December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: The Earliest CP Remailer *DID* Emphasize Anonymity
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:05 AM 9/2/96 -0700, Tim wrote: >No, the focus was at _least_ as much on providing anonymity as on >protection from eavesdroppers or traffic analysts. More so, actually. >How do I know this? Well, I was the one who did the presentation on >Chaumian mixes at the first meeting, describing them as remailers and using >paper envelopes-within-envelopes to illustrate the concept. >Later that day, in the "Crypto Anarchy Game" we played to educate the Thanks for the history correction; I got involved with Cypherpunks about a year after the initial meeting/game, so I'm going on other people's comments about the intent of mixes and remailers. Out of curiousity, did either spam or blackmail show up during the first run of the game? >And all of the early uses were explicitly to anonymize the sender, not to >deter eavesdropping (which conventional crypto works well for, anyway). Keeping the sender's identity hidden from the recipient is a different problem than keeping either of them hidden from Untrusted Third Parties. Conventional crypto is fine for keeping message content secure from eavedroppers, but isn't enough to prevent traffic analysis; that requires either mixes or at least message pools or broadcasts. > Kleinpaste .... Julf .... I've also been pleased by how long Julf's remailer stayed in business. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> # You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto

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Assassination Politics Question
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 06:10 PM 9/2/96 -0500, correspondent wrote: >If there are more than one accurate prediction for an even, how will >CP Server will allocate the prizes? What made me think of that is >that, only in the case of famous peoples, a very smart individual >might make a prediction simply out of being smart and informed. To a first approximation, they could split the reward among the correct guessers. This is an issue that I considered in some detail a year ago, but which (surprisingly enough) hasn't been raised by others. As I pointed out in AP part 1, it is necessary to reduce "shotgun guesses" among people who simply guess a date (or many dates) and make a bet. That's why I included the system of requiring the predictor to include a payment with the prediction, in such a way that the prediction remains anonymous while the included money is always paid to the AP organization. This might initially appear to be a burden to the potential "guesser"/killer, but in fact if he understands the reason for it he'll want the system in place: It's one of the main ways to avoid the situation where multiple people make guesses for a particular person and date, and thus it would tend to ensure that the successful "guessor" is the only one to make that guess. Some of my analysis in AP part 1 was superficial and not really accurate, because in the example it gave, it suggested that the amount of money that would have to be included might be as little as 1/1000th of the reward money. However, chances are it'll usually be somewhat higher for this reason: Let's say a person does something REALLY AWFUL, such as Jeffrey Dahmer or another multiple murderer. Suddenly, he goes from completely anonymous to Public Enemy #1. One would suppose that if AP was operating "efficiently," he'd be dead in a week. However, if indeed he's dead in a week, and you only have to pay 1/1000th per day to place your bet on his demise, you could (hypothetically) make your bet for all seven days, paying a total of 7/1000th of the prize, and assuming the death occurred any day that week you'd be guaranteed to share in that prize. But that's the problem: You'd only _share_ in that prize, because many other people would get the same idea and they'd make similar bets, and the thing would simply turn into a Lotto-type game. The potential killer out there, aware of this problem, would hesitate to make his bet under those circumstances, because it is almost certain he'd lose at least part of the prize to others. The result would be a great deal of suspense, because nobody would know when somebody is actually going to place a prediction and carry out a killing. The AP organization would rake in the money from all those bets, but the killing would be delayed and the betting public would become unhappy. At some point the "prediction" donations would slow down, and perhaps a killer would take this as a cue to actually make his prediction. One way to avoid this is to carefully adjust the amount of payment that's required with the "prediction," raising it _just_enough_ to deter all but "informed guessing" among people who know what's going to happen. Or, at least, to reduce "uninformed guessing" to a level which doesn't dramatically affect the fulfillment of the donations. The problem with this is that this price-setting would be a lot of work, and is not likely to produce the "right" price. It would be somewhat akin to the kind of central planning that the communists never did very well. The problem with trying to set a price like this is that to do it right, requires WAY too much knowledge, knowledge that will often only be known by a small number of people that you can't identify. Perhaps the most obvious solution is to allow the free market to decide how much a given prediction is worth. In other words, the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith. Instead of asking for some specific amount of money along with any given prediction, simply announce that along with a prediction the predictor ought to include some portion of digital cash, although there would be no minimum amount required. Assuming the associated prediction turns out to be true, the reward fund will be distributed on a pro-rated basis, divided up based on the amount of prediction. For example, if you're the killer and you include a dollar with your prediction, and I'm a random, guessing predictor and I include a dime, you get 1/1.1 of the reward and I get 0.1/1.1. Had you included $10 with your prediction, you'd have won 10.00/10.10, and I'd get 0.1/10.10. Sure, the amount a predictor included might be as little as a dime, and if that's the only correct prediction he'll get the entire amount of the reward. But a killer would be stupid to ONLY include a dime, because somebody else could, likewise, include a dime per day for a prediction for a given person, and then he'd get half of the reward if nobody else did the same thing. And since it would only cost him $0.10 per day or $36.50 per year for a given person, he'd be dollars ahead to do this. It should be clear that a person who really KNEW that the target would die on a particular day would want to include enough digital cash to help ensure that he's the beneficiary of a good fraction of the reward, ideally most or all of it. On the other hand, he won't want to include so much that it's "too much" a proportion of the reward itself, since the payment is non-refundable and it reduces his net reward. The random guesser likewise wants to maximize his share, but unlike the killer does not have the specific knowledge that the death will occur on that particular day. With this system, the market is responsible for finding its own equilibrium point. The AP organization need not decide how likely a given death is, and how much money to ask for. Its job is made substantially simpler. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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[BEATING A NOT QUITE DEAD] Passive Trojan [HORSE] (was:Re: HAZ-MAT virus)
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>The key to the success is that the application in question has to be >compromised to respond to these codes, either by design or by hacking. >Either way the individual responsible must modify the execution >mechanism, not just the data itself. A well-written program is hard to exploit, but badly written programs can often be exploited in ways that allow execution of untrusted code. For instance, the fingerd bug exploited so spectacularly by Robert Morris handed a program more input that it was ready to accept, and the program stupidly kept writing the input into the array, past the end, and out into the stack, where it could be later interpreted as executable code. If a popular GIF or JPEG interpreter was written that badly, you could possibly devise a GIF that lies about how big it is and encourages the program to scribble on its stack. Now, there probably aren't any like that, and it'd probably have to be Netscape or MSIE or Lview to be widespread enough to make an attack like that worthwhile. (I'd bet on MSIE, of the three of them :-) Does Microsoft have some sort of Really Cool Extension to JPEG, allowing Macros for Self-Modifying JPEGs, trying to out-do Netscape's animated GIFs?) >Let's see -current examples of computing items with this kind of a >"feature"... magic cookies, macros, OLE, DDE, MS Objects, JAVA, and the >list keeps growing. Back when Good Times came out, everyone denied that it was possible for there to be any risk from a text file (though, as I pointed out, escape-sequence hacks have been used occasionally for over 15 years), and not long after that, the MSWord Macro Viruses started appearing. Bad Code can't always be hacked usefully, but it can always be hacked... # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> # You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto

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Re: The Esther Dyson Flap
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:59 AM 9/3/96, Chuck Thompson wrote: >I don't quite understand the position taken by Mr. Assange and Mr. Unicorn >regarding recent statements attributed to Ms. Dyson. I would appreciate >some additional insight. > >It appears as though they are both critical of statements (taken out of >context according to Dyson) because of her position with the EFF. It >appears that they both believe that she has no right to her opinion if it is >contradictory to the policy of the EFF. Certainly no one is suggesting she should have her right of free speech taken away from her, as a citizen. Rather, these are precarious times for the future of the Net, with actions in many countries, including the U.S. to restrict the Net in various ways. Esther Dyson is in an influential postition, not just because of her new role as Chairman of the EFF. Anytime a person of her influence is seen to be supporting limitations on what private citizens can communicate to others or to the public at large, this is cause for worry. (As both John Gilmore and Stanton McCandlish have noted, anonymity has a long history in the United States. From the Federalist Papers, to anonymous leafletting (upheld by the Supreme Court), to anonymous letters to the editor, to the basic architecture of the Postal System and the phone system, anonymity has been with us for a long time. Esther Dyson says that anonymity on the Net can do more damage than anonymity in other forums, and thus may need to be regulated and restricted in various ways. I disagree, as "the Net of a Million Lies" (to use Vinge's term) has grown up with anonymity, and few people take the anonymous (or not) rants and charges made in the millions per day with the same degree of certainty they take print comments. Put another way, there is no clear and present danger. And the Net makes for effective counterspeech. As free speech advocates note, the proper remedy for bad speech is more speech. (The links between "free speech" and "anonymity" are fairly obvious, and curtailing one curtails the other. "Congress shall make no law restricting speech" says nothing about anonymous speech being subject to regulation.) Further, the computerized nature of Net speech makes other remedies available as well. For example, reputation-ratings services. And digital signatures (to preclude forged comments). Speech on the Net closely resembles idiots, scholars, dweebs, and scoundrels ranting in public parks. Sometimes they accuse the mayor of adultery, sometimes they rant about UFOs, sometimes they merely utter obscenities. All are potentially dangerous, potentially ignorable, potentially humorous. And yet in none of these cases is there a demand that identification be produced, that one's papers be in order, that a "free speech license" be produced upon demand by the authorities. (Some might say that the physical personna of the speaker means that a means of last resort--apprehending the person--exists to track down a speaker of illegal thoughts, and that this is the kind of last resort that is currently lacking for Net speech. Perhaps. But this very same lack is evidenced with anonymous pamphlets, with anonymous pieces written for newsletters (where even an editor may not know the author), and with phone calls, say, to radio call-in programs. Clearly someone calling "The Howard Stern Show" and making a preposterous, or even illegal, claim is reaching many more people than is some anonymous message to a Usenet newsgroup. Again, where is the clear and present danger with anonymous Net speech that would justify (putatively) greater restrictions on Net speech than other speech channels have?) >Pouncing on someone, without knowing all the facts, who is vulnerable >because of their position smacks of dirty politics - it is distasteful. Why >not ask for the facts from the source? Then state your opinions or make >your threats about not contributing financially. Well, many of us did not pounce. Speaking for myself, I strongly suspected that the newspaper article had summarized a more-nuanced point and had effectively taken just a convenient sound bite. (Also, I'd heard Dyson speak on anonymity issues before, and knew her to have some doubts about full-blown crypto anarchy.) Now that she has somewhat clarified what it was she actually said, more issues have been raised. I believe she does not understand the problems implicit in trying to provide "accountability" for online speech. What if, for example, I offer to forward things I receive to various online forums? Am I then violating a law by "anonymizing" a message? Am I supposed to check identities? (How?) Are remailers to be declared illegal? If not, all other "accountability" laws go out the window. This is the "knife edge," or "fork in the road," I've long talked about. If anonymity is outlawed, it will take draconian measures to enforce it--citizen-unit ID cards, officially issued encryption keys, escrow, monitoring of communications, massive penalties to deter illegal use of encryption, and other police state measures. On the other hand, if enough degrees of freedom are left untouched, the result is a growing, expanding crypto anarchy. Government will find itself powerless to control commerce (handled via encrypted channels), will find it doesn't know the True Names of various Net entities, and will end up being chased into an enclave of things it _can_ control. My strong hunch is that no stable solutions lie between these two extremes. This is one of those "decision points" for modern society, with attractors pulling the solution to one side or another. We know which side we stand on. It's possible that Esther Dyson is finding herself on the other side, alongside Dorothy Denning, Louis Freeh, Donn Parker, and the other advocates of "responsible freedom." (Anytime you hear someone speaking of "responsible freedom," look out.) I don't call her our enemy. Perhaps she just hasn't thought things through as deeply as many of us have. Given that I think EFF has pretty much lost any role it may have once had, for a variety of reasons we're probably all tired of hearing about, I'm not too worried about what the EFF says or does on this issue. I'm more worried, to be honest, that a person as influential _for other reasons_ as Esther Dyson is talking about responsible freedom and the need to limit certain forms of speech. --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I 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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LInteger Version 0.1: A C++ MPILIB
by janke＠unixg.ubc.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- LInteger is a C++ library designed to allow programmers to create and perform arithmetic on objects representing nearly arbitrary precision integers. Thanks to C++'s support for operator overloading, the use of the large integers in this library should be nearly as easy as the use of regular int's. In fact, much code which performs arithmetic on regular int's can be converted to code to perform the same arithmetic on arbitrary precision integers merely by substituting "LInteger" for "int". This library is free for both commercial and non-commercial use. (See the COPYRIGHT notice included in the source distribution for exact details.) The current version of this library is only implemented for i386+ processors, and will, probably, only compile unhacked under gcc. Additionally, it has only been tested on the Linux operating system, though I am fairly confident that it will compile, unhacked, under the OS/2 and Windows versions of gcc. (Please let me know if you get it to work!) The basic multiprecision methods are implemented in i386+ assembly language for high speed. Multiplication is performed recursively resulting in O(lg 3) performance. Modular multiplication can be performed via Montgomery representations for a noticeable performance gain when a large number of these modular multiplications are performed. HTML documentaion for all public methods is included. There is currently no pseudo-random or probable prime number generation included. These are my highest priorities for the next release which will, hopefully, come out shortly after I read Rabin-Miller. :) A link to the latest version of this library can be found at http://www.interchg.ubc.ca/janke/linteger/index.html Once you have the file linteger-v0.1.tar.gz, uncompress and untar it with tar -zxvf linteger-v0.1.tar.gz. Next, cd to the newly created directory linteger-v0.1 and read the file README for details on how to proceed. The message digests for linteger-v0.1.tar.gz are MD5: B518B338D59A8376095B9CAD74EA2E16 SHA: 445D8D1555DC18AB0DF47B9B0381F0B07D4CB644 HAVAL: 53774BA2BF60116DF9F0F476913252188DFD9D3828D19B6795BC14C19EFA7FEE -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3ia Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBMitSJR6H/su8/YEZAQH3lwQAsBpNY0rEW1U5vq5hkxdnqxgk1ZZtSV3K 5gTlYu7Z3OAqsqC62Qi7LlkI2dzhrNWYr/G+OXdFfCaHfBcNlePgHsj6xF4oCy3U iGy9yiCxP7Xs4xb8CjHYkW7S/HfVwyiY2AMxGJ/YfFzvi1MJTIT2A8z4Par5qwWe XuG7XztGzAI= =wq2q -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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The most ridiculous SPAM in my lifetime
by geek＠algebra.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This is the American reincarnation of Ostap Bender. Next spam from him will be about interplanetary chess congress, no less I am sure. Here's what his Web page says (excerpt): IRS> The Internet Registration Service Has Created An On-Line Service That IRS> Will Simultaneously Register Your Web Site With The Top 400 Internet IRS> Directories And Search Engines Operating On The Internet. IRS> IRS> The Proper Registration Of Your Web Site In These Directories And Search IRS> Engines Will Insure You That When Your Potential Customers Perform A IRS> "Net Search," Your Web Site Will Be Included In The "Search Results," And IRS> Your Web Site Will Become A Selection For Anyone Searching The Internet IRS> For The Products Or Services Your Company Sells. IRS> IRS> To Compete In This Fast Paced "Information Age" You Must Secure Your IRS> Place In As Many Of These Directories And Search Engines As Possible... If IRS> You Do Not... The Competition Will Simply Pass You By. IRS> IRS> In Order For You To Complete Your Internet Registration, All You Need To IRS> Do Is Complete The On-Line Registration Forms On The Following Pages IRS> And Submit Them To Our Offices Along With Your Registration Fee Of ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ IRS> $395. You Can Pay Your Registration Fee By Credit Card, Or By Company ^^^^^^^ IRS> Check. If You Are Paying By Check, Please Make Your Check Payable To: IRS> Internet Registration Service. And Mail It To: >From nking(a)pvnet.com.mx Mon Sep 2 22:13:17 1996 Return-Path: nking(a)pvnet.com.mx Received: from galaxy.galstar.com (ichudov(a)galaxy.galstar.com [204.251.80.2]) by manifold.algebra.com (8.7.5/8.6.11) with SMTP id WAA13038 for <geek(a)algebra.com>; Mon, 2 Sep 1996 22:13:15 -0500 Received: from neptuno.pvnet.com.mx ([200.23.229.18]) by galaxy.galstar.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id WAA07844 for <geek(a)algebra.com>; Mon, 2 Sep 1996 22:00:37 -0500 Received: from nking.pvnet.com.mx ([200.23.229.43]) by neptuno.pvnet.com.mx (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id VAA27361 for <geek(a)algebra.com>; Mon, 2 Sep 1996 21:59:40 -0500 Message-ID: <322B57BF.704(a)pvnet.com.mx> Date: Mon, 02 Sep 1996 21:55:11 +0000 From: NORMAN KING <nking(a)pvnet.com.mx> Reply-To: nking(a)pvnet.com.mx Organization: Internet Registration Committee X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0b7Gold (Win95; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: geek(a)algebra.com Subject: IMPORTANT MESSAGE!!! Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit IMPORTANT MESSAGE!!! Dear Sirs, It Has Recently Come To The Attention Of The Internet Registration Committee That Your Web-Site Has Not Been Properly Registered On The Internet Or On The World Wide Web. This Could Result In Your Potential Customers Being Unable To Locate You Or Find Your Web-Site On The World Wide Web. Proper Web-Site Registration On The Internet Is Required In Order For Your Web-Site To Be Successful. There Are Currently More Than 400 Hundred Internet Directories And Search Engines Operating On The Internet. It Will Be Necessary For You To Register Your Web-Site With The Majority Of These Directories And Search Engines In Order For Your Web-Site To Become Easily Located By Your Potential Customers. If You Do Not Become Registered With A Large Number Of These Internet Directories, Your Web Site Could Become Impossible For Your Customers To Locate, Your Web-Site Will Become Inaccessable, Therefore Becoming Dormant, Unprofitable And Inactive. In Order To Resolve This Situation, We Urge You To Contact Our Web-Site Registration Service At The Internet Address Below By Clicking Your Mouse On This Link: http://adgrafix.com/mail/irs.html It Is Imperative That This Situation Be Resolved Immediately! We Hope That We Can Help You To Resolve Your Registration Problem As Soon As Possible. Thank-You, Sincerely, NORMAN KING - Administrator Internet Registration Service

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Re: Los Angeles Times article on Helsingius and anon.penet.fi
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:06 PM 9/2/96 -0700, Stanton McCandlish wrote: >You have to have an anonymizing system that crosses a dozen or so >national boundaries to make such an attack infeasible for most large >organizations. You'd need a system that crossed 50 or more widely >disparate jurisdictions to make it infeasible to large intelligence or >law enforcement agencies, and even then you'd have to NOT have broad >international agreements, such as you'd called for or it would be trivial >to force all the remailers in the chain to cough up personally >identifiable information. > >> My assumption is that there will be a wide variety of Net communities with >> different rules/regulations/attitudes towards anonymity that would apply ex > >This is already true. > >> some kind of international sanctions; I think that's appropriate. > >That's what bugs me - if there are some kind of sanctions coming from a >governmental body (I may be misinterpreting you here), that's probably >enough to kill private and well as public anonymity on the Net. > >Incidentally, if something does happen from a governmental direction to >kill online anonymity, it will probably be readily broadenable to all >other media. At the risk of sounding like a broken record (a phrase that will get ever more obscure now that we're in the CD era...) that's why I pushing AP (Assassination Politics.) While anonymous remailers and chains are great for security, there ought to be some final bulwark against violations of our security and anonymity that doesn't depend on legal arguments, or even technical refinements of encryption. When organizations such as CoS can seek Penet data with impunity, and when courts in Finland can let them, we're not safe. Remember the saying, "The best defense is a good offense." Playing as we do now, it's like saying, "We'll try our best to maintain our security, but if it fails too bad." I propose changing it to, "We'll try our best to maintain our security, but if you manage to violate it anyway you're dead." As rude as it may sound, one of the best advantages is that this defense is free while it's not needed, and is pretty cheap when called upon. In case anybody has any residual doubts as to whether we should enforce our rights in this way, consider this: if we've decided that we have the right to anonymity and security (through remailers and encryption) EVEN IF some people might misuse those tools to cause crime and potentially even death (which, of course, would be an exceedingly rare outcome) then I suggest we've already accepted the principle that our rights to use these tools daily are more important than the possibility of a rare negative outcome. (in the same sense that occasional fatal car accidents don't justify taking away all cars.) And if that's the case, we should also be willing to DELIVER a rare negative outcome to anyone who acts to take these rights away, particularly if such a person is adequately forewarned of our intentions. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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POT_hot
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Foreign Affairs, Sep/Oct, Lead Essay: "Postmodern Terrorism. The terrorism of the future may be far more destructive than terrorism as we have known it." An informative survey and pot-heat by Walter Laqueur. Terrorism's prospects, often overrated by the media, the public, and some politicians, are improving as its destructive potential increases. Terrorism has replaced wars between nations of the 1800s and 1900s. In the future, terrorists will be individuals or like-minded people working in very small groups. An individual may possess the technical competence to steal, buy, or manufacture the weapons he or she needs for a terrorist purpose. The ideologies such individuals and minigroups espouse are likely to be even more aberrant than those of larger groups. And terrorists working alone or in very small groups will be more difficult to detect unless they make a major mistake or are discovered by accident. Society has also become vulnerable to a new kind of terrorism, in which the destructive power of both the individual terrorist and terrorism as a tactic are infinitely greater. The advanced societies of today are more dependent every day on electronic information. That exposes enormous vital areas of national life to mischief or sabotage by any computer hacker, and concerted sabotage could render a country unable to function. Why assassinate a politician or indiscriminately kill people when an attack on electronic switching will produce far more dramatic and lasting results? If the new terrorism directs its energies toward information warfare, its destructive power will be exponentially greater than any it wielded in the past -- greater even than it would be with biological and chemical weapons. The single successful one could claim many more victims, do more material damage, and unleash far greater panic than anything the world has yet experienced. ----- http://jya.com/pothot.txt (30 kb) POT_hot (in 2 parts)

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Re: DON'T Nuke Singapore Back into the Stone Age
by Hallam-Baker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

One of the things that you are probably not aware of is that your government tracks every phone call you make and has a complete list of everyone who you comunicate with. This information is then used to identify potential dissidents who can be "monitored" - just like in the old USSR. I know that this is a fact because I know people in the business. They also tell me that they prefer to dissuade people from entertaining guests at home. The assumption being that the more private conversations take place the more opportunities to criticise the government there are. >Now, what makes you think that citizen of Country A has the power or >rights to tell politicians of Country B what to do and what they cannot >do? What makes you think that the concept "country" has any legitimacy whatsoever? The Web is not politically neutral. I intended the Web to be an agent of social change. The corruption of the present social order should be apparent from the fact that we destroy food while people starve, the majority of the worlds population have no political rights and political participation is only available to a tiny minority. The Web will have an effect whenever there is an internal inconsistency within a social order. The interaction of opposed cultures via the Web will reveal these inconsistencies in a manner that requires them to be resolved. The people of Singapore are not going to change their government because the US people convince them of the superiority of US culture. While it is patriotic for a US citizen to believe a-priori in US superiority it is unpatriotic for anyone else. What will change the government of Singapore is revealing the internal inconsistencies of the governments claims. Phill

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Anonymity and free speech
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Instead of discussing whether or not Esther Dyson or other EFF board members are personally comfortable with anonymity, let's talk about whether or not the EFF and its board members believe that the First Amendment provides a right to speak and associate anonymously. (I believe that the First Amendment gives everyone the right to wear a t-shirt which says "I am an asshole." But I have no interest in wearing such a t-shirt. And so on.) I believe that it does, and that the Supreme Court has already made that clear. In cypherpunks(a)toad.comparticular, I'm thinking of _NAACP v. Alabama ex rel Patterson_, _Talley_, and _McIntrye v. Ohio Elections Commission_. (Sorry for the lack of cites; 95% of my stuff is still in boxes and I'm sending this via laptop and a Ricochet modem.) If the right to speak/associate in "real life" is protected by the First Amendment, I don't see why it wouldn't be on computers and networks which are located inside the United States. And if that right is based upon the Constitution, it will take a constitutional amendment or a big sea change in the Supreme Court to take it away. (I wonder if the decision in _McIntrye_ would have gone the other way if Ms. McIntrye were selling drugs via anonymous message pools instead of discussing school funding via windshield flyers.) Discussions about the utility of anonymity would be more useful if we were designing a communication system or a constituion from scratch; but that's not our current situation. Is there serious debate about whether or not the Constitution and the Internet allow anonymous communication? (I'm not asking a rhetorical question. If someone's familiar with an argument to the contrary, please tell me about it.) Both the Constitution and the Internet are difficult to modify quickly; we probably have anonymity (like it or not) for at least a few more years. (I'm not trying to imply that US law is the only law, or that the rest of the world doesn't existy. But I don't know poo about the right to anonymity in other nations; and to a certain extent anonymity anywhere on the Internet is the same as anonymity everywhere on the Internet. Are other readers aware of other jurisdictions where anonymous speech is considered a right?) ---- Greg Broiles gbroiles(a)netbox.com http://www.io.com/~gbroiles

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