December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Escrowing Viewing and Reading Habits with the Government
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:59 AM 1/28/96, Lucky Green wrote: >Of course the V-Chip transmits the ID number of the program to be rated >upstream. Since all programs will be rated by the chip, regardless if you >choose to use the rating or not, the exact channel you are watching will be >tracked and logged. > >Have fun, This is a serious misstatement of the proposal! I am shocked, simply shocked. If Lucky only knew what I know... The logged information is only available to law enforcement if they have a legitimate need to know, as evidenced by a valid court order, an authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a request by a regional or local police department, or upon suspicion that a sex offender or pedophile is displaying too much interest in children's shows or "Baywatch." The "Library Awareness Program," administered by the Justice Department, is designed to identify potential criminals before they have a chance to commit their deeds. The visits to libraries made by the FBI are used to determine who is reading subversive or dangerous material. According to Director Freeh, "If we had had this program in place when Timothy McVeigh was a child, we could have detected his interest in ANFO and picked him up for reeducation, or at least recruited him for the CIA's Lockerbie team." Finally, I am confidant the the viewing habits "escrowed" with the government will only be used for good purposes. The policeman is our friend. --Klaus! Boycott espionage-enabled software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

4 3

Re: Downsizing the NSA
by jf_avon＠citenet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timothy C. May wrote: >AT&T is downsizing, IBM downsized a while back, so why couldn't the NSA >just do the right thing: admit that the Soviet threat is no more, >congratulate the victors, and downsize by 20,000 employees? Your post is very interesting. I would like to add to it in the form of a question: Q) What are the factors, in what context did AT&T and IBM and many other big companies downsize? Or, in other words: What are the ultimate contextual causes of the downsizing? Regards to Cypherpunks from a new guy on the mailing list. JFA

1 0

Re: "German service cuts Net access" (to Santa Cruz)
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 1:47 AM 01/29/96, Felix Lee wrote: >> Are you saying that, if I ran a bookstore, and accepted international >> mail orders, I would have to screen every order to ensure I did not >> ship something offensive to the German government? > >urrr. yes? anyone doing international shipping has to comply with >customs regulations anyway. this isn't really any different. (except >when telecom or broadcast media become involved.) > >(excuse me while I see if I can ship smallpox to germany.) >-- If you violate customs regulations on the receiving end, all that's going to happen is the book you sent gets confiscated. Which is only bad for the receiving party (in Germany), since you already have the money, which is fine since it's reasonable to expect the receiving party in Germany to know German customs regulations. You, as shipper, certainly won't get extradicted to Germany from Denmark or anywhere else. Trying to ship smallpox to Germany might be another matter, of course.

1 0

Re: "German service cuts Net access" (to Santa Cruz)
by jf_avon＠citenet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Well, here is a very costly but ultimate answer: Cancel all business you have with germany and let them know the reason. This will speak much more louder than any civil liberty protest. The feodal view of most europe makes any appeal to liberty futile. JFA

1 0

Ernst Zundel impersonator on Usenet
by Declan B. McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Ernst Zundel is the holocaust revisionist who sparked the Wiesenthal Center's attempts at censorship, and the latest move by the German government. Now an AOL alias, "ernstzundl(a)aol.com", is being used in the course of an impressive trolling spree on Usenet newsgroups including aus.flame, alt.skinheads, alt.mindcontrol, and soc.culture.jewish. Some excerpts from posts to soc.culture.jewish: Prior to 1904, there *were* no black people. But they invented the whole myth of Africa, the slave trade, pyramids in Egypt, etc-- to serve their own ends. I know this because *I* have studied history. This is why I am the Revisionist Extraordinaire. I know obscure things about history that nobody except me knows. FOIL THE JEWISH PLOT!! POLUTE THE EARTH!! CONTAMINATE THE WATER!! DESTROY EVERY LIVING THING TO SAVE IT FROM THE JEWS!! AND THEN WAIT FOR THE MOTHER SHIP TO BRING US TO OUR HOME IN THE STARS! I found an interesting message with the help of Alta Vista. Posted by "ernstzundl(a)aol.com" to rec.scuba, it said: Does anyone know of any scuba clubs in or near Kingston, NY? Thanks! I'm not familiar with how AOL screen names work, but my guess is that the Kingston, NY resident impersonating Zundel forgot to switch back to his other screen name before posting. -Declan

1 0

Decrypting the "MIG Group"
by James M. Cobb 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Friend, A 01 29 96 Electronic Telegraph newsstory ----------------------------------------- Riddle of spooks in the White House BY AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD reports: Official logs kept by the US secret service...indicate that a top White House aide, Patsy Thomasson, met a team of secret service technicians at her office on the night of Mr Foster's death. Evans-Pritchard writes: ...logs kept by Secret Service staff at the White House --pub- lished in Senate documents on the death of Mr Foster-- show that a so-called "MIG Group" was checked into offices occupied by Miss Thomasson and her boss, David Watkins...at 7.10 pm on July 20, 1993. Miss Thomasson was the only member of the White House staff log- ged into the office at the time. She checked out at the same time as the "MIG Group" at 7.44 pm.... E-P inquired about MIG, but-- The press spokesman for the Secret Service at first said that he had not heard of the acronym "MIG". The next day he changed his account, saying that the "MIG Group" was a team of Secret Service technicians that had gone to Miss Thomasson's office that night to conduct a routine alarm check. He said he could not divulge what the acronym MIG stood for be- cause the unit was secret. However, Intelligence sources have told The Sunday Telegraph that "MIG" stands for "military intelligence group". MIG groups are typi- cally known as Technical Services Counter-Measure teams (TSCMs), highly classified units that handle high-tech counter-espionage. Their duties, for example, include sweeping for bugs at the White House. Sources say that the high-tech counter-espionage staff at the White House are controlled and operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, known as FEMA. This agency...has enormous power and can draw freely on the capabilities of the CIA, the FBI, and the Pentagon. E-P concludes: ...[The logs] add to the growing weight of evidence that a tiny group at the White House was tipped off early about Foster's death, long before the official notification at 8.30 pm. It would have provided a window of at least an hour to cover things up before anybody was alerted. If so, America is facing a White House scandal that is every bit as serious and nasty as Watergate. The Electronic Telegraph can be accessed at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk The newsstory is under World News. Its online filename is wamby- 27.html. Cordially, Jim

2 1

Re: "Concryption" Prior Art
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>However the Con-cryption patent covers first compressing, then >>encrypting. > >Isn't that how PGP does its thing (first compress the data and then feed it >into the Encryption Stage)? PGP is prior art in-and-of-itself. Peter Wayner posted that the "new" thing about the way they do it is that it saves time by combining the steps. But I think I've seen approximately the same done with arithmetic-coding compression? #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 # # "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" used to mean us watching # the government, not the other way around....

2 1

Re: CP LITE: A Censorship Device?
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:54 AM 1/28/96 -0600, you wrote: >I've been watching this CP Lite thing develop. > >Sounds like an attempt to moderate the list. >I mean it's easy to post out of it, >but hard to answer to it. >And all of the good back and forth discussion >gets lost in a backwash of private email. The default behaviour of Eudora seems to work reasonably well for replying to these. Reply pops up a message with To: John Doe #2 <jdoe-2(a)alpha.c2.org> From: My Name <me(a)here.com> Subject: Re: whatever Cc: At 03:54 AM 1/28/96 -0600, you wrote: > WHATEVER IT WAS and you can just fill in cypherpunks(a)toad.com as the Cc:. Your mailer may vary, but it's probably got a similar capability. The main problem I have is the "you wrote" as opposed to "John Doe <jdoe-2(a)alpha.c2.org> wrote", which is more like what you want for mailing lists, but that can be copy&pasted or ignored. The person you're replying to usually gets two copies, but that's minor. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 # # "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" used to mean us watching # the government, not the other way around....

1 0

Re: Denning's misleading statements
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:54 PM 1/28/96 -0500, perry(a)piermont.com wrote: >Well, not really. Silvio Micali did some work on this topic. Er, yes - Micali's term "fair cryptosystem" outranks even "key escrow" on my outragious pro-government toadyism bogometer ..... #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs

1 0

Re: Denning's misleading statements
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:12 PM 1/28/96 -0500, Ben Samman. wrote: >There's quite a few folks in the Yale CS department that are pro-Clipper >or fence sitters. They justify it in class by claiming that law >enforcement needs these abilities if LE is to remain effective. They're quite correct - it's a problem of values and goals, and theirs differ from mine. IF law enforcement is to be effective (at those things it's effective at, like self-preservation and politician-electing), then it WILL need this increase in power. Because otherwise we WILL move to crypto-anarchy. I hope we will anyway, and perhaps the tackiness of the Clipper forces will encourage the general public to get there faster rather than slower. BTW, the reason Swiss banking laws were so strong for so many years was because the Nazis were pressuring bankers to give out information on their Jewish customers... #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs

1 0