December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

AP story: Police look for Olympic bombing Internet link.
by Martin Minow 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Search Campus Where Jewell Worked; Check Internet Link By Associated Press, 08/02/96 ATLANTA (AP) - Widening their investigation of Richard Jewell, federal and state agents descended on a small Georgia college campus Friday to hunt for evidence linking him to the Olympic park bombing. Among other things, investigators were trying to determine whether the former campus guard had tapped into the Internet via Piedmont College computers, a campus source reported. Bomb-making instructions available through the global computer network have contributed to an increase in bombings in the United States, authorities say. [From http://www.boston.com/globe/cgi-bin/globe.cgi?ap/apnat.htm ] Martin Minow minow(a)apple.com

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BOO_mer
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

8-2-96. WaJo: "More Bombs Are Exploding Across the U.S." What also worries law-enforcement officials are the comparatively unspectacular bombs exploding at a rising rate in neighborhoods across the country. Indeed, with homicides declining, bombings may have become the fastest-growing category of violent crime. "In the old days, kids would break windows," says John O'Brien, an agent in Washington with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. "Now, they're making pipe bombs." Police say one of the most popular bombs among youths -- one combining acid and other ingredients in a bottle -- is called the "McGyver" because many learned about it from the television show. David Estenson, head of a bomb-crisis management firm and former head of the Minneapolis police bomb squad, observes that many of the pipe bombs in Israel contain only match heads. "U.S. Studies Use of Chemical Tracers To Track Explosives in Terrorist Blasts." The Treasury Department is studying a family of trace chemicals -- first developed by U.S. weapons scientists to track the fallout of nuclear weapons -- as a way to give terrorist explosives an identifiable trail. The trace chemicals are newer and much smaller than plastic "taggants," which have provoked resistance from the explosives industry and gun lobbies. Desmonde Cowdery, vice president of Isotag L.L.C., a small Houston company that has obtained commercial rights to the process, claims the chemical tracers are so small they can be blended with all types of explosives, including fertilizers and gunpowders, without interfering with chemical reactions. "Can America Stomach a War on Terror?" The lessons from the world's battlefields of terror are sobering. Not only have few countries been able to make much of a dent in a determined terrorist campaign, but their efforts also often incur a heavy price. Due-process rights have been suspended, freedoms of speech curtailed, police powers beefed up. Tommy Sands, a Belfast folk singer, praises America's caution. He says that in Northern Ireland and other hot spots, authorities have often overreacted to the initial threat. "It's like driving a car and seeing a red light come on that means you're short on oil. If you take a hammer to it, the red light will go out, but you're still short on oil," Mr. Sands says. "Sometimes there are answers other than the big hammer." ----- http://jya.com/boomer.txt (19 kb for 3) Lynx: http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/boomer.txt BOO_mer

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Re: [off-topic] roving wiretaps (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Fri, 2 Aug 1996 15:23:23 -0700 > From: shamrock(a)netcom.com (Lucky Green) > Subject: Re: [off-topic] roving wiretaps > > The Fourth Amendment has been abolished by the Supreme Court for all > intends and purposes. It remains listed in the Constitution for historic > reasons only. ARTICLE IV. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. I must agree with the above sentiment by Lucky. When Steve Jackson got busted (I was peripheraly involved through Mentor and Bloodaxe) and the warrant was not only sealed (ie Mentor and Bloodaxe didn't get to see it) but it was unsigned as well when it was executed. Jim Choate

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Re: "adjust your attitude with their billy club" (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Fri, 2 Aug 1996 11:48:45 -0400 (EDT) > From: Alan Horowitz <alanh(a)infi.net> > Subject: Re: "adjust your attitude with their billy club" (fwd) > > << 9th & 10th AMendments to the Conmstitution >> > > Cute, you left out the Third. ARTICLE III. No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any home without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law. I didn't include it because it isn't germane to the discussion at hand. > We are referring to the Sovereign power of the State of Washington to > allocate to the municipality of Seattle, a general Police Power to > maintain the Peace. Every lawyer seems to think that Seattle has the > power to forbid people from using sidewalks as latrines and kitchen sinks. I agree with the municipality, if you want to eat your own shit and piss go right ahead. You have no right to expose me to the deliterious health effects of such material randomly sprayed around my city. Hell, even animals are smart enough to know not to shit in their own bed. Pitty all these smart people seem to have forgotten such a basic rule of nature. Such actions are clearly a threat to my person and property. > I am in bed with the government, so I have better knowledge than most of > the people on this list, about how bad it is. Nonetheless, I recall the > aphorism from the Talmud: "Pray for the health of the government, lest > the people eat other alive". If these sayings indicate such insight how come the Jews have such a terrible time getting along with anyone for any length of time? Why does their current regime have such a hard time? Why is it that I get such a rising in the hackles on my neck when I am reminded that it is illegal in Isreal to carry a Palestinian flag in public. How come they begin to look more and more like the new age nazi's? The Isrealis love of government and structure has certainly not brought them great amounts of security, wealth, or friends. > If you want to walk into the public library after a six-month moratorium > on bathing - well, the courts are divided on this, but _I_ stand for the > proposition that this is an assault on the other patrons and I will lobby > _my_ city councilman for there to be rules against it. I will oppose it. While I would oppose those self same persons from touching me or my property without my prior permission (which I would not give) I would not prohibit them from entering any public facility. I oppose Austin's recent ruling prohibiting sleeping in public parks and other area because the local businesses said it effected their profits. I oppose their recent ruling that ALL persons who ride a bike MUST wear a helmet, ostensibly to protect children even though the law doesn't mention minors at any point. The mayor when queeried on this point simply ignored it. I assure you none of them will get my vote, and from what I have seen not a lot of others either. > But if you want to play your boombox loud near me, make damn sure you do > it behind soundproof walls. Where I live, the cops will respond to that > kind of complaint and shut down the nuisance, with nightsticks if need be > (in my little rural area, it's seldom necessary). Maybe you California or > NYC folks don't have police forces that will mitigate nuisances. Enjoy > your progressive radical-chic neighborhood, folks. Unless you can demonstrate that your person or property are harmed by the action I oppose such laws. Simply smelling bad is not a physical act. Austin has a law which basicaly does the same thing. In general the people of the city don't like it, the police don't enforce it, and the people drive around town jammin' to their hearts content. If my apartment neighbor is playing their radio too loud I am not going to call the cops I am going to call the manager if my attempts at becoming some sort of aquaintence fail at mediation. It is private property and short of violence to a person or property they have no business in here without a warrant. I own 5 acres near Lockhart, just outside Austin, and I have made it clear to several of the county mounties that parking in my driveway is verbotten if they don't have a warrant for searching my property, they liked to park there to eat food and fill out reports. They seem to understand and respect my wishes. They now park down at the intersection of my dirt road and 71 on public land. The right to freedom of speech means you have a right to be offended and to offend. If you haven't been offended at least once a day you need to get out of your apartment and quit watching the roaches crawl the walls. If what is on television offends you then start your own television station and play family (or porno) material till your hearts content. Passing laws that tell privately owned stations what to air is wrong because it is equivalent to limiting the freedom of speech and press. This can be extended to all such prior restraint laws. To regulate content based on the public airwaves model is equivalent to the state telling me what station to listen to on my car radio because I am on a public road. When I was a small child I learned an important lesson the hard way. I was smaller than the other kids so they would call me names and pick on me to no end. Did I fight with them? No, I recognized even at that young age that violence would not stop the actions, only change their nature. Violence as a means of coersion is a signal of a small mind. On the other hand, I only lost a single fight in the 1st grade. This taught me that if one is attacked in a physical sense respond with all the force and violence you can muster, show no mercy until the beggar is on the ground and in a sorry state. Don't stop if they say they surrender, they may be saying it to gain a tactical advantage. Stop only when you are certain they no longer have the will or means to carry the fight further. It would be a great thing if our government and society in general would learn this lesson regarding violence. We would live in a much less violent world. Jim Choate

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Re: A Libertine Question (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Fri, 2 Aug 1996 16:50:01 -0500 (CDT) > From: snow <snow(a)smoke.suba.com> > Subject: Re: A Libertine Question > > As long as you are enforcing it on everyone, I don't think you'd have a > problem, but to force some one from cooking food for homeless people, and > allow a family barbeque, is IMO wrong. Not at all. Businesses have no rights, individuals do. Businesses have a responsibility to protect their patrons (if you don't think so ask all the folks in Japan or the people here in Austin sick from Strawberries and Blueberries they bought at the local HEB). Individuals have a right to privacy, that includes cooking themselves food without harrassment. Business on the other hand are selling products of potentialy questionable quality. A reasonable person recognizes that such a business has two ways of fulfilling its responsiblities. They can either submit to regulation and quality control from the local municipality or else they can hang signs about their place of business declaring "Caveat Emptor: Our food may be tainted, eat at your own risk". Which do you think is the more reasonable? > If it is unsafe/unsanitary to cook > food in a certain way, it is unsafe/unsanitary. Selective enforcement is > wrong. Not at all. I have a right to kill myself with bad cooking if I choose. I do not have the right to kill another, especialy a stranger, without their prior consent. I guess it would be ok if a food vendor were to ask you if you minded being killed by their product, but I doubt many of them would be in business next week, let alone sell many hot dogs. People and businesses are not the same. Jim Choate

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Paranoid Musings
by JMKELSEY＠delphi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- [ To: cypherpunks ## Date: 08/02/96 12:29 pm ## Subject: Paranoid Musings ] >Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 11:13:59 -0700 >From: frantz(a)netcom.com (Bill Frantz) >Subject: Paranoid Musings >Sometimes paranoia strikes. Since these musings are crypto related, >I thought I would share them. >Now expensive specialized cracking equipment can certainly speed up >the process, but there may be a better way. If cryptanalysis of RC4 >yields techniques which make the process much easier, then it is the >ideal cypher to certify for export. Actually, this makes sense for another reason. Academic cryptanalysis is often about finding any attack on a cipher that's easier than keysearch, even if the requirements for that attack are still completely impractical. (Differential and linear attacks on DES are a good example of this.) However, if you're interested in actually recovering data in your attacks with high probability and low cost, then it makes sense to focus on protocol and implementation weaknesses, and then on attacks like keysearch which can be done with either ciphertext-only or known-plaintext. I would guess that some of NSA's best people work on optimizing keysearches. This especially makes sense because of the widespread use, first of DES, and more recently of exportable 40-bit ciphers like RC2 and RC4. >The paranoid conclusion is that there is a significant weakness in >RC4. The paranoid conclusion is that there is a significant weakness in any cipher you're counting on. >Bill Frantz | Cave ab homine unius lebri | Periwinkle -- Consulting >(408)356-8506 | [Beware the man of one | 16345 Englewood Ave. >frantz(a)netcom.com | book] - Anonymous Latin | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA --John Kelsey, jmkelsey(a)delphi.com / kelsey(a)counterpane.com PGP 2.6 fingerprint = 4FE2 F421 100F BB0A 03D1 FE06 A435 7E36 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMgI7X0Hx57Ag8goBAQEsNAQAm6SbOnCkTh2EByH8Oa1GoTItx+JUE2hA mtEDp//VW1qH5Lzem14ARGbcgIHbPQqVHN355p5pSrH7tI+RnPc45RRjmF6Ot96r CjnOz3DWPOXx30pm4NGchKs3MmfMyeDKvL3GofMZee8qNm8IZsnMuLMhQABUIdBM kU/oaYwfZdE= =C9ip -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: VISA Travel Money
by Hallam-Baker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timothy C. May wrote: > I'm also skeptical of these "VISA Travel Money" cards. That is, they don't > seem to be too useful for anything. They are usefull for the one purpose for which they are designed. One can go off to a foreign country and obtain cash as required without having to pay often usurous fees from bureaux de change. Just because you are supposed to be able to use travel cheques as cash does not mean that you really can. > After all, cash works well. (It's rarely stolen, in my experience, or at > least this is not a major concern. Traveller's checks work well, and can be > "cashed" into the local currency. ATM machines fill the same function these > "VISA Travel Money" cards apparently do; at least when I was in Europe the > last time this is what I used, and my French francs were as untraceable as > could be. > > As I see it, yet another marketing solution looking for a problem. Its not a major VISA product but it is reasonably usefull. Its more convenient to carry a card than cash. If one gets mugged or looses the card there is a way of recovering the cash (sometimes). I don't think that there would be much use for such cards in the tourist belt but you might well want to have one if you were going on a trip to the hinterlands of a country. For most people VISA travel cheques or a cash advance is likely to be more usefull. > A real step would be a true privacy card, a card issued in a jurisdiction > unfriendly to U.S. investigators and offering various transaction-blinding > options. I have to wonder what pressures have been put on the major credit > card companies... See the Stored Value Card work that VISA have been working on, or MONDEX. MONDEX has almost every feature you would want from anonymous cash except you can't prove its anonymous. You can do purse to purse transfers however. Its a different level of privacy to that of e-cash. e-cash provides only purchaser unlinkability and its an online scheme. MONDEX makes it possible to trace certain withdrawal and deposit patterns of a user but little else. Phill

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Re: Stop the presses -- Anti-terrorism bill not that bad
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:48 AM 8/3/96, Declan McCullagh wrote: >Stop the presses -- the other shoe didn't drop. Despite a flurry of >last-minute hyperbole, the House passed an anti-terrorism bill this >afternoon without the ominous encryption or wiretap provisions. Now >the bill lies in the lap of the Senate, which probably will approve it >later today or tomorrow before they leave town for the August recess. I agree. And I think we should thank CDT, EFF, the ACLU, and (gasp) the NRA for ensuring that martial law provisions did not get slipped in during the rush to get out of Washington for the recess. (And maybe other groups...I don't follow all the politics.) I'm watching Rep. Bob Barr (R) on "Larry King Live," on CNN. He makes a lot of sense, and keeps coming back to civil liberties, the alliance between the ACLU and the NRA on this one, etc. His adversary, Rep. John Conyers (D) is calling for stronger measures, for the need to "do something." (I thought the Democrats nominally stood for certain types of civil liberties? Not that I ever was fooled by them, but this is the public personna they present.) >The Net owes its thanks to the House Republicans for stopping these >fool Dems in a fine backroom political maneuver late last night. By the way, my blasting of Sen. Dianne Feinstein as "Fineswine," "Swinestein," etc. (names not original with me, of course) is heartfelt. I don't mine dealing with opponents, even articulate enemies of freedom. But Feinstein is a halfwit and a hypocrite. A San Francisco society lady masquerading as a senator. She's proof that transmigration of souls is real, being the incarnation of Marie Antoinette. "Let them eat cake." --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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Re: SOUP KITCHENS (fwd)
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:10 AM 8/3/96, Jim Choate wrote: >True enough, but not the whole story. If a dog or cat is kept well and fed >good quality food they live 10+ years. The average life of an animal on the >street is between 2-5 years. As to people, we now live around 75-80 years, >prior to all these rules and regulations on food and such the average was >20-25. If we go back to what you propose you would be dead a long time ago. Hardly a proved correlation. A lot of other factors come into play. But never mind. No point arguing. ... >I personaly find it reassuring that some bunch of knuckle-heads are unable >to start a chip making facility like you support. The thought of finding >flourine compounds in the local river (where I get my tap water) or simply >dumped in the air is a little unsettling. Just because some group of bozo's >want to start a business is not sufficient justification for that to be >allowed. A straw man. There is is no evidence that these startup companies are dumping stuff in rivers. Jeesh. The point is that large companies learn how to keep large staffs employed filling out paperwork, and they actually have come to see it is a good way to keep small companies from forming. >It seems to me that many of the folks who recognize downsized workers pleas >for their 'right to a job' as so much bunk are at the same time supporting a >businesses right to start up. A pretty humorous double standard. Not at all comparable. >I have never heard of anyone being arrested for giving away food, only >selling it without a license. I bet the Salvation Army soup kitchen would be >worried if this claim were true (they aren't and it ain't). Then you weren't reading the thread, which in several posts described this very situation. "Food Not Bombs" was giving away soup, chile, and other such stuff at a park in Santa Cruz (and maybe elsewhere, e.g., San Francisco). They were busted. Now do you understand the situation? --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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FAA to require transponders on all aircraft passengers
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

According to KCBS, a local radio station, the FAA has closed a long anticipated deal with a manufacturer of transponder devices. The goal of the system to be deployed nationwide is to match aircraft passengers to their luggage and thereby identify unaccompanied luggage on board an aircraft. Transponders will be affixed to all items of luggage and all passengers. If the system discovers a transponder on the luggage in the cargo hold without the corresponding transponder on the passenger on board, an alarm will sound. I am not making this up. As many of you know, I have long predicted subcutaneous transponders to become widely deployed in the near future. First for child identification and monitoring of criminals, then, as the children grow up, as universal ID, driver license, proof of eligibility for employment, PIN substitute, etc. Today, we moved a step closer to this future. [Note that the transponders will have to be affixed to the passenger. An example would be a hospital style bracelet that stops working when removed. Why embedding the transponder in a hand carried item, such as a card, will not work is left as an exercise to the reader. Even an affixed device does not provide perfect security. You'd really have to embed the transponder in the body at an early age to make removal nearly impossible.] -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred. Defeat the Demopublican Unity Party. Vote no on Clinton/Dole in November. Vote Harry Browne for President.

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