December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: "Contempt" charges likely to increase
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I think Tim has hit the nail right on the head with this one. I have been quite appalled to read the various analyses on the net (URLs not handy, but they have been posted here before I think) which conclude that compelled disclosure of a cryptographic pass phrase would probably be OK despite the Fifth Amendment. This seems to be an area where there is widespread agreement based on recent precedent. In the past, when crypto was not widely used, the issue didn't really come up very often. If a criminal chose to write incriminating information diary or financial ledger, and it could be found in a search, then it was used as evidence against him. At one time not even this was accepted but it has been this way for many decades. But crypto, if it becomes widely and routinely used, raises the bizarre spectacle of criminals commonly being forced to produce information which will then be used against them! Imagine if they'd found a file by OJ on his computer, encrypted, which he refused to decrypt. The judge could actually jail him for contempt until he revealed the password. This could become a routine occurance in many kinds of crimes which rely on private records as evidence. Currently, I don't think the subpoena power is widely used in criminal cases. Rather, the prosecution relies on search warrants and the element of surprise to prevent the destruction of incriminating records. I think there is recognition that in practice subpoenas would not be effective, that the records would not be produced, even if contempt charges were the result. If so, then probably the tactic will not be that effective in forcing people to reveal cryptographic keys. Maybe if the jails start filling up with defendants who refuse to go along with such order, judges will decide that effective secrecy of records is now the new status quo. The law will then once again extend the Fifth Amendment privileges to personal papers. Hal

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Re: Fascinating troll with forged newgroups
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Bill Stewart wrote: >At 03:00 AM 4/4/96 -0800, you wrote: >>Looks like the Nazis forged newgroup messages for rec.fag-bashing, >>rec.org.kkk, and 100 RFD'd groups in order to get their little messages >>across. >> >>How entertaining. What a marvelous new form of net.vandalism they've >>discovered. Or is this not new? > >Oh, no, this sort of thing is not new. It happened more before the >Great Renaming, but it's not new. The other possibility is it's troll >trying to make it _look_ like the Nazis did it. The latter is most likely the truth given that Bnai Brith and the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal centre all have plenty to gain financially by claiming that the internet is full of neo-nazis.

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Re: More visprint stuff
by JonWienke＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>An alternative would be to supply a distinct name for each octet. Hashes >could >be displayed and verified something like: > >Frog Lizard Snake Tyranosaur >Cat Hat Rat Chair >Star Moon Sun Earth >Lincoln Washington Clinton Kennedy > >Ideally, there would be minimal confusion in the set of images/objects/names >(to avoid the "is that a Tyranosaur or a Lizard?" type questions.) Why not create a list of of syllables (256 would work nicely) designed in such a way that when combined together at random, they would always form a pronounceable (but otherwise nonsense) word pair? These words would be guaranteed to be as unique as the fingerprint, fairly easy to remember, and a perfect icebreaker at parties. (Imagine the reaction you would get if you sidled up to someone and tried "SOBgoFALpinHOGmiDOwop PORtudeINfoGLOPsabRIvar" as a pickup line.) The challenge to this approach, of course, is to come up with 256 reasonably distinct syllables. Jonathan Wienke P.S. AOL's send mail software is a wothless piece of ****. P.P.S. These "unsubrscive" pea-brains all need one of those Louis Freeh-style leather belts with their names embossed on the back in BIG letters...

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Re: "Contempt" charges likely to increase
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 9:26 PM 4/5/96, Bill Frantz wrote: >At 11:57 AM 4/5/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote: > >>If the secrets or assets _cannot_ be retrieved--a scenario which is >>possible, if the protocol is so written (clauses for court action)--then >>contempt charges are meaningless and would not stand, IMNALO. > >The Black Unicorn indicates that if the reason the secrets _cannot_ be >retrieved is because they are in a jurisdiction which refuses to reveal >them when the owner is under compulsion, the owner can still be punished >for contempt (A contractual situation). Far be it from me to question the legal advice BU/Uni/Dirsec provides, but I think all contempt charges have a kind of eventual expiration. That is, after some number of months or years have passed and it becomes apparent the incarcerated person simply will not or cannot comply, release is ordered. It has happened in most cases of reporters, and it happened with Rebecca Morgan (who never did tell the court where her daughter was, though it later came out that her daughter was probably in Australia with grandparents). Jail term for contempt of court has certain resemblances to trial by ordeal: if after some period of time of ordeal one has not talked, the ordeal is over. If the court is shown that the protocol makes it impossible for the person to retrieve the material, especially that there are no ways to circumvent the contract, then the court may still jail the person for a while "just to make sure" that there is no means of circumventing it. If and when it becomes apparent to even the most skeptical that the material has been lost, or is unretrievable, then I think the contempt jailing must end. When nothing is served by furhter jailing, except punishment, then the reason for the contempt action is ended. Or so it seems to me, from what I've osmosed about the law. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" 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."

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Wired didn't like this one....
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Sender: e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com Reply-To: rah(a)shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga) Mime-Version: 1.0 From: rah(a)shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga) Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 21:21:19 -0500 Precedence: Bulk To: Multiple recipients of <e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com> Subject: Wired didn't like this one.... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- ...but I like it. Said it was a little too "fast paced". (For WIRED???) I'm starting over on another, so you guys might as well see this one... It *was* supposed to go into their Idees Fortes (Or, as my brother Mike in Albuqerque says, in his best Jose Jimenez, "Stron' Gideas") section. Now something else is, once I write it. Feh! It's 800 words. Exactly. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ------------------------ Geodesic Capital? Robert Hettinga I've just finished a bit of anonymous consulting on the net for an anonymous client, being paid, of course, in anonymous digital ecash(tm). I could just store it, offsite even, anonymously. But, I'm saving it for that special retirement habitat in the Belt ("Gerry's Habitats, Inc.: Pie in the sky, Nano-Built(tm) *before* you die!"). I have to *invest* it somewhere. I buy a page of mutual fund reccomendations from a LipperBot(tm). In my case, I just want to buy a broad market index, say, the (ahem) Hettinga Million(tm), and shop around for the fund server which approximates closest the HM's price over time. I link to the server, and buy anonymous bearer certificates for that server's HM fund. Later, when I cash in my certificates, I have enough appreciated capital to buy the custom Bernal sphere of my dreams. Of course, if my tolerence for risk is higher, I could buy shares from a fund manager (bot or otherwise, no way to tell with anonymous cash markets) with a hot hand for picking stocks. OK. Say I don't actually *save* money. I'm someone who borrows money for very short term "assets" like resturaunt meals, and pays the incurred debt off over the long term at some userous interest rate. How do I do this? I issue a personal digital bearer bond for the amount of the transaction. All I need is someone to underwrite the risk. Fortunately, I always have an efficient real-time market to auction it into, one that always knows my payment reputation, thanks to all those money-bots in the ubiquitous network. Voila'! Bring on the chateaubriand for one, waiter, and don't spare the bearnaise, all this thinking about money's made me hungry. What we're talking about here is nothing new, of course. We've had trade ever since we've had artifacts. The ancient "red-paint" culture was just a trading network which ran around the north Atlantic from New England to as far as Ireland. So much for the "New" World. The oldest surviving Babylonian money is a piece of clay saying "three cows" wrapped in a clay "envelope" saying something like "three cows, payable on demand, so say I, (signed) Joe Nebbuchenazzar". This happened shortly after writing was invented, which was actually invented for *accounting*. Mechanical signatures like chops and seals have been around since. Digital signatures and bearer certificates are just a new implementation of some *very* old stuff. Ornate paper certificates, representing shares in companies, or actual stuff, was physically traded for other ornate paper certificates (cash), or actual stuff, at places like the famous buttonwood tree on Wall Street. Pretty soon people didn't have to be there to trade. We built fast industrial communications (staged horsemen or coaches, then ships or trains, then telegraphy, then telephony) but we still had slow switches (people), so we had to build all the communication/organization/market hierarchies we know and love today. In addition, the power of the state (another industrial communication heirarchy) provides a sizable argumentum ad bacculum for people who repudiate trades. If you don't pay, I throw you in jail. Like every thing else, Moore's law changes that. Proportionately, semiconductor switches get more and more cheaper than lines, so the telephone network is no longer a hierarchy. Nodding to Buckminster Fuller, Peter Huber called it the "Geodesic Network", the title of the 1986 government report he wrote describing it. Ironic. I'm here saying this in a magazine founded by deciples of Stwart Brand, himself a one-time Fullerite. All threads lead to Bucky. When you combine a geodesic network with strong cryptography, you get a geodesic economy, which needs geodesic capital. Just change the size of players in either equity or debt scenario, and you're looking at what any large business organization does today. The only thing you're missing is how to deal with non-repudiation. If the state can't tax transactions or financial assets because strong crypto makes them all invisible, states can't exist, much less "bacculize" very well. The solution is the same it ever was: reputation. J. Pierpont Morgan said, when hauled before Congress one afternoon, "Character, sir. I wouldn't buy anything from a man with no character, even if he offered me all the bonds in Christendom." In a geodesic economy, reputation is abstracted to keys, not people. Geodesic capital scales up to bigger stuff than we can do now. A chaotic hoarde of autonomous money-bots swarms on the minutia of the necessary financial complexity. It also scales *down* as processor prices fall. Real time, MicroMint(tm) cash-on-the-router-head auctions for packet switching, anyone? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMWR/ovgyLN8bw6ZVAQHCkQP7BPmSNibfRQLeZETvRkUVGJdPB0WOYrTM yU33wwqDPBEcwfYLgX4oBcAfHv/Kfvr1vH4bBTioEVyanVDtJLt9KL/62kn+Ot+/ BLDdBM6Km1R/xRD9xnvQd5Kyz2INQCmNU7ZJk3BQpK484V74aW6We155fH2ovjr3 TgQ6mYMe7rs= =GVNA -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -------------------------------------------------- The e$ lists are brought to you by: Making Commerce Convenient (tm) - Oki Advanced Products - Marlboro, MA Value-Checker(tm) smart card reader= http://www.oki.com/products/vc.html Where people, networks and money come together: Consult Hyperion http://www.hyperion.co.uk info(a)hyperion.co.uk See your name here. Be a charter sponsor for e$pam, e$, and Ne$ws! See http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/ or e-mail rah(a)shipwright.com for details... ------------------------------------------------- --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 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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RIC_odj
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

4-5-96. TWP: "At the Justice Dept., Big Government Keeps Getting Bigger" In the tug-of-war over downsizing the government, Republicans and Democrats still willingly take out the checkbook when crime is the issue. Over the past 16 years, a time in which both parties have controlled Congress, Justice's budget has grown by nearly 600 percent and its work force has expanded from about 55,000 employees to 94,000. Justice is only one part of this phenomenal crime- fighting growth. Where the federal government once relied mostly on the FBI, the federal buildup is creating several large police agencies. More than 41,000 criminal investigators now work for 32 federal agencies. "It has grown like Topsy," says former AG Griffin B. Bell. "What I worry about is that people with a badge many times can't manage power." Senior members of Congress with oversight responsibility for DoJ say they are considering ways to consolidate the government's law enforcement agencies under a more centralized command. Among the models under review are the JCS, which aerosols DoD hogstench, and the DCI, who perfumes spy pew. RIC_odj

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Was Cohen the first?
by Michael Wilson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I ran across the following article, and it set me to wondering--did Dr. Cohen actually publish on 'computer viruses' before anybody else? He continues to use it as the bedrock of his reputation capital, so if this pre-dates his 'seminal' article, please let me know. Included message: For Liz Bass or Reg Gale Discovery 9:31 AM Friday, April 5, 1996 By Lou Dolinar This is still my favorite computer story. I'm not saying it was the first piece ever written about computer viruses, but I won't say that it isn't. I still have the original, dated April 16, 1985. In some ways I wish I hadn't written it, because it was posted and reposted on bulltetin boards all over the U.S., and seems to have subsequently inspired a whole generation of virus writers. Note to kids: back then, most computers didn't have hard disks, and started up from floppies, hence floppy based viruses were a big deal. As usual, The Hacker wasn't paying for his midnight phone call; he had stolen the line from one of the long distance phone services. What's up? I asked. The 17-year-old snickered. Doom was ahead for all Apple II owners. "Don't engage in casual disk-copying with strangers," he said. "You might catch an operating-system virus." Now the hacker has a pretty hefty national rep in the computer underground, so when he talks about this crazy stuff, it's worth listening. I've seen whole collections of pirated games software bearing his nom de hack, and his black-bag jobs on mainframes would curl your hair. In case you're not familiar with software piracy, manufacturers build protection schemes into their programs to prevent people from making illegal copies and siphoning their profits. Dedicated pirates like my friend spend hours, sometimes days, cracking these schemes then release them, illegally, free, to the public over a network of electronic bulletin boards that can be reached with a phone, a computer and a modem. The Hacker always imprinted his name, electronically, on the game that he cracked ("Cracked by The Hacker, July 4, 1978"). And therein lies this tale. A couple of years back, he recalled, some teenagers in the Milwaukee area stole his stolen programs and released them under their own names. Why bother, you ask? Because the hacker whose name the stolen program bears receives the "credit" for having cracked the piracy protected program and, thus, is viewed with some degree of appreciation by similarly larcenous wizards in the computer underground. The Hacker was outraged and plotted a diabolical revenge: A wizard of code, he constructed ted what he calls an "operating system virus" for the Apple II computer. The operating system, you may know, loads into the computer before the program and controls the functions of the computer. The Hacker modified the operating system erase whatever disks were in the computer after they had been used 25 times. Not only that, but the "virus" would attache itself to any other discs that were loaded during the particular session of computer use. Thus,k if you played a "virus" carrying pirated game, and then went on to use your $495 word processor and $795 data-base program, these too would be infected and would cash after their 25th use--and in the meantime, they would be spreading the "virus." Like any disease, then, Killer-DOS, as The Hacker dubbed it, has a latency period, which allowed it to spread to other "victims" He inserted it into a recently cracked games program, put it on an electronic bulletin board frequented by the Minneapolis crowd, and sat back to watch the fun. A couple of months later, whole libraries of disks were begin wiped out as the "disease" spread. Now Killer-DOS is common knowledge in the underground, it it wasn't the reason The Hacker called. It seems he had, in a frenzy of anti-social behavior, created a particularly virulent form of Killer-DOS that didn't crash until it had been loaded 150 times---with a longer latency period, the potential number of victims rises geometrically. But conscience prevailed. The Hacker decided not to release the bug. Then, however, just like the Andromeda Strain, the bug got loose anyway--the Killer-DOS disk got mixed in with "healthy" programs, disks that he has been handing out for the last couple of years and are now all over the country. So if you find a worm in your Apple, don't say you haven't been warned.

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NSA Oil
by cpunk＠remail.ecafe.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

NYT, 5 April, 1996 Pentagon Spy Agency Bares Some Dusty Secret Papers By Tim Weiner Washington, April 4 -- The National Security Agency, the Pentagon spy service that eavesdrops on global communications, said today that it had declassified more than 1.3 million pages of secret documents, some from before World War I. All the declassified material is more than 50 years old, older than the agency itself, and represents a tiny fragment of the billions of pages of Government documents that have been kept secret on the grounds that their release would damage national security. Agency officials were at a loss to explain why these documents, now at the National Archives, had remained secret for so long. Among the documents declassified today is a January 1919 memorandum from CoL A. W. Bloor of the Army, a commander in the American Expeditionary Force in France, explaining the origin of the "code talkers," American Indian soldiers who spoke in their native tongues to confound enemy code breakers in World War I and World War II. Their languages were largely unwritten and largely unstudied by foreigners, and so constituted an instant code translatable only by the speakers. "The German was a past master at the art of 'Listening In,' " on radio transmissions, the memorandum says. "It was therefore necessary to code every message of importance and coding and decoding took valuable time." Then, Colonel Bloor wrote, he remembered that he had a company of Indians in his regiment who among them spoke 26 languages or dialects, and that "there was hardly a chance in a million" that the Germans could translate them. David Hatch, the National Security Agency's historian, said Choctaws, Navajos, Comanches, Winnebagos, Pawnees, Kiowas and Cherokees served as code talkers. In World War II, he said, the Marine Corps used more than 400 Navajos as communicators in the Pacific campaign. That story has been popularized by Hollywood films, documentaries and books. Mr. Hatch said he could not explain why the documents stayed secret for so long. The agency's archives run into the billions of pages, and the agency, loath to disclose anything concerning codes, has only begun to consider declassifying documents in the past four years. "We have so many pages and we've only been at it for a few years," Mr. Hatch said. "The interesting thing to me is that this is coming out. What was known only to insiders is now becoming known to historians and outsiders." ----- WSJ, 5 April, 1996 Secret Cables of '43 And the Hiss Case May I offer a distinction that may clarify a point in Eric Breindel's March 14 editorial-page piece "New Evidence in the Hiss Case?" The matter deals with the newly released Soviet cables dated from 1943 to the early Cold War, and intercepted and solved by the National Security Agency and its predecessors in a project called Venona. As Mr. Breindel states, "The single most interesting document in the new Venona batch is a March 30,1945, Washington-to-Moscow report on an agent whose cover name was 'Ales.' The cable was decrypted on Aug. 8, 1969, and the NSA glossary ... explains that 'Ales' is 'probably Alger Hiss.' " A distinction must be made between the test of the cables and the identification of the individuals mentioned in the text only by code name. The cables were cryptanalyzed. The internal cross-checks in this work make the likelihood of their being incorrectly solved all but zero. This means that the code names are almost certainly right. But the determination that a particular code name represents a particular individual did not come from cryptanalysis. It came from FBI field investigations. I have no reason to question their accuracy, but they stand on a different basis than codebreaking. This is why NSA qualified the Ales=Hiss identification with a "probably." David Kahn, Great Neck, N.Y. (Mr. Kahn was scholar in residence at the National Security Agency in 1995.) -----

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RC4 improvement idea
by Jack Mott 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I got a paper from the cryptography technical report server "http://www.itribe.net/CTRS/" about a weak class of RC4 keys. The report said that with some keys, it was possible to predict what some parts of the State-Box would be. I was thinking of a way to fix this, and had this idea: do some sort of hashing function with the key that derives a number between 55 and 500 or something like that, then scrabmle the S-box that many times. In this way, the chances that the State-Box will have any correlation becomes extremely small. I think it is 1/125 to begin with anyway, so this would make it around 1/(125*NumPasses). And since the exact number of passes is a function of the key, the cracker won't know how many times it went through. I tried this out and having 1000s of passes doesn't effect the randomness of the state-box in any negative way, possibly it makes it more random? If anyone has any thoughts I'd love to hear them. -- thecrow(a)iconn.net "It can't rain all the time"

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Re: Blue Water spooks
by nyap＠mailhub.garban.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Have the Chinese turned their thought towards cryptography, > or cryptanalysis yet? If so, I suspect the answer is > yes, If not, then the answer is a definate No. > > The Chinese Intelligence Service traditionally has > not looked outward, preferring to ply its trade domestically. > That said, the earliest extant text on espionage is Chinese. In addition, (if I remember correctly from _The Puzzle Palace_), a person who was heavily initially involved in the formation of NSA also helped establishing the Chinese Intelligence Service. Also from the same book, in the US has set up, with Chinese approval, a sigint shop within China. This was done to sigint the Russians. With the tensions between the US and China now, I'm not sure whether they closed shop or not.

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