December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Assassination Politics 1-3
by Jean-Francois Avon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 19 May 96 at 20:31, you, Pat Trainor, wrote: > On Sun, 19 May 1996, Jean-Francois Avon wrote: > > Back to AP, I did not invent the scheme nor do I approve or like > > it a lot. But I find it very interesting to discuss. > > > > The author of AP is Jim Bell <jimbell(a)pacifier.com>. > > That was what I was interested in. You see, I read a story exactly > along the same lines a long time ago, and I thought the group would > like to know just what happenned during that 'scheme'. > > > I would gladly read the long letter that you wrote. > > Here's the text, and if you didn't see it posted, please repost > with a cc to Mr. Bell. If you did see it, then just erase.. But the > damnest thing that my email is so squirrely!! > > Thanks again!! > > (if anyone wrote me in a reply, I never got it. ISP is putting a new > T1 in, and this is causing errors in traffic I'm told.) > > >From ptrainor(a)aura.title14.com Sun May 19 20:23:48 1996 > Date: Thu, 16 May 1996 22:09:16 -0400 > From: Pat Trainor <ptrainor(a)aura.title14.com> > To: jimbell <jimbell(a)pacifier.com> > Newsgroups: talk.politics.crypto, talk.politics.libertarian, > alt.politics.libertarian, alt.society.anarchy, alt.privacy, > alt.security.pgp, alt.activism, alt.anarchism, alt.cyberpunk, > alt.politics.datahighway > Subject: Re: Insurable Interest Assassination Politics 1-3 > > On Thu, 9 May 1996, jimbell wrote: > > > > How will this be enforced, someone with more resources, > > >money, drugs, guns, better planned religion, icbms, will start to > > >gather "like minded individuals" and start to tell others how to > > >live., some will join them, others will fight, and we're back > > >where we started. > > > > No, because any threatening individual or group will be "predicted > > to death" posthaste. > > I haven't followed this thread from the beginning, but I recognize > the theme. I read _eons_ ago a short story in which this exact > mechanism was used to enforce a leaderless society. Now I'm no > economist, nor historian (future or otherwise) but I do vividly > remember this story. > It was in a science-fiction compilation, as I was very prone to > read (Nebula Awards, etc..) in my early days in the military and > before. > > My question would be: have you ever read a story with this precice > theme? The assisns looked like (sorry) Star Wars storm troopers in > white, air conditioned suits. They were not anonymous, except that > you couldn't see their faces (is that enough?). > > The story treated the same (apparently) hypothesis you mention. The > 'Assassin's Guild' I think was the title. Irrelevant to AP since nobody knows anybody, nor what anybody else do. > One of the problems in the model I read about was that the area to > be policed was too large to allow an elite minority to cover > properly, or even effectively. Again, irrelevant to AP. This scheme suppose some clan against another (the govt). Re-read Jim Bell's essay and you'll realize that it wouldn't work that way at all. > It was a situation of ratios. To be superior, even with a > technological edge, you need numbers. You have to offset the balance > somehow. Population control was attempted by the guild in the end as > a measure to increase the odds in their favor. This caused an > understandably intense reaction with the masses, who were ultimately > those being served. Not in AP. Because the aim when using AP against government or any other entity is not to get rid of it by killing it's members, but rather to get rid of it by scaring any individual that would participate to it. > Another problem was that the technology required for a large > coordinated effort required organization of a military nature (rank, > etc..). This was necessary due to the myriad of decisions that had > to be made. <Lots of stuff absolutely irrelevant to AP deleted>. Re-read the essay again. > Surveillance was the issue. In order for the Guild to be able to > identify a problem, an immense amount of surveillance was required. > Again the technology and the infrastructure required to support it. Are you saying that problems are difficults to identify? > The decision had to be made by superiors who were in touch with all > the information from all areas under surveillance to make the > ultimate decision. There needed to be, effectively, a steering > committee to determine if the proposed action was both affordable > and warranted. To Cypherpunks: I did not write the following paragraph. It was probably from Jim Bell, but I only guess. To: Pat Trainor: Ask Jim Bell to send you his paper. I'm sure he will do it wilfully. Pat Trainor wrote: >somebody wrote: > > To the eventual outcome. The system's inevitable. Read the > > essay; it explains why. I'll forward it to you; I assume it's no > > longer available on your newsfeed. > > I wouldn't mind reading it, it sounds a lot like what I'm > describing. > > > They might be wrong. I might be right. > > The Assassin's Guild was bought into in phases by the ruling > elements of all major powers only after they had all lost their > ability to maintain an effective repel borders and the place (earth) > was a mess. > > Realistically, you can't build from the ashes any faster than > anyone else is. And human nature doesn't change because of a new > caveat in religion or 'law'. A human will always be a human, > regardless of what law they proport to follow or heed. > > > Thomas Edison tried hundreds of differnet materials to make light > > bulb filaments before he found one that would work. > > Actually he directed experiments! :) But this statement reminded me > of the 'Infinite Number of Monkeys' theory, except applied to 'self > rule', well, I guess not, well..? > > > And BTW, we're already all "in fear of our lives." You know, > > muggings and carjackings. How is my system worse, > > quantitatively? > > Actually, you'll find folks doing the most desparate things in a > desparate world. If you try to forge order out of chaos, you quickly > find that the order you are trying to enforce feeds the chaos. You > create your own increasing difficulty by default. A society (or > group of societies) in anarchy will fear order. This, coupled with > the fact that you have to create from the same resoucres the masses > have access to, makes your efforts incredibly difficult. You will > never find a unified agreement among a society that can't feed or > cloth itself. If you do, you instantly become what you are telling > the people you are trying to prevent. Folks will see through this > veil and vanquish such an effort favoring a predictable anarchy over > a concerted organized rule. > > > >To change the world you have to understand the rules, > > > > But you don't necessarily have to _follow_ the rules! > > That's a good point, and one I think I've shown means that you will > always have rules. Sometimes yours, sometimes theirs, if lucky a bit > of both.. But they will be there. We are a self-righteous > pack-oriented species. We thrive on group individuality! That must > be why psychologists make so much money! > > > The system I've described will work even if only a small > > proportion of the population uses it, at first. That's what makes > > it so amazing, really. > > Again, I'd appreciate a look at your paper. > > Now for the subtle problems pointed out accurately in the > Assassin's Guild. As a strategic planner for a living, I have > learned to live by a good rule: Make your best estimates for a > project's completion, then double them. > > A support structure required for the Assassin's Guild required > things you would never immediately think of. Support from several > areas are required. Remember, you are basically operating a country > with soft borders covering all areas, no matter how distant. > > For solely the guild's efforts, no others, a few of the things > required are: > > Manufacturing > Fabrication > Research & Developement > Quality Assurance > Medical > Clothing > Shelter > Food > Recreation > Self-Rule > Coordination > Information Exchange > Communication > Information Retrieval > Surveillance > Commerce > Expansion > Earth Sciences > > The trouble is, each and every one of the above is subject to > espionage, revolution, corruption, pranks, etc.. Therefore each must > be treated with complete encapsulation within the guild. The only > way to exclude interference from within or without, was to closely > monitor each and every aspect of the guild's organization. > Self-policing. > > When you start visualizing what the organization would actually be > running (never mind the seemingly impossible task of starting the > organization from scratch), it seems a very impractical proposition. > > Plus, the guild found all the military stuff laying around pretty > useful.. Folks were NOT excited about another police state.. > > Anyhow, sorry for the long post, but I thought perhaps you'd enjoy > the problems the Assassin's Guild had, and compare it to your own > model. > > later! > > pat > :) > > Pat Trainor * WARNING: THE OPINIONS I EXPRESS MAY NOT BE MY OWN > * finger for key: ptrainor(a)aura.title14.com > http://www.title14.com/ > Key fingerprint = 4B 14 97 D7 11 41 35 76 28 43 1E E3 2E E3 81 > D6 "Winning may not be everything, but losing is NOTHING!" -Ed > Bighead > > > DePompadour, Societe d'Importation Ltee; Limoges porcelain, silverware and crystal JFA Technologies, R&D consultants; physists, technologists and engineers. PGP keys at: http://w3.citenet.net/users/jf_avon ID# C58ADD0D : 529645E8205A8A5E F87CC86FAEFEF891 Unsollicited commercial e-mail will be proofread at US165 $/h Any sender of such material will be considered as to have ac- cepted the above mentionned terms.

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Re: Cypherpunks, a political "newsgroup?"
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 06:09 PM 5/19/96 -0400, Declan B. McCullagh wrote: >Excerpts from internet.cypherpunks: 19-May-96 by anonymous-remailer@shell >> Cypherpunks is not a political newsgroup. > >Hah! Most everything that's discussed here has political overtones. I, >for one, appreciated in the info on the Burmese businessman and >forwarded it to fight-censorship. I'll link it in to >http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~declan/international/ when I get a chance. I happen to agree. Information privacy, security, and freedom are definitely "on-topic" around here. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Toastmasters? Incorporating
by remailer＠2005.bart.nl 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

How do corporations work, in terms of liability? If the cost of incorporating isn't forbidding, I would think a remailer operator might consider incorporating a company, and making the remailer a function of that company. That way, any losses are restricted to the total value of the corporation; that is, nothing. Any flaws? There must be something wrong with it somewhere. Thanks.

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New Remailer (hidden)
by middle-man-admin＠alpha.c2.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

NOTICE: A new type of remailer has just gone into business! It's called a "hidden remailer-in-the-middle". The address is middle-man(a)alpha.c2.org. This new type of remailer uses a combination of Lance Cottrell's Mixmaster remailer and Raph Levien's premail program. Advantages: * The remailer is completely hidden. Attempting to discover the actual identity of the remailer site is virtually impossible. * The remailer uses both Type-I and Type-II remailer technology for handling remailer traffic. * Random remailer chains are selected separately for every outgoing message. * The remailer is designed to answer to a chained nym. * All Mixmaster administrative commands are also chained through multiple remailers. (i.e. remailer-help, remailer-key) How it works: The actual address of the remailer is hidden behind a chained nym. The plan is for the reply-block for middle-man to change approximately every 48-72 hours. This will be transparent to the net but will help to foil traffic analysis. The new remailer operates under a modified Mixmaster. The code has been modified so that outgoing messages are passed to premail to allow padding of extra remailer chains. Each outgoing message will have two type-I remailers randomly padded to the end of the chain based on the current status od Raph Levien's remailer reliability list. If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact middle-man-admin(a)alpha.c2.org. middle-man-admin(a)alpha.c2.org

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Re: The Crisis with Remailers
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"frantz(a)netcom.com" 17-MAY-1996 15:56:36.35 >Perhaps what is needed is a non-profit, charitable 501c foundation to >encourage anonymous communication. Those who support the idea could make >tax deductible contributions which would be used for grants, public >education etc. etc. to encourage anonymous communication. It could be >called, "The Federalist Foundation" because the Federalist Papers were >published anonymously. Hmm... I wonder if it would be good for this Foundation to itself operate some for-pay remailers, in order to make some money from sources besides contributions? Possible disadvantages: A. It could get sued, and thus lose funds B. If its prices were set too low, it could wind up driving other remailers out of the market (combination of low price with likelihood to still be there), and thus become a vulnerable point. -Allen

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Re: Rumor: DSS Broken?
by timd＠consensus.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 8:32 PM 5/19/96, Bill Stewart wrote: >On the other hand, NIST has been saying that DSS isn't covered by any patents, >which the PKP folks had some very negative, skeptical comments about, >before PKP fell apart; it probably still is covered by the Cylink/Stanford >patents until they expire next year, though it's not covered by RSA. >The patent licensing hassles probably have kept a lot of people from using it, >except for specific sales to the government. Not to mention the Schnorr patent, which is good until 2008. NIST has claimed DSA doesn't infringe upon patents, but they won't necessarily help you in court, let alone indemnify you. I think everyone is using RSA because it's easy, safe and already widely deployed. Since you've got to buy a BSAFE license to do any interesting commercial cryptography anyway, why go through the hassle of another algorithm? Cylink is pushing DSA, however, because with DSA + Diffie-Hellman, you get both encryption and signing, thus providing a similar set of capabilities to RSA. Note, also that a DSA implementation might be usable as to do ElGamal or RSA encryption; I don't know whether generally available commercial / exportable implementations can or not. [Applied Cryptography, 2nd ed., 490-491] - Tim PS - Anyone know what the ASN.1 AlgorithmIDs and public key formats are for DSS? I'd like to add support for DSS X.509 certs to my X.509 library. Even better would be a couple of such certificates so I can test. PPS - Any chance the original rumor surrounded RCA/Hughes' DSS satellite TV system, and not the Digital Signature Standard, and we've all been barking up the wrong tree? Tim Dierks - Software Haruspex - tim(a)dierks.org "That's the trouble with technology. It attracts people who have nothing to say." - Muffey Kibbey, mother [Wall Street Journal, May 10 1996]

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Re: Defeating fingerprints
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"sinclai(a)ecf.toronto.edu" "SINCLAIR DOUGLAS N" 18-MAY-1996 04:15:33.26 >Not that random playing with carcinogenic chemicals is a good idea, but... >I've found that if you use just one reagent from epoxy glue, the collagen >in your skin will disolve. You can sculpt it into whatever shape you want, >and it will stay that way for an hour or so. I don't remember if it was >the resin or the hardener though. This was regular 5 minute epoxy. I somehow doubt that the collagen is dissolving. You may be loosening the keratinized dead skin cells and pushing them around, and then they flake off in some length of time (probably speeded up by this treatment). Any signs of redness, etcetera in the skin afterwards? Unusual sensitivity of the fingertips, especially to pain? One thing to keep in mind is that fingerprints aren't just from the whorl pattern that you see. They're also from that the sebaceous (oil) glands in the skin are arranged along those whorls. You need a pretty resistant barrier to stop these. I've been told by the son of a cop that the combination of a pair of latex gloves with a couple layers of cotton gloves stops both the oils and the normal pressure patterns. -Allen

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Re: Rumor: DSS Broken?
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:05 PM 5/19/96 -0800, Jim Bell wrote: >It should occur to all of us that if the NSA was actually doing the job we >are vastly over-paying them to do, it is THEY who should be finding, >exposing, and correcting these kinds of cryptography faults. They may have; they're just kind of selective in who they expose them to :-) Also, there are expert cryptographers outside the NSA, and outside the US; you might check where Dobbertin lives. And this is a Good Thing. >Another question: If the government provided DSS, and it's now toast, SHA-1 isn't toast; it's MD5 that might be at least a bit crunchy. (The NSA gave us SHA, and later added a correction that appears to make it stronger, unless there's something really subtle and nasty inside.) DSS isn't toast either, though the subliminal-channel stuff makes it necessary to look very carefully at any applications to find out what else is being done with them, which you can't always do. One of the purposes of DSS appears to be that it provides signatures without providing encryption, so the Feds can trust the Public to have it. Except of course that subliminal channels _do_ toast that part of it. On the other hand, NIST has been saying that DSS isn't covered by any patents, which the PKP folks had some very negative, skeptical comments about, before PKP fell apart; it probably still is covered by the Cylink/Stanford patents until they expire next year, though it's not covered by RSA. The patent licensing hassles probably have kept a lot of people from using it, except for specific sales to the government. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 # goodtimes signature virus innoculation

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Re: SEVERE undercapacity, we need more remailer servers FAST
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"llurch(a)networking.stanford.edu" "Rich Graves" 18-MAY-1996 09:07:35.05 >On Thu, 16 May 1996, Bill Stewart wrote: >> ================================================================== >> This message was posted from the anonymous remailer at www.jim.com. >> Send any complaints to webmaster(a)www.jim.com . >> Please don't post any copyrighted material longer than fair use quotations. >> And did you know that Scientology's highly overpriced documents say that >> "<random paragraph quotation>" >> =================================================================== >Once I was more or less done laughing and got off the floor, it occurred >to me that this could provide a revenue stream for anonymous remailers. >You'd charge advertisers sub-pennies for these little trailers. I >understand that Sameer is getting very little Ecash for his >remail/by-www.html, but maybe if he sold advertising space? It's an interesting idea. One wonders if EFF would be interested in such a sponsorship? One could even add, say, an ACLU promotion to the end of messages without getting cash from the ACLU - this might encourage them to give more backing in case of a legal dispute. (You scratch my back, I scratch yours... I'm not meaning to be offensive to the ACLU, BTW.) -Allen

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Re: Sendmail Question (was: SMTP Server for sending to anonymous remailers?)
by John Deters 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:42 PM 5/19/96 -0400, you wrote: >At 12:09 AM 5/19/96 -0700, you wrote: >>If you use popmail (like Eudora), then just tell it the server to use in >>"SMTP Host". >> -Lance >I have been following this with no little interest. Using Eudora Pro when I >attempt to replace host: smtp1.abraxis.com with *SMTP Host*, I receive the >message *Attempting to resolve host: SMTP Host*, and dat's all until I stop >the send command. > >Thanks > >Alec Alec, What he meant was that you should replace the contents of the SMTP server's field with the address of the first remailer in your chain. For example, if I wanted to send this through the Holy Cow remailer, I'd put this in the SMTP server field: haystack(a)holy.cow.net Remember, though, that several things OUT OF YOUR CONTROL have to happen for your mail to be anonymised successfully. First, if you are behind a "firewall" (i.e. doing this at work through your work's net connection) your firewall may be implementing what is known as a "proxy." That means even though you're using the SMTP protocol, you may not be *directly* talking to the SMTP client of the remailer. It may "look" like you're able to SMTP out to whoever you want to send mail, but in reality, the firewall can intercept your request, and "pretend" to be some other SMTP server. It then accepts your outgoing mail, and forwards it to the real destination. Abraxis sells firewalls. Also, your firewall may be configured to not pass SMTP out at all, but rather to require you to send any SMTP traffic directly to it. That means you can not change your SMTP server to anything outside of your local net. In either case, firewalls are certainly capable (and employers within their rights, but that's another useless thread) to log and/or read your mail. Anonymity lost, at least to your employer. Finally, the anonymous remailer may (or may not) have some kind of logging turned on. I don't know why they would (what's the value if they do) but if some law enforcement agency orders them to discreetly monitor traffic, you lose again. Unless you PGP encrypt your mail to the remailers before it leaves your machine for the big bad net, someone else can read it. And, no matter what, persons unknown can tell that your machine sent some message to the remailer. (This is known as "traffic analysis".) Therefore, I'd *highly* recommend not e-mailing anything illegal over the net, remailer or no. -j, annoying, yes. Illegal or harassing, no. -- J. Deters >From Senator C. Burns' Pro-CODE bill, which I support and you can find at: http://www.senate.gov/member/mt/burns/general/billtext.htm " (2) Miniaturization, disturbed computing, and reduced transmission costs make communication via electronic networks a reality." +---------------------------------------------------------+ | NET: jad(a)dsddhc.com (work) jad(a)pclink.com (home) | | PSTN: 1 612 375 3116 (work) 1 612 894 8507 (home) | | ICBM: 44^58'33"N by 93^16'42"W Elev. ~=290m (work) | | PGP Key ID: 768 / 15FFA875 | +---------------------------------------------------------+

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