December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Politcal Action Toolkit now available
by David HM Spector 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

...not having much in the way of sleep since reading Louis Freeh's testimony and his plans to assault the US Constitution I decided to do something about it, and try to develop something that would help others get involved too... I would like to announce the availability of a Personal Political Action Kit (PersPAK). It contains full databases of members of the House and the Senate and may be used for mail merging, faxing (senate only at the moment, house members hopefully this week with the next release), email campaigns, as well as plain old phone calls. The data were culled from the House and Senate directories that are on the Web, and are current as of September 3, 1997. The datasets are provided in two formats, tab-delimited and as an Excel spreadsheet. Two sample letters are included that show how to use the mail-merge features of Office95/97, along with a README file that will step users through the basics of using this kit and offers some hints on what to say -- and sometimes more importantly NOT to say -- in a letter to their congress-folk. The kit can be accessed at: http://www.zeitgeist.com/crypto I plan on updating this toolkit with more features soon with some more tools, and the ability to send mail/faxes to entire committees (as opposed to picking congress persons/senators by individually), some Java Applets to auto-generate letters, etc. I'm making it available under the GNU Public License, so feel free to use this kit as a base for other tools. Constructive criticism/ideas may be sent to perspak(a)zeitgeist.com regards, _DHMS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- David HM Spector spector(a)zeitgeist.com Network Design & Infrastructure Security -.-. --- -. -. . -.-. - .-- .. - .... .- -- .- - . ..- .-. .-. .- -.. .. --- "New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled, the humiliating question arises, 'Why then are you not taking part in them?'" --H. G. Wells

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Re: FW: Why I Pay Too Much in Taxes
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 18:27 5/5/96, blanc wrote: >I have a great idea - let's start a closed, elite mailing list for >"Offshorepunks". >Uni, Sandy, & Duncan et al could "show us how it's done". The list already exists. It was supposed to contain essays by Sandy and Duncan. It was called "Privacy 101". After two articles hyping the great info about to follow... nothing. Utter silence. [What ever happend, anyway?] Disclaimer: My opinions are my own, not those of my employer. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.

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"Matchcode" technology sparks privacy flames.....
by Will Rodger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 One of the main assertions made by both sides in the privacy battles is people must be informed when a third party is gathering "personal" information about them. But what constitutes personally identifiable information, anyway? Where do "real" privacy concerns begin? Below is a story I wrote about Imgis Inc. - a little-noticed company whose cookies are among the most common on the Net. If you don't them now, look in your cookie file. Chances are you'll find several marked "imgis.com." Imgis thought it knew what the privacy concerns were with its technology. Others thought otherwise. Within two days of hearing about impending opposition, the company apparently changed its views. Note that the technology described is not yet in use. from http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/content/inwo/0919/inwo0006.html Ad tracking technology sparks new privacy war By Will Rodger September 19, 1997 11:42 AM PDT Inter@ctive Week Online An effort supported by two of the world's largest advertising brokers to tailor advertising to individual Internet users may pose the greatest threat yet to the protection of privacy in cyberspace, activists said. Under a system due for rollout in the first half of 1998, the Web advertising service Imgis Inc. will begin comparing detailed demographic information about Internet users to its stock of Web- ready ads, sending Net users only those ads Imgis determines are best matched to their interests. The company, based in Los Angeles, will use a system of "match codes" to identify individual users. Match codes are unique identifiers used to pick information about consumers out of databases, much as banks use Social Security numbers to identify customers. Under the plan, when Internet users visit Web sites carrying Imgis ads, participating Internet service operators would send Imgis a match code corresponding to a demographic database of 140 million consumers maintained by database marketer Metromail Corp. Imgis would then compare users' names, addresses, estimated incomes and automobile ownership against an inventory of advertisements. Thus, a white, single 25-year-old man living in Dubuque, Iowa, could see an ad that differs from that seen by a 65-year-old American Indian woman living in Manhattan. Yet, at the same time, the system has the ability to track the movements of any Internet user across participating sites, potentially revealing a dizzying array of confidential information, including users' reading habits, health concerns, political inclinations and religious affiliations. Imgis executives insist they won't do so, but the danger remains, critics said. Shelley Pasnik, an analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Media Education, slammed the proposal. "This is huge. This is the most detailed proposal I've seen and probably the most significant threat to privacy I've heard of," she said. "This is a really big deal; this is a real step back," added Tara Lemmey, chief executive officer of Narrowline Inc., a San Francisco- based Internet advertising firm and a member of the TRUSTe privacy consortium. "This is a case where it's really important to step back and say we've really crossed the line." Imgis, which specializes in Internet advertising, will place ads sold by Petry Media Corp. and Katz Media Group Inc. Exposure of the plan follows four days of hearings on cyberspace privacy at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission last June. Though direct marketers were often on the defensive over their use of surreptitious techniques in gathering consumer information in cyberspace, the FTC tentatively concluded that the industry should police itself before the government takes action to protect privacy on the Internet. But the Imgis case "accentuates all the concerns we've been talking about," said David Medine, associate director of credit practices at the FTC and moderator of most of the sessions. "Up until today, I think that users naturally assumed that users were anonymous through their Internet service providers when they surfed the Web. I don't think that you can say that anymore. If that has changed, it represents a dramatic shift in the relationship between the user and the Internet." Medine said the FTC would expect Imgis to disclose all aspects of its data gathering through participating Web sites and ISPs if it begins using match codes to tailor ad delivery. In an interview Tuesday, Imgis Chief Executive Officer Chuck Berger told Inter@ctive Week that his company had signed two Internet service providers, GTE Corp. and Netcom On-Line Communication Services Inc., to carry the service sometime in the first half of 1998. At the time, Berger said he believed there were no privacy concerns with "anonymous match codes," since Imgis had decided not to record which sites users visit. "Once we pull your ad out of our database, we're done," Berger said. "We're not following you around the Web." Imgis abruptly altered its story Thursday after Inter@ctive Week found that privacy advocates were up in arms over the technology. Marisa Verson, a principal with San Francisco public relations firm Interactive Communications Inc., which represents Imgis, said Imgis never had agreements with GTE or Netcom. "GTE is nothing," she said. "If Chuck communicated that, I don't know how he even thinks that. This thing isn't even in the speculative stage until the privacy thing is down." GTE spokesman Bill Kula confirmed Thursday morning that "we do use Imgis - or plan to - related to using actual public billing files." But "there's not a contract between the two companies today." Netcom officials said they spoke with Imgis more than a year ago about the match code proposal but had discarded the idea over privacy concerns. "I have absolutely zero plans to be involved with this," said Netcom advertising director Terry Pittman. "Whatever we do needs to be in synch with some rules of the road so that people know what we do with their information." Imgis officials, stung by criticism of their plan, said they are moving swiftly. Though Berger earlier described Netizens who worry about their privacy online as a "vocal minority," Imgis marketing director David Kopp said the company is moving to develop some way of disclosing how it gathers information online and what it does with it. "We'll come up with a policy that makes sense," Kopp said. "These issues are very big issues. The main reason we haven't pursued the product is we're not entirely confident we have a set of standards that would work. Without informed consent you can't do this sort of thing." Kopp said the company would soon contact TRUSTe for guidance. TRUSTe Chairman Lori Fena said she hoped to hear from Kopp soon. "We mandate full disclosure," she said. "We expect full disclosure at all the Web sites, so this would no longer be a back-door deal." The FTC's Medine agreed. "It's going to take enough firms getting beat up in the press to make people realize they have to think about this first - before they develop the technology," he said. Imgis can be reached at www.imgis.com The FTC can be reached at www.ftc.gov -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQA/AwUBNCQghdZgKT/Hvj9iEQLu5ACfSVkRIbX8iYE7EgKnwV2FIZK82fUAoIBl 2TyMisA624IB1nWUwhI3qx54 =08lI -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: WWW proxies?
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:37 PM 5/5/96, Mark M. wrote: >The same is also true for cpunk and penet-style remailers that do not use >encryption. You always have to trust remailer operators regardless of whether >encryption is used or not. The situation will become much better when there >is some way to chain proxies and encrypt to each individual proxy. If the >operator of a proxy is more trustworthy than the operators of any sites you >visit using the proxy, then you have nothing to lose. We haven't talked about traffic analysis of remailers and Web proxies much lately, so it bears repeating that: -- this is a little-studied subject -- that nobody has done--to my knowledge--a fairly detailed study of the traffic analysis that is possible -- that a model is lacking (I don't mean we don't have some ideas of what's important, but that we haven't filled in the details, figured out what sorts of correlations an analyst can make by looking at packet sizes, sending times, delivery times, etc.) -- the real world situation with remailers is that message volume is probably way too low for comfort (my presentation on remailers at the first CP meeting outlined a need for about 10 mixes, each mixing at least 10 messages of the same size before remailing...and 20 mixes each mixing 30 or more messages is much better...we are most likely far, far below this, for nearly all remailed messages. Fortunately, most remailed messages are either not critical or are being done for novelty, harassment, flaming, etc.). -- with Web proxies, the problem of traffic analysis (even with encryption, which I am taking for granted) becomes astronomically larger...all those commands sent to the site and stuff returned, and all in a "reasonable" amount of time! (How many of us will use a Web proxy in our current mode if we have to wait minutes to hours between actions? I'm not saying what the response times will be, as this will depend on mixing ratios, desired security, etc. But it is likely that "fast response" is counterproductive to the avoiding of traffic analysis.) (PipeNet-type schemes may help, depending on a bunch of details. So would "local mixes in cabinets," meaning, Web anonymizers with high bandwidth that do their mixing locally. They have to be "trusted," to some extent, but would help a lot. There are some gotchas.) -- I certainly believe the NSA has put at least an analyst or two on this problem, and probably long ago put together some models. We have a very long way to go before remailer networks are really up to snuff. --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: PGP and Pine?
by jordan＠Thinkbank.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

That reminds me that I have been meaning to send out what I use for PGP and ucbmail. First of all, since you can ~| outgoing messages, I don't need any support for sending. For receiving, there's two ways to 'edit' messages: 'e' invokes $EDITOR and 'v' invokes $VISUAL on a message. I actually use 'v' so I set $EDITOR (in my .mailrc) to ~/bin/mypgp which looks like this: #!/bin/csh pgp -f < $* | more So to read a PGP'd message, I just type 'e' ... Anyone else do something interesting with ucbmail? /jordan

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Re: 6 USAF Crashes in 7 days = InfoWar? (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Subject: Re: 6 USAF Crashes in 7 days = InfoWar? > Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 11:31:04 -0700 (PDT) > From: Mike Duvos <enoch(a)zipcon.net> > Why go in search of the complicated when stupidity is a perfectly > acceptable explanation? Well it really wasn't meant to be taken quite that literaly. It just seemed to me that a question of some import to this list might be how one tells such a statistical anomaly (if you'll allow me) from an actual concerted attack. What would the tale-tell's be for such a distinction? While full-blown war would not be hard to differentiate consider such an attack from a small group with an immediate and distinct goal as well as potential long-range goals. What sorts of processes and types of information would be of interest to a person who was tasked with evaluating such an occurance? Things like: - relationships between the history of the various participants, both mechanical and human - geographic relationships, weather comparisons, environmental conditions, etc. Consider your responce at first reading. That is a barrier that has to be jumped for such activities to be used effectively, wouldn't you think? This would indicate that an effective long-term strategy for a sect attack via the Internet would be advertising. Which would rule-out most real clandestine attacks as being from a small political or religous group. There is also the issue of talent recruitement and budget. So, with these sorts of issues in mind, what kinds of financial transactions might be of interest? And finaly, in such an environment can the elimination of non-GAK crypto really be effective? Is crypto really even an issue? Now consider, if you will, the requirements if we assume that we are under a concerted Pearl-Harbor attack from a rival 1st World power. How would that effect the issues discussed above? ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there | | be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. | | | | -Alan Greenspan- | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http:// www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Re: Why I Pay Too Much in Taxes
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 21:48 5/5/96, Alan Horowitz wrote: ><< " I paid approximately 60%...." >> > > >didn't the feudal vassels only pay 33% ? To paraphrase - I forget >which Presidential candidate of yore - "are you better off than you were >a thousand years ago?" > >ANd that's not even counting the interest you pay on your mortgage. Count >that, and the vassels were head and shoulders above Californians. Generally, the feudal subjects paid the Tithe. Yes, Robin Hood and his men fought the evil Sheriff of Nottingham for his crushing 10% tax. :-) [My last post in this off-topic thread.] Disclaimer: My opinions are my own, not those of my employer. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.

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Re: FW: Why I Pay Too Much in Taxes
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 06:27 PM 5/5/96 -0700, blanc wrote: >From: Black Unicorn (in reply to TCMay): > >> I have no doubt that "tax planning" works for some people, and I think >> certain people like Vince Cate may do well in places like Anguilla, >> essentially starting a business from scratch. I even have longterm hopes >> for tax havens, cyberspace tax havens, anonymous systems, etc. But this >> ain't happening soon. > >Here I'm not so sure I agree. Several of us are working on making it >happen, soon. >.................................................................................................. > > >I have a great idea - let's start a closed, elite mailing list for "Offshorepunks". >Uni, Sandy, & Duncan et al could "show us how it's done". Let's turn this around, shall we? I have a theory that within the next few years, one of the biggest users of these off-shore accounts will be government employees who see their worlds crashing down around them, and they want to be able to escape the country with their loot. Maybe the most useful task we could accomplish would be to identify them for later targeting. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Pearl Harbor Aggression (Was: 6 USAF Crashes in 7 days = InfoWar? (fwd)
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jim Choate wrote: >Now consider, if you will, the requirements if we assume that we are under a >concerted Pearl-Harbor attack from a rival 1st World power. How would that >effect the issues discussed above? For answer to this consider: There a number of countries who believe they are under just that kind of Pearl harbor attack from the US through high-tech information warfare, electronic surveillance and related crypto control demands, especially the requirement for GAK in US and foreign-made products. US leaders insistence that the US be 1st before all others in information technology, rightfully scares the shit out of our allies who are distrusting the US more and more, perhaps even giving them ideas about getting together with US enemies to beat back the Microsoft of nations. A counter-strike Pearl Harbor may be in the offing because of US belligerence and threat of Pearl Harboring others. (Recall the frequent invocation of this term by US reps, perhaps a clue to pre-emptive aggression in the works.) The harping of US leaders on unidentified threats is making non-US folks rather nervous, not being sure that the US may not turn on its allies for the slightest of missteps or demurs, and cut off the bountiful flow of global intel -- as the TLAs are now threatening Congressional committees. Crypto Czar Arons world consultations were apparently thinly veiled threats to compel GAK compliance. For an example, see a recent exchange on theukcrypto mail list between Ross Anderson and two DTI reps about the impact of US GAK policy: http://jya.com/dti-words.htm

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Guardian: Screw the Internet
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text X-Authentication-Warning: fma66.fma.com: majordomo set sender to owner-espam(a)lists.espace.net using -f X-Orig-From: rah-web <rah(a)shipwright.com> X-e$pam-source: Various X-Sender: rah(a)pop.sneaker.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 14:15:00 -0400 To: espam(a)intertrader.com From: Robert Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: Guardian: Screw the Internet Sender: owner-espam(a)lists.espace.net Precedence: bulk Reply-To: e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- This mail is brought to you by the e$pam mailing list --------------------------------------------------------------------- From: rah-web <rah(a)shipwright.com> Reply-To: rah(a)shipwright.com MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Robert Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: Guardian: Screw the Internet http://go2.guardian.co.uk:80/theweb/874505219-crypt.html Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; name="874505219-crypt.html" Content-Disposition: inline; filename="874505219-crypt.html" X-MIME-Autoconverted: from 8bit to quoted-printable by lbo.leftbank.com id LAA08197 [Image] Spooks on both sides of the Atlantic are intent on retaining their power to monitor the world's telecoms traffic, writes Duncan Campbell Screw the Internet INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES in the US have stepped up their campaign to control the flow of information over the Internet, counterattacking an unholy alliance of civil libertarians and business chiefs who back the introduction of secure encryption technologies to protect personal privacy and commercial data online. Last Thursday in Congress, lobbying by the FBI and the National Security Agency won amendments to a draft pro-encryption law known as Safe (Security and Freedom through Encryption). The House Intelligence Committee replaced rights to sell effective encryption systems to the world with regulations to ban even US citizens from using them. The agencies and their political backers are now demanding that any American whose electronic communications cannot immediately be read by US intelligence should, after January 2000, face up to five years imprisonment. Furthermore, they want the US to use its political and industrial power to force the rest of the world to follow suit. Battle resumes in Washington a week today, when the likely more sympathetic House Commerce Committee will provide its review of the Safe law for Congress to consider. That done, Congessional leaders and the White House will have to negotiate which version of the Safe bill is to be taken ahead. If the new version of the bill succeeds, it will be illegal in the US to make or sell encryption systems unless the government can break the code and have "immediate access" to the contents of messages or phone calls. In Britain, the new government has soon to decide what line to take in this little-understood war that has almost paralysed the development of electronic commerce. Under pressure to formulate standards, New Labour has to decide if it wants to face the economic penalties of giving in to the spooks. If the secret agencies win, the losers will also be ordinary users of electronic commerce or e-mail. Without encryption to scramble the contents of messages, reams of Internet traffic can be read easily, not just by intelligence agencies, but by miscreants with direct access to the Net through routers or local area networks. E-mail is less secure than an ordinary telephone call, since ordinary telephone calls are connected "point to point" by a precise route rather than being broadcast between routers and into networks. Without encryption, e-mail containing sensitive private information or financial details, such as credit card numbers, can be read at numerous points as messages pass through the Net. This complex but fundamental issue for everyone in the information society has been made politically more difficult by an initiative launched in the dying days of the last government. Just before the election was called, the Department of Trade and Industry unveiled its version of the US system for ensuring that the government could read everyone's private communications. The DTI's version is a network of licensed agencies that would provide (and keep copies of) everyone's encryption codes, or keys. If sent a warrant, these Trusted Third Parties, or TTPs, would hand over keys at one hour's notice - a less demanding requirement than the latest US plans, but no less absurd or impossible to engineer, say Internet specialists. Plans to hold everyone's keys in central registries have also been slammed for creating a huge security threat, because everyone would be at risk if crooks were able to get into the central database. DTI officials were unprepared for the torrent of protest, abuse and reasoned objection that has arrived on their desks since early this summer. The former government's proposals have, it is understood, attracted not a single unqualified supporter. They were condemned out of hand by industry leaders, academics and civil libertarians alike. David Svendsen, head of Microsoft in the UK, says that "the DTI's plans are unworkable, unwieldy and unacceptable. Setting up a bureaucratic structure to regulate encryption services will isolate the UK from global electronic commerce. It will force us all to look elsewhere for barrier-free encryption technology, while UK plc will foot the bill." The battle in the US Congress follows setbacks for the intelligence agencies, which have been fighting to stop effective encryption systems from being exported. Classifying encryption software as "munitions", the US government banned the export of systems with key lengths (see Cracking the code, opposite) long enough to make them uncrackable. Thus, while Americans who use Web software browsers to make "secure" credit card purchases benefit from built-in encryption with strong 128-bit keys, Europeans have until now been permitted to use only weakened and insecure 48-bit keys. In August, the US government gave in to commercial pressure to relax restrictions, and non-US users of software to browse the Internet are already being offered upgrades to provide full 128-bit security. The catch, which is not being advertised, is that the licencees must provide the US government with backdoor access to the new systems. The extent to which this area of information technology has been held back is already remarkable. It's now 20 years since fundamental advances in mathematics created unique but simple new ways of encoding messages, known as public key cryptography, that did away with the need to exchange keys or codebooks before encrypted messages could be sent. In 1977, long before the Net reached its modern form, three mathematicians - Rivest, Shamir and Adelman - showed how to implement this revolution. Their RSA algorithm allows users to create separate "public" and "private" keys. To use a public key crytopgraphy system to, say, send a private message to OnLine, you would first obtain OnLine's published key. Many Net users (but not yet OnLine) publish such keys on their Web sites or in directories. You then scramble the message using the public key, and send it. The message can be decoded using only a matching private key, which only Online would have. The RSA algorithm is available for use on the Net, or for file protection, using a program called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, whose inventor, Colorado computer consultant Phil Zimmermann, is a Net legend. His reward for inventing PGP was not scientific accolade, but arrest and prosecution by the FBI. For having created PGP, he was accused of exporting munitions. Charges against Zimmermann were dropped only last year. Recognising that there could never be uniform international agreement to lock away cryptography as nuclear weapons are locked away, governments and information acquisition agencies have tended instead to attempt covertly to regulate encryption. This has taken the form of patent secrecy orders, attacks on research funding, the undermining of the international standardisation of cryptography, the harassment of inventors and commercial organisations, and legislative campaigns to restrict their work. In the shadows behind these events hide communications intelligence agencies - the US National Security Agency and Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). For 50 years, they have harvested intelligence from monitoring the world's international communications network. This activity is threatened by large-scale encryption. Historically, huge codebreaking resources have been used to try to break the codes of hostile states. But to use the same methods and resources against the mass of ordinary international communications would be costly and futile. The scale of NSA operations is staggering. Tens of billions of messages are intercepted every year. All international communications by satellite or undersea cable, and many domestic communications can be collected by taps or via satellite interception stations. GCHQ's interception station at Morwenstow near Bude, Cornwall, was built almost 30 years ago to spy not on the Soviets but on the West's international communications satellites, Intelsat. NSA's and GCHQ's electronic tentacles still reach round the world, and into the heart of Western policy making. Within the DTI, the director of technology policy and innovation, David Hendon, makes no secret that a substantial input to his work comes from GCHQ. At the European Commission, a former official of GCHQ's Communications Electronic Security Group, David Herson, has been steering EU policy on information security. Critics such as Ross Anderson, the computer security specialist based at Cambridge university, have accused them of being stooges for NSA. The DTI has hired consultants to summarise the responses to their TTP proposals, and hope to publish a summary in the autumn, together with policy proposals. The risk is that officials are still locked into the same Neanderthal security agenda that once branded the Home Secretary a subversive threat to the nation. Advice to ministers trying to understand this most complex part of the IT brief will need to balance the UK's national economic interest against the concerns of security officials anxious to maintain the intelligence service's "special relationship" with the US. Until last week's events, US attempts to control strong encryption had faced setbacks. Three weeks ago, a federal judge in San Francisco ordered the US government not to take action against Chicago academic Daniel Bernstein if he published encryption software on the Net. Export restrictions, said Judge Marilyn Patel, violated Bernstein's constitutional right to free speech. And US attempts to lobby the European Union and the OECD into backing an international system of cryptographic controls have failed. Despite US support from Britain and France, both organisations have backed and encouraged open use of cryptography (albeit with qualifications). The continued campaign against effective cryptography is still being fuelled by the raising of alarms about the potentially antisocial use of the Net, including those which Net enthusiasts cynically dub the "Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse": terrorists, drug traffickers, paedophiles and organised crime. But the argument is specious. Forcing honest individuals and companies to turn over their keys or to use only licensed keys will not prevent criminals from using strong encryption outside of the mandatory system. Labour's policy, formulated before the election, had it right : "It is not necessary to criminalise a large section of the network-using public to control the activities of a very small minority of law-breakers." (http://www.labour.org.uk/views/info-highway/content.html) Last year, EU adviser and ex-GCHQ official David Herson was astonishingly candid about the real reason for playing on fears about the Net activities of terrorists and paedophiles. "Law enforcement is a protective shield for all the other governmental activities," he told two European journalists. "We're talking about foreign intelligence . . . that's what this is all about. Law enforcement is a smoke screen." If New Labour sticks to the policy adopted before the election, it should have little difficulty reaffirming its view that attempts to control the use of encryption technology are "wrong in principle, unworkable in practice, and damaging to the long-term economic value of the information networks". But if intelligence agency dinosaurs get their way, they will jeopardise not just personal privacy but the economic rewards of Net commerce. The winners will be those countries, such as Germany and many of those in Asia, that by rule of law or through commercial instinct stay resistant to NSA's and GCHQ's intelligence imperatives. [Duncan Campbell is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and not the Guardian's crime correspondent of the same name] 17 September 1997 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Where people, networks and money come together: Consult Hyperion http://www.hyperion.co.uk info(a)hyperion.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------- Like e$? Help pay for it! See <http://www.shipwright.com/beg.html> Or, for e$/e$pam sponsorship, <mailto:rah@shipwright.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------- --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

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