December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

The National Research Council Study of National...
by CRYPTO 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Subject: The National Research Council Study of National Cryptography Policy (An incorrect web page/URL locator was posted in the previous message; apologies. If you found your way to the right page anyway and signed up for information, you don't need to do it again.) Please post this message widely I am writing to let interested parties know about the imminent release of the NRC's study of national cryptography policy. If all goes well, we hope to release it on May 30, 1996. However, prior to that time, we won't be able to comment on its contents. For current information on release, visit the web site http://www2.nas.edu/cstbweb/notifyme.html When you visit that site, you'll have the opportunity to be put onto a mailing list so that we can inform you by e-mail when the report is available in print and/or electronically, as well as any public events associated with the report (e.g., public briefings). Herb Lin Cryptography Policy Study Director Computer Science and Telecommunications Board National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council 202-334-2605

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The Political Map, (was Re: FTC online workshop on privacy)
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:14 AM 5/23/96 -0400, Shabbir J. Safdar wrote: >There's actually an interesting parallel here. If you look at the >Dworkin "ban pornography because speech is action" crowd, they often >end up on the same side of things as the Christian Coalition "ban porn >because it drives you to ungodly acts" crowd. They both happily support >legislation that would ban such images. The left and the right move so >far off the edges of the scales that they come around and meet each other >on the same side of the issue. This is because any analysis of political opinion that tries to reduce it to a one dimensional metric is ipso facto wrong. Two dimensions gives you a much better match. (Try personal freedom on one axis and economic freedom on the other.) I suspect the more dimensions you include, the better you analysis will be. Regards - Bill ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bill Frantz | The CDA means | Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting (408)356-8506 | lost jobs and | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | dead teenagers | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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Re: INFO: Transcript of Sen. Leahy's RealAudio chat now available! (5/22/96)
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:34 AM 5/23/96 -0400, Voters Telecommunications Watch wrote: > REALAUDIO TRANSCRIPTS OF LEAHY'S WIREDSIDE CHAT AVAILABLE > Date: May 22, 1996 > URL:http://www.crypto.com/ crypto-news(a)panix.com >NEWS >Rave reviews of Senator Leahy's appearance on HotWired's WiredSide chat >are coming already. With this appearance, the gentleman from Vermont >proves once again that he knows net.politics on a personal level, and >can understands the subtleties that we assume many in Congress are just >learning. Well, he must have learned it all in the last few months, because his bill was the closest thing to DOA that we've seen in a long time, exceeded only by GAK 3. I'd like to hear from him what the source of the text of the Leahy bill on encryption really was: Who pressured him to make it so bad? Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: The Crisis with Remailers
by Bruce Baugh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:30 PM 5/22/96 -0400, Joined Trill wrote: >On certain political newsgroups (perhaps most noticeably in the >soc.culture.* heirarchy) it's common to see someone's views refuted >because they are identified with a particular interest group. Now _there_ is a good point, well-known to the sort of people I'm concerned about presenting good advocacy to. Thanks! -- Bruce Baugh bruce(a)aracnet.com http://www.aracnet.com/~bruce

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Re: ecash representation
by Peter Trei 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> In my last article, I slightly screwed up. > > A signed 32 bit fixed point number, with two places of precision (less > than you need when calculating things like interest and what have you, > but lets be generous) has a maximum representation of even less than I > off the cuffed -- a mere 21,474,836.48. This is hardly sufficient for > accounting. However, floating point is even less useful. > > .pm Back in the mid-80's, I worked for several years at Irving Trust, a (now-gone) major money center bank. One of the financial messaging systems I worked with stored currency amounts as 96-bit vectors of a base unit (eg, a penny), and could have a 'binary point' anywhere in the vector. There were the usual math functions available to handle this data type. If you split the vector evenly between fractional and non-fractional parts, you could represent amounts up to $7E13 to an accuracy of about 3E-15 of a cent. The maximal amount that could be represented was about $2E28, and the highest precision about $1E-29 of a cent. This range and level of precision was judged adequate of most purposes :-). Peter Trei ptrei(a)acm.org "Did you know that there is a subunit of the Japanese yen?"

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Re: CLI_pr3
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:17 PM 5/23/96, John Young wrote: > 5-23-96. WaJo: > > "Chasing Criminals at Cyberspeed." .... > Says Stanley Morris, director of FinCEN, "The only way > we can adequately assist our federal law enforcement > counterparts in following the trail of the multinational > money launderer is through our linkages with > multilateral arrangements such as ... [Clipper 3]." Of course, this appears to be implying that _domestic_ data will be subject to Clipper 3 restrictions, else this statement is meaningless. So, will my stored-value cards that I "charge up" in California and carry in my wallet to Zurich be GAKked? If not, Morris's statement is meaningless. If so, domestic data is intended to be GAKked. (But we knew this, didn't we?) --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, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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National Journal article sez net-activism is just political hicks
by declan＠well.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 11:04:50 -0700 >From: jwarren(a)well.com (Jim Warren) >Subject: National Journal article sez net-activism is just political hicks >Sender: owner-fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu >Precedence: bulk >X-URL: http://fight-censorship.dementia.org/top/ > >Tommorrow, Washington's politically-powerful National Journal reportedly >will publish a know-nothing piece of "journalism" saying that net-aided >politics is essentially nothing but a batch of ineffective, know-nothing >nerds and back-water political hacks. > >Check it out on Friday or thereafter -- at www.politicsusa.com -- and >forward your *informed* comments to the NJ's Editor and Letters Editor. > >--jim > >On the other hand, maybe we ought to just continue escalating our political >effectiveness using the net, and let it come as a total shock to the >Beltway insiders who trust this piece of misinformed blather ... when we >provide more and more swing votes in contested elections -- as already >occured with DeFoley8 against ex-Speaker Tom Foley, VTW for now-Senator Ron >Wyden, me for now-available Calif legislative data, the gun BBS against >ex-Calif Senate Prez Pro Tem David Roberti, etc. :-) >

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Re: draft NIST key escrow paper
by Carl Ellison 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 16:38 -0400 5/21/96, Pat Farrell wrote: >http://www.isse.gmu.edu/~pfarrell/nist/kmi.html after sentence 1 of their introduction, people might want to re-read http://www.clark.net/pub/cme/html/civ-own-crypto.html "Government can no longer monopolize state of the art cryptography." It's about time they admitted that governments historically had no monopoly on state-of-the-art cryptography. > >Enjoy >Pat > >Pat Farrell grad student http://www.isse.gmu.edu/students/pfarrell >Infor. Systems and Software Engineering, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA >PGP key available via finger or request #include standard.disclaimer - Carl +------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Carl M. Ellison cme(a)acm.org http://www.clark.net/pub/cme | |PGP: E0414C79B5AF36750217BC1A57386478 & 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2| | "Officer, officer, arrest that man! He's whistling a dirty song." | +-------------------------------------------- Jean Ellison (aka Mother) -+

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Re: An alternative to remailer shutdowns
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:02 PM 5/22/96 -0700, Martin Minow wrote: >Black Unicorn <unicorn(a)schloss.li> comments on the responsiblity >of prudent persons (in, I presume, the context of threating e-mail >sent through an anonymous remailier). > >I'm still perplexed: what can a "prudent" remailer operator do if a >threatening e-mail was sent through a remailer under one or more of >the following conditions: > >-- The remailer operator is legally enjoined from reading messages > transversing his system. (For example, the remailer is subject to > data privacy laws.) > >-- The message was encrypted using the intended recipient's public key. > (This means that, without access to the private key, the operator > has no mechanism to examine the e-mail.) That's just it, the government wants (or, will want) "the prudent operator" to SHUT DOWN his system entirely. We, on the other hand, should take the position that operating a remailer is a right, and further that such remailers get a broad immunity for materials send through their system. Providing for the opposite was one of the reasons the Leahy bill on encryption was so bad. It criminalized use of encryption to "thwart a law-enforcement investigation" and there was no way for a (encrypted) remailer operator to know that any given message flowing through his system might eventually trigger such an investigation. In fact, the prospect of the government actually setting up such an operator by having his remailer act as the last link in the chain of an otherwise-untraceable message, whose transmission could arguably be a violation of law. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: An alternative to remailer shutdowns
by Rev. Mark Grant, ULC 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Wed, 22 May 1996, Bill Stewart wrote: > A secondary concern is handling multi-casts - should the remailer > create one copy for each recipient (secure, easy, space-wasteful), > or should it try to get fancy and keep the message for N recipients or D days? Easy on Unix - just create N links to the same file, delete each link as the recipient requests it, and delete all remaining links after D days. Mark

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