December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: V-chips, CC, and Motorcycle Helmets
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"jimbell(a)pacifier.com" "jim bell" 14-FEB-1996 05:12:52.66 >At 07:36 PM 2/13/96 -0800, Bill Frantz wrote: >>At 8:15 PM 2/13/96 -0500, Declan B. McCullagh wrote: >Actually, I think the primary targets will be either the middle level >manager types, or the ones who have attracted a substantial amount of bad >publicity by "following orders." Lon Horiuchi (the sniper who shot Vicki >Weaver) for example, would be a excellent example of a person who'd try to >claim, "I was just following orders." Okay, maybe he was, but so was Adolph >Eichmann. >Once the tax collectors/enforcers were targeted, the rest of the government >wouldn't be able to operate, and would collapse. One difficulty in this is that the middle managers - the most vital ones in the long run - are also the ones that can best protect themselves using the net and various cypherpunks techniques - partial (not to their superiors) anonymnity with persistent, verifiable pseudonyms. If they don't directly deal with the public, they're kind of hard to target. >>If, after a couple of the Waco people had been hit, I was given the >>responsibility to protect them I would proceed as follews: >> >>(1) Gather them and their families onto some Army base and step up the >>patrols. Now I have them safe. >And, of course, you've just ruined their lives. Think about it. By doing >this, it is made absolutely, completely, and abundantly clear to them that >THEY are considered "the enemy" and that their lives are forever put at >risk. Previously, government employees could hold their heads up high and >be proud of their "public service." Now, if they're discovered, they have >to disappear. Does this treatment sound familiar? Their job description >and circumstances will more closely resemble that of a Mafia enforcer than a >proud public servant. They'll have to teach their children to lie about >what their parent does, rather than risk getting exposed. You have an interesting point about motivations and the likely psychological effects. Given the headaches that counterintelligence goes through in wars - nobody wants to shut up - such secrecy would be difficult. >Who, exactly, would want to work for the government under such >circumstances? Remember, we're not just talking about a tiny fraction of >their number; if the most egregious ones were hidden the ones that were less >secure would be killed in their place. Would they? You appear to be assuming that with less targets available, people will start being less selective. You may be correct. >>(3) Make sure that the names/faces of the cannon fodder in future actions >>are not available to make it harder to target the guilty. >Then they'll target the "names," the ones who show their faces. See how this >works? If the only way you can maintain the government is to keep them all >absolutely anonymous, then that government has FAILED. Has it? Currently, we've got the guys who deal with the public (the politicians and the low-level bureaucrats) and the faceless drones (the rest of the bureaucrats). The politicians can be protected, and already are to some degree. The low-level bureaucrats aren't _that_ likely to be targeted by enough people to make a difference, and the ones who go bad enough to do so can be protected (or sacrificed, if that seems to be the way to keep the public happy). The faceless drones can be even more faceless, and so very hard to target. >Furthermore, this system's anonymity allows disgruntled public employees the >chance to collect money by "turning in" their bosses to the public's ire; if >the personnel list for the government is nominally a secret, it will "leak" >eventually and those on the list will be followed, confirmed, and targeted. That's an interesting point. I can see some sort of Blacknet-variety system developing to distribute information and get paid for it, even if the employee in question doesn't want to do the hit themselves, although the payment part could be a problem. Even with the partial anonymnity protections I mention above, _somebody_ will know who the person who ordered another Ruby Ridge is - I doubt a government could operate with full internal anonymnity. -Allen

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Re: Assasination Politics
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"jimbell(a)pacifier.com" "jim bell" 13-FEB-1996 14:53:40.39 >From: Me >> A. My previously mentioned problem with a limited but non-libertarian >>organization. >I don't deny that such an organization might spring up. (Anti-abortion >activists are the group which come most immediately to my mind, BTW. I'm >not in sympathy with them; quite the opposite.) I've never claimed that >this system is totally immune to such abuse, in the same way that the seller >of a gun can certify that it will never be used to commit a crime. I understand and agree with the gun argument. However, it's still a matter of whether Assasination Politics will overall be better or worse than the current system. If better, then I'll support it if it becomes necessary (I still hope for peaceful (or at least relatively peaceful) change - hopefully, it has not become necessary for the Declaration of Independence's justification of revolution to be reused). If worse, I won't. I won't try to stop you from doing so, however (currently, there's no way that I could, for instance). Incidentally, by "support" I am meaning making suggestions for technical improvements. Admittedly, the degree to which I can do so is limited by my lack of technical knowledge, but I believe I have thought of some workable refinements. As well as the obvious problem of unethical assasinations, there is also that of a negative reputation being given to various cypherpunk-liked ideas (anonymous remailers, fully anonymous digital cash, etcetera) if someone notices this. >> B. I don't trust the average person to look ahead enough to make this >>(or other Anarcho-Capitalist) schemes work. >Fortunately, "Assassination Politics" will achieve this "crypto anarchy" >even if only a tiny fraction of the population participate and use it. The >reason is that the number of decision-maker government employees is >comparatively small and most will resign before being "terminated." (with >extreme prejudice.) The total cost to bring down the US government will >probably be substantially less than $100 million. >> In other words, the average person >>has to be able to see that a non-limited organization is a danger to them, >>etcetera. >I realize that this takes a bit of thinking to recognize. I've thought >about this whole thing for nearly a year, now, and it is still a fascinating >and yet a bit terrifying subject. >> Moreover, Jim Bell is ignoring the other sources of propaganda than >>government in convincing the average person that someone is doing something >>wrong (when, by my ethics at least, they aren't) - such as religion and >>various organizations like the PFDA. >Again, only a tiny fraction of the population needs to participate... However, if more of the population participates, they may do stupid things like using an organization that might strike at them - just as they currently support a government that can crack down on them. The minority of intelligent people - the tiny fraction needed for this to potentially work - isn't a factor for this part. In other words, I'm more worried about too _many_ people - the wrong people - participating rather than too few. >> Admittedly, as I've stated before, the >>requirement for some money would help, at least to the degree that our >>economy is meritocratic. (A growing tendency, fortunately.) If most people >>are on a subsistence wage (the result of free trade & automation with >>varying human abilities), they can't afford enough money for Assasination >>Politics. (Yes, I'm an intellectual Elitist. Deal with it.) >Since "Assassination Politics" is based on a combined-donation system, even >people on a subsistence wage could contribute; a quarter here, a dollar >there, pretty soon it turns into real money. That is an argument against it. Do you want the people who give to televangelists being able to more directly have people killed than in the current system (when at least you've got votes by others to take care of the problem)? Unfortunately, the same system of ethics that would make one's targets the right ones also excludes the targets (non-governmental figures) that can create the problems under this system - like the PFDA leaders. >I understand your concern. I wish there was some simple argument I could >give which would assuage your fears. However, I look at it this way: The >Federal government (and all other governments, around the world) are >curently parasites on the rest of the population. Now "parasite theory" is >that the parasite has some sort of optimum "parasite level" above which he >cannot go. Once the cost for such parasitism is removed, there will be an >economic boom for those "hosts" of the parasite. Naturally, the parasite >will be in trouble, but that's only justice. Yes, there would be an economic boom under Anarcho-Capitalism - but for whom? All the population, or just the intellectual Elite? Now, so long as the masses (the non-Elite) have at least enough to survive - a subsistence wage - I wouldn't call this a problem. (Liberals should see Mickey Kaus' _The End of Equality_ for some liberal arguments to this effect). It's when you go below that that it's an ethical problem, at least under my ethical system. (Incidentally, a similar argument can be made about some other issues, such as campaign finance reform. Equality before the law means equality before the judiciary, not equality before the legislature or the executive. Otherwise, how could one have media that weren't government-controlled?) -Allen

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Re: Switchboard
by Rich Graves 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:05 PM 3/6/96 -0800, Steven Weller wrote: >Check out www.switchboard.com. From the blurb: > >find people [...] > find > businesses [..] They forgot "Change the entry for any person or business in the US from a throwaway AOL trial account, or using an anonymous web proxy and pseudonymous remailer." Hope this helps. >Is this the same data that was supposed to go on that Lotus CD-ROM? Is this >publicly available info? It's from the Database America CD-ROM, which is one of the cheaper and less complete ones. It's all publicly available information, or was. There are probably tens of thousands of numbers that have been changed or unlisted recently. Unlike the original CD-ROM, Switchboard does not provide a (easy) way to build large mailing lists or do reverse address lookups (like "who lives at this address on Pennsylvannia Avenue" or "who might be on vacation in a building with line of sight to this place"). -rich

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Re: Paint Your Own Scarlet Letter (Was: Edited Edupage, 29 Feb 1996)
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"frantz(a)netcom.com" 1-MAR-1996 21:54:54.53 >From SafeSurf Rating Page via lmccarth(a)cs.umass.edu wrote: >>Thank you for making the Internet a safer place without censorship. >>Until later, SafeSurfing to you! Incidentally, the strategy of simply rating one's page all 9's, if one is required through some means of rating it at all, has the distinct advantage of making any system using such filters more annoying to use. (One would, of course, except any page making a political statement or other material that one wanted to get out to as wide a number of people as possible). >(I think I want to start a web search engine looking for pages rated >SS~~002 9, SS~~004 9, SS~~005 <5, and all the others don't care.) A configurable search engine on this basis could be very nice. -Allen

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Re: Remailers not heard from; info?
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"tcmay(a)got.net" 20-FEB-1996 09:24:11.00 >(There are wrinkles that work, such as adding a subject line based on stuff >stored inside the encrypted block a remailer opens for furhter processing. >The nth remailer can add a suject line that may be different for every hop, >or only added near or at the end of the remailings...) Adding a new subject line for each hop has the advantage that one can't pick out messages to examine (for use in traffic analysis) simply because they don't have subject lines. (I realize that lots of messages go through without subject lines; one could, however, use such a filter as the initial thing to look at before one checks whether a message appears to be something encrypted. Steaography won't work to conceal such because of the multiple encryption, unless the remailer combined decryption with steaography extraction and later "packing". One problem with the latter solution, which does have its points, would be the need for lots of different things with which to use steaography. Otherwise, you could track remailers by that they kept sending out almost exactly the same file over and over again; using the same one as was sent in would be a variety of "barium-tagging". Hmm... you could have a setup that added the message's steaographic concealment to the end of a "stack", and picked up the new image/sound/whatever off of the start of the "stack." Could be a bit expensive in disk space, though. -Allen

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FCC Sets Comment Date for Internet Phone Call Rulemaking (fwd)
by Henry Huang 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

------- Start of forwarded message ------- Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 15:33:21 -0600 Errors-To: borton(a)macc.wisc.edu Reply-To: telecomreg(a)relay.doit.wisc.edu Originator: telecomreg(a)relay.doit.wisc.edu Sender: telecomreg(a)relay.doit.wisc.edu Precedence: bulk From: "Neal J. Friedman" <njf(a)commlaw.com> To: Multiple recipients of list <telecomreg(a)relay.doit.wisc.edu> Subject: FCC Sets Comment Date for Internet Phone Call Rulemaking X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0b -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas X-Comment: Requests (UNSUBSCRIBE/HELP) to: listserver(a)relay.doit.wisc.edu X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.4b11 (32) The FCC has acted with astonishing speed in setting a date for comments on the ACTA petition to regulate telephone calls via the Internet. It is not uncommon for rule making petitions to sit for weeks, months, even years without action. ACTA filed its petition on March 6th and two days later the FCC issued a Public Notice seeking comment. The deadline for comments is April 8, 1996 with reply comments due 15 days later. After reviewing the comments, the FCC will either terminate the proceeding without further action or issue a Notice of Proposed Rule Making seeking further comments on a proposed rule. Time is of the essence for those who may be interested in opposing the Notice. Our law firm would be available to represent parties who may wish to file joint comments in opposition. Please contact me privately if you have any interest. _____________________________________________________________ |Neal J. Friedman | Pepper & Corazzini, LLP |Voice: | | njf(a)commlaw.com | 1776 K Street, N.W. | 202-296-0600| |Telecommunications| Suite 200 |Fax: | |& Information Law | Washington, D.C. 20006 | 202-296-5572| | | | Web Server: http://www.commlaw.com/ | |____________________________________________________________| ------- End of forwarded message -------

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Re: Vexatious Litigants (was: SurfWatch)
by Martin Janzen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Martin Diehl" <mdiehl(a)dttus.com> wrote: >Henry Huang <hwh6k(a)fulton.seas.virginia.edu> at INTERNET-USA wrote: >> The question I have is if these systems were widely implemented, could >> an Web page author or provider of content be sued for "mislabeling" >> their page? If so, under what circumstances? Could the RSAC attach >> legal requirements to the use of their system, and open up such a >> loophole (similar to how Sun attaches conditions to the use of its >> "Java" logo)? > > Seems to me that if the Web page author labels his page > conservatively, i. e. "materials may be unsuitable for non-adults; may > contain controversial material, may contain views different from your > own, etc.". How can the author be liable for mislabeling? I read Henry's question to refer to the case in which the Web page author rates a page "too low"; that is, in such a way that despite the use of RSAC/SurfWatch/etc. software, "undesirable" material gets through the filter. Suppose that an author provides a page which lists, say, clothing- optional beaches, complete with pictures. The author rates it as "suitable for family viewing" -- either naively, believing that no one will be offended; or deliberately, to make the point that the content is harmless and _should_ be considered suitable for family viewing; or simply in order to widen the potential audience. Henry's question (as I interpret it) is this: If prudish parents now catch their kid looking at a page with pictures of barenaked people, figure out why the page wasn't filtered out, and file suit against the author, what is likely to happen? ObCrypto, sort of: What if the page were retrieved through an HTTP proxy which, unbeknownst to the author (and the filtering service/SW), deliberately removes or alters the PICS-Label or other rating information? The author did, after all, _provide_ the "undesirable" material.... To what extent does the author's intent matter? Must Web authors now add a digital signature to each page (including its rating info), to prevent tampering? -- Martin Janzen janzen(a)idacom.hp.com ObRant: Or, before it comes to that, will people learn to take just the tiniest shred of [Exon]ing responsibility for themselves and their [Exon]ing kids?

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Artist self censorship (Was Chinese net-censorship) Noise
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Excerpts from internet.cypherpunks: 8-Mar-96 Re: U.S. State Dept critici.. by JFA T. QC, Canada@citene & later Declan B. McCullagh. >> There is no such thing as "self-censorship". Either you stick to >> your values, and then it is *not* censorship, or then you do not, >> and then, it is neither. >Self-censorship does happen, and it's a growing problem in the arts >community. (I'm not a commercial artist, so this is my understanding >from other panelists and speakers at a conference I spoke at last month.) >Making art more palatable or less "extreme" to curry favor with >corporate patrons, or to get that NEA grant, or to get that faculty >position is self-censorship, and it does happen. There is a photographer by the name of Jock Sturgis who is famous for his photographs of naturalists and their children on the beaches of California and France. Sturgis' home was raided by the FBI and all of his photographs, equipment, & records were seized under suspicion of producing child pornography The photo equipment, records, and photographs were returned but not after making Sturgis' life a living hell... Sturgis' work which has critical acclaim throughout art circles and has published two books profiling naturalists, has been quoted to saying that before taking a picture he usually asks himself about how this picture is percived, something the he never thought twice before the FBI raid. Mr. Avon should think twice before commenting on self censorship does not exist, for that could be the difference from having the door kicked in by the black ninja turtles with the FBI or toning down your work. --

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Re: [ Death of MOSS? ]
by Housley, Russ 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jim: >> And if you look at what I've said previously, it is my firm belief >>that if we are to succeed in giving users a truly interoperable secure >>email standard, then said standard must be fully and completely >>integrated into MIME and do everything it does in the proper MIME way, >>as opposed to just being security grafted on. > >Allow me to make a contentious statement: > > MOSS is the only secure email protocol integrated with MIME. > >You see, integrated to me means that the base is security aware. MIME is >only security aware when the security multiparts are used. In all other >cases, MIME is not security aware. > >The use of the application content-type with experimentally defined >subtypes gives the appearance of MIME being security aware, but it >provides nothing more than a mechanism for carrying a protected object. >In addition, the fact that the security service itself must do a callback >in order to support recursive services, unlike MOSS which uses the >security multiparts framework and thus lets MIME do all the work it was >designed to do, further supports my position. Jim, in what way does the end user distinguish between the MOSS-like integration and the S/MIME-and-MSP-like integration? It seems to me that a good user agent implementation provides the same services to the user. Russ

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Re: Switchboard
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:27 AM 3/7/96, Bill Frantz wrote: > I checked them out and the couldn't find my record. Since I have a listed > telephone number, I can only assume that their records do not include GTE > local service records or some other equally huge gap. I was messing around with this a year and a half ago (woulda shoulda coulda), and my guess is they're using Reuben Donnelly's database. They're the largest phonebook printer, and they even go so far as to OCR a lot, but apparently not all, of their competition. They say 90 million names, and that seems to be the number I was quoted... Cheers, Bob ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/

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