December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

lambda bulletin 2.08 / French Telco Act puts the Internet in leash
by jt＠freenix.fr 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

netizen's --> Lambda Bulletin 2.08 <-- contents French Telco Act puts the Internet in leash + New rules regulating Internet content + First key-escrow encryption rules As the Communications Decency Act was declared unconstitutional yesterday, June 12, the French Parliament (Senate and Assembly) passed a kind of Telco Act a la francaise last week, June 7. This law, aimed at providing new regulations for the telecommunications market (including the end of telephone monopoly in 1998), stresses two interesting points for Internet users : 1) a kind of CDA amendement was introduced en force in the Senate on Wednesday, June 5, just two days before it was voted Friday, at 3 in the morning. 2) the law establishes the first ever key escrow encryption rules created in industrialised countries. It will create trusted third parties (TTPs), private companies taht would keep encryption keys in custody for law enforcement purposes. It turns out that before the vote of the law, French military circles had already choosen which firms would be well suited to be TTP : Alcatel, Sagem and Bertin. All of them are well connected to the French military complex, and ! are all big defense contractors. The amendment number 200 in the Loi sur la Reglementation des Telecommunications (LRT) was sponsored by French Senator Larcher and introduced by French telmecom minister Francois Fillon. At first glance, it depenalizes Internet Access Providers for the content of text, images and documents that they are transmitted. But there is an IF. The condition stresses on that they must conform to future recommendations that will be establish by a French government's council : the Comite Superieur de la Telematique. Created in February 1993, the CST has a mission of regulation of Minitel services (text and voice based services), through a professional code of ethics. The CST will no longer depends upon the French telecom ministry, but will be placed under the tutelage of another famous regulation watchdog : the CSA (A for audiovisuel - a kind of French FCC), aimed at regulating radio and TV broadcasts. The law makes clear that if IAPs don't respond to "black" lists of Internet sites or newsgroups (in case where these sites may be in opposition to French law), the IAP will be held responsible for what it is carrying. These lists will be set up by the CST. Internet organisations and professionnals are scheduled to be members of the new CST -- today, in its "Minitel" form, it has 20 members, magistrates, ministry officials, France Telecom reprsentatives, Minitel providers, family and consumer organisations... So, the French amendment smells like the CDA, with the introduction of a so-called reprentative body. In the U.S. the IAP or ISP must control its content. In France this is a centralised body that will do the job. It feels that the French succeeded in what some in the US dreamt : to give the FCC the power to rate sites or content on the Internet. The French State, once again, plays the Big Mother (mother = the Republic) game with a huge sense of precipitation. Furthermore, the law broke in great haste -- and mess. Because before the amendment 200, telecom minister Fillon established an interministerial commission to work on guidlines and recommendations to enforce French law on the Internet. It came after a Jewish organisation sued IAPs for transmitting neo-nazi propaganda; and early in May, when 2 IAP directors were arrested for one day, and convicted, for transmission of pedophile pictures. The mess comes about because that Fillon didn't wait for the Commission : it was scheduled to publish a report on its work around June 15. Another mess concerns French pro-users organizations. The newly created French Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC-France) decided, apparently with the government commission's consent, to organize a mailing list consultation on the issue. Another group, the AUI (Association of Internet users), published a report this week about ethics, Internet content selection, and so on. Both organizations were openly ignored by Fillon. He did this even after saying during various interviews that the problem of IAP legal responsability on the Internet will be the result of a "broad consensus". It turns out, however, that a small pressure group of IAPs (the AFPI) were consulted Monday, June 2, and had the opportunity to read the amendment before its final review in the Senate. The IAPs are quite satisfied now, because they didn't want to be treated as "pedophiles" and "neo-nazi" anymore. But they will have to adopt the CST guidelines. During my personnal inquiry of the CST last year, I found some clues to understanding how the CST has been working at regulating Minitel services. The CST has a surveillance assignment on the Minitel market (to ensure that each provider follows deontology principles written in his contract with France Télécom). But surveillance operations are not organized by the CST, but by a small army of France Telecom spook agents in Bordeaux: they are 5 to 8 people regulating hundreds of thousands of services! It is no surprise to learn that France Telecom regularly intervenes in this choice, and that France Telecom itself is a big Minitel provider, through a lot of business affiliates. It turns out that theses spook agents are infiltrating private discussions in adult-oriented forums to check for indecent speech (which may be sanctionned by the CST). Here is what here in France we have inherited to regulate the Internet! The second important point of this Telco Act concerns encryption. France was already the first country in the OECD to forbid an individual to use any crypto system not approved by the French authorities (ie, the military). Thus, PGP-like software were, de facto, forbidden. The new law introduces the first key-escrow regulation. It frees cryptography use ONLY for digital signature; but to ensure privacy of email messages, however, the liberation of use is under condition : to give encryption keys to a so-called TTP. Some confidential reports in the press said that one or three private companies are already on the list to serve as TTPs for the French government. The first is Bertin & Co., an engineering company that has some competence in cryptography, and the others seem to be Alcatel-Alsthom (a big industrial conglomerate in telecommunications, defense and public-works engineering), and Sagem, another telecom conglomerate. It seems clear that all of these companies were choose! n according to their defense expertise and good relations with the French military. The mess is that these choices, if confirmed, have been made before the vote on the law, and even before "applications decrees" were published (they may be prepared this summer). France has no NSA. But some big ideas. (During the oil crisis in the 70's, a government commercial stated : "In France we have no oil. But we have good ideas".)

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No Subject
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

_The Atlanta Journal/The Atlanta Constitution_ 6/13/96 ...From a 1/2 page article: *In Georgia the movement appears to be percolating, too. Robert Costner, president of Electronic Freedom Georgia, says the biggest hurdle his group is trying to clear is the unfamiliarity of legislators with the Internet. Laws like the CDA are passed, Costner said, "because people are afraid of the Internet just as people were at one time afraid of the printing press.*

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New NRC Report Site
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks to Replay Web Development's generosity, the full 434-page NRC cryptography report of May 30, 1996 is available at: http://www.replay.com/mirror/nrc/ Our previous URL for the report also links to Replay's site: http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/nrcindex.htm

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NYT on CDA Win
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

6-13-96. NYP, Page One lead: "Judges Turn Back Law To Regulate Internet Decency." In a unanimous decision that celebrated the Internet as "the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country -- and indeed the world -- has yet seen," a three-judge Federal panel in Philadelphia yesterday declared unconstitutional major parts of a new law intended to regulate indecent material on the global computer network and blocked the law's enforcement. The three judges called Government attempts to regulate content on the Internet a "profoundly repugnant" affront to the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. "Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects," Judge Dalzell wrote. http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/cdawin.txt (3 articles) ----- Or, if the http fails, send a CDA_win to <jya(a)pipeline.com>.

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Re: Kaos vs Control
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:31 AM 6/12/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: >I see little chance that people who don't >understand anarchy derives from "an-archy," "no top/leader/highest level," >will become educated.) Unless they choose "anarchy" without even knowing it. As in my Gallup Poll question to "prove" that 90% of Americans are anarchists: "Some groups advocate aggressive violence as a means of achieving social ends. Do you agree with them? Do you advocate aggressive violence as a means of achieving social ends?" So 90% of the population answer "No" and demonstrate that they are either anarchists or don't understand the nature of government. >Good to see the courts reaffirming that "chaos" and lack of control by >authorities is a core part of the U.S. system. Maybe the control freaks of >Europe and Asia who have been charting their own authoritarian courses will >give more thought to ensuring liberty even if it causes more "chaos." One would hope. Perhaps reality will have to do it for them. DCF

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Tripwire and SATAN for Linux
by Steve O 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hey guys, Can any one point to where i can get Tripwire and SATAN for Linux? a friend is in dire need. thanks... Steve O Steve O. "True Utopia can only be reached by an uncensored and secure Internet, True Chaos can only be reached by the government, True love can only be reached in the movies." S.O. "Bang your head, Metal Health will drive you mad!" Quiet Riot "Welcome my friend, Welcome to The Machine" Pink Floyd "Lonelyness and Emptiness; Love and Fulfillment; Are all but flashes in the eye of the storm of our tormented soul." S.O.

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Re: Kaos vs Control
by Deranged Mutant 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 13 Jun 96 at 10:06, Duncan Frissell wrote: > At 11:31 AM 6/12/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: [..] > >Good to see the courts reaffirming that "chaos" and lack of control by > >authorities is a core part of the U.S. system. Maybe the control freaks of > >Europe and Asia who have been charting their own authoritarian courses will > >give more thought to ensuring liberty even if it causes more "chaos." > One would hope. Perhaps reality will have to do it for them. Reality never did anything for the (Supreme) Court, and certainly not a lot of politicians. But yes, one would hope... Rob. --- No-frills sig. Befriend my mail filter by sending a message with the subject "send help" Key-ID: 5D3F2E99 1996/04/22 wlkngowl(a)unix.asb.com (root@magneto) AB1F4831 1993/05/10 Deranged Mutant <wlkngowl(a)unix.asb.com> Send a message with the subject "send pgp-key" for a copy of my key.

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Re: Comments on MicroPayments and the Web
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: "Mark M." <markm(a)voicenet.com> > I think it would be interesting to see how copyright law will be applied to the > Web if micropayments ever become popular. Would memory or disk caching be > considered fair use? If so, then people could just set up a very large disk > cache and maybe delete it every month or so. It would also be a pretty neat > hack to use a proxy that only cached pages that charged micropayments. > Companies would not make a lot of money from things like this. If disk caching > was not considered to be fair use, people would still turn it on anyway. Where does the money come from to run this proxy? Consider two sites, one which acts as a proxy and cache but which charges something under a penny per page, and another which acts for free. Won't the for-pay site be able to afford a larger disk, more servers, and better net connections? It will be a superior service. Micropayments will allow new services and improved quality over what we have today where we have to rely on charity and advertising as motivations for much of what we find on the web. Hal

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Re: Report from Germany on "backdoor" net-censorship
by um＠c2.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A short update from Germany: The "ICTF" attorney has half-retracted their announcement on Usenet. "ICTF" is going to be only an advisory group for ECO members. They will make recommendations about newsgroups that might be 'dangerous' to carry, and will only react on individual articles when they are informed about articles that would be illegal to keep on the news servers. The "ICTF" plans to use a modified Cancel message format that will only affect their members' servers. He says that the press release was not addressed to the net (well, they tried their best to hide it...) but to journalists with no clue. Of course, political harm has been done, but I am glad that the Social Democratic Party's net expert has severly critizised this censorship attempt in a press release and on Usenet. For those who can read German (if you can't you'll sure find the most important news on Declan's international censorship page), I have put up a web page on "ICTF" at http://www.thur.de/ulf/zensur/ In September, we will see what they are really going to do other than issuing bogus press releases.

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Re: PBS show
by Joseph M. Reagle Jr. 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:26 PM 6/12/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: >I caught the show and thought it was pretty good, all in all. I thought so too? When is part II coming on? (I hope it didn't come right after that, I had to run.) Next week? >I personally despise the term "nerd," but I won't get into that here. Ahhh... it makes them happy. What I find most unnapealing is the unabashed, "I don't have a life, I live with a computer" mentality. I was rather taken with that mentality myself for a bit (and I'm sure it contributed to the RSI), but even then I would have found it painfully difficult to only associate with one "culture" and only do one thing all day long. Maybe "nerds" over do it, but they do do other things, like play magic, or assasin, D&D, or whatever. <grin> And the most interesting/brilliant computer people that I run into _have_ other interests beyond computers. >first employee hired by Jobs and Woz. Personally, my first personal >computer was a Processor Technology SOL, as I thought the Apple II looked >too much like a toy. Shows you what I knew.) The thing that startled me, was the contrary temporal perspective. Watching it I felt like, "Hey! I remeber that, I used an Apple II in kindergarden to write LOGO," or though I didn't have an Altair, I had a Bailey Arcade. No one here probably remembers, but it was a kick ass game playing (the best at the time) and programmable machine. I remember belonging to a mailing-list club and getting a thick envolope of type written code that I'd dutifully punch into a calculator like entry pad. (All ~20 keys for quadrupely overloaded!!) The cool thing was it had cool (c-64 like) peeks and pokes and you could call a plethora of the pregenerated graphical things from your own code. Then there was always saving it to the audio tape... <ack> Ok, so that is the nostalgia bit (hey I remember that), the other bit was a, wow that was a long time ago. Looking at PC-history always feels like a contradiction in time. _______________________ Regards, Laziness is no more than the habit of resting before you get tired. -Jules Renard Joseph Reagle http://farnsworth.mit.edu/~reagle/home.html reagle(a)mit.edu E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65 BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E

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