to 12:30. Also on the panel will be someone each from First Virtual, Open Market, and CheckFree, all of whom will be demo-ing their latest stuff. This promises to be interesting, and it would also be a great opportunity for me to actually meet some people I only read in e-mail. If you're around, I hope to see you there! Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Shipwright Development Corporation, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 323-7923 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell >>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf(a)clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<

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Re: PGP at Universities
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:37 PM 10/30/95 -0600, James Black black(a)suntan.eng.usf.edu wrote: >>I am talking with one of the >>administration people about putting PGP on the system for everyone to >>use, but there are issues for them (the admin) as they might be liable, >>even if they can't read the e-mail. What other legal considerations >>should be evaluated? >> Is there any large organizations (like any other universities) that >>allow their students to use PGP, and have the system in place to make it >>easier for the students? If it is offered here I might be the one to add >>to the mail program (pine) that is generally used to transparently use >>PGP, which is what I mean by having a system set up for the encryption. Well, one obvious example is MIT, which not only makes PGP available to its students, it makes it available to everyone else in the US, though ostensibly not everyone else in the world. Your University isn't required to be reading students' and employees' private email anyway, (though it can get away with it by announcing it as official policy), so not being able to read it because of PGP is just fine - if anything it may reduce their legal liability by offering students the option of having truly private email, where sysadmins won't even be able to read bouncemail or other fragments of messages left around when mailers break. On the other hand, I'm guessing that usf.edu is in the USA? If so, there may be ITAR considerations - are any of your students non-US citizens without Green Cards? Offensive as it sounds, it may not be legal to let them use a copy of PGP that you provide (though it's perfectly legal for them to import copies from the UK for their own use.) There _are_ privacy- protecting programs you can let them use, such as the next edition of Netscape, which has 40-bit RC4, and you can use digital signatures from packages like RIPEM-SIG, which is a signature-only subset of RIPEM that's approved for export. Since Netscape 2 will be using X.509 certifications, which RIPEM uses, you or your students can do things like building good friendly user interfaces to the current character-menu certification chains that RIPEM provides (somewhat like PGP's Web of Trust, but a bit clumsier for now.) #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

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W3 Self-Regulation?
by Dave Del Torto 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[Where's Tipper when you need her? Answer:] FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Ron Warris, President, Internet Filtering Systems, Inc. phone: 1-403-258-5804, email: warrisr(a)colt.t8000.com Web: www.tenagra.com/ifsi DEMOCRATIC WORLD-WIDE WEB SELF-REGULATION ANNOUNCED CALGARY, ALBERTA, CANADA -- October 30, 1995 -- Internet Filtering Systems, Inc. (IFSI) today announced Net Shepherd, the first product designed to democratically rate and filter World Wide Web sites and selectively supervise access. Net Shepherd is the first PICS-compliant rating and filtering solution. Under the auspices of The World Wide Web Consortium, PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection) is a cross-industry working group whose goal is to facilitate the development of technologies to give users control over the kinds of material to which they and their children have access. According to Ron Warris, president of IFSI, "There are a number of companies offering filtering solutions. What is really needed is a rating solution. How do you go about reviewing and rating 8.5 million volatile documents on the Internet? Our approach will allow the people who surf the Internet to be the people who rate the Internet. With Net Shepherd, parents, educators and other concerned organizations will be able to voluntarily participate in the rating process. Mr. Warris continues, "Net Shepherd will also provide parents with the ability to selectively filter documents viewed by their children. Parents can choose from a variety of rating databases that represent the accumulated ratings from others who hold similar views and philosophies. Organizations that wish to create rating databases for their subscribers will also be able to use Net Shepherd. You'll be able to subscribe to the Good Housekeeping database or the Lutheran Church database or the ACLU database. Take your pick. "The Internet has always been self-regulating and special-interest-group oriented. Now the World Wide Web can be as well." IFSI's mission is to become the preferred and premier provider of Internet rating systems and services for individual consumers, concerned groups and associations, as well as other filter software developers. A World-Wide Web site currently contains basic information about IFSI, and will evolve over the coming weeks into an extensive resource for those interested in Internet content filtering. It is located at URL <http://www.tenagra.com/ifsi/> >From the Web page: Internet Filtering Systems, Inc. is the developer of Net Shepherd, the first product designed to democratically rate and filter World Wide Web sites and selectively supervise access. The Internet has always been self-regulating and special-interest-group oriented. Now the World Wide Web can be as well. Net Shepherd is the first PICS-compliant rating and filtering solution. Under the auspices of The World Wide Web Consortium, PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection) is a cross-industry working group whose goal is to facilitate the development of technologies to give users control over the kinds of material to which they and their children have access. Net Shepherd allows the people who surf the Internet to be the people who rate the Internet. With Net Shepherd, parents, educators and other concerned organizations will be able to voluntarily participate in the rating process. Net Shepherd will also provide parents with the ability to selectively filter documents viewed by their children. Parents can choose from a variety of rating databases that represent the accumulated ratings from others who hold similar views and philosophies. Organizations that wish to create rating databases for their subscribers will also be able to use Net Shepherd. IFSI's mission is to become the preferred and premier provider of Internet rating systems and services for individual consumers, concerned groups and associations, as well as other filter software developers. [cf. PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection) at <http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/PICS/>]

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