December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Schlafly on crypto
by Brad Dolan 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Subject: Clinton Is Trying to be Big Brother -- Phyllis Schlafly Column 8/8/96 Clinton Is Trying to be Big Brother August 8, 1996 by Phyllis Schlafly We hope the appropriate government agencies will soon solve the recent terrorist crimes and punish the criminals. But all Americans who care about civil liberties should vigorously resist President Clinton's attempt to use the terrorist attacks as an excuse to carry on his all-out war against the personal privacy of law-abiding Americans. This mind-set was first revealed in the Clinton health care bill, which would have given the government computer access to the medical records of all Americans. Fortunately, that totalitarian takeover of the health care industry was rejected. The Clinton Administration's education legislation now pending in Congress would put personal information about all schoolchildren -- academic, medical, attitudinal, behavioral, and family -- into an expanded Labor Market Information database available to the government, as well as to prospective employers. Now the Clinton Administration is trying to make it illegal for individual Americans to have private conversations with one another. That's the real meaning of its effort to control encryption technology, and it's a direct assault on the First Amendment. It would be downright ridiculous to assert that the First Amendment guarantees our right to speak in public but not in private. It would be just as ridiculous to say that we have freedom to speak in words that the government can understand, but not in words the government can't decipher. Americans have the right to speak to one another in private, behind closed doors, and we should likewise have the right to speak to one another in code and to put our coded messages on computer in a process called encryption. Americans would not tolerate the government opening and reading the letters we send through the mails, and we should not tolerate the government opening and reading our encrypted, or coded, messages sent via computer. Yet, Attorney General Janet Reno, FBI Director Louis Freeh, and Vice President Al Gore are all demanding the authority to read our encrypted messages. In a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California, Reno bluntly stated her demand for "ensuring law enforcement access to encrypted data.'' Reno boasted that there is "a consensus'' that the government should create a system known as "Key Escrow'' (i.e., a supposedly "neutral third party''), to which all Americans should be forced to "entrust'' the keys to their encrypted messages, and to which the government would have access. On the contrary, there is no such consensus. Do you trust Janet Reno with access to your private messages? Do you trust the FBI to keep your files confidential? The Clinton Administration is already doing 30 to 40 percent more federal telephone wiretaps and other electronic surveillance than the last year of the Bush Administration. Those figures don't even include national security wiretaps or the hundreds of extensions granting more time for wiretap orders already issued. FBI Director Freeh wrote the New York Times last November that "There is no intention to expand the number of wiretaps or the extent of wiretapping." Four months later, FBI documents revealed that the FBI does, in fact, plan to increase electronic surveillance 54 percent by 1998 and 130 percent by 2004. On July 12, Al Gore announced that the Administration will continue to push for the adoption of a massive public key infrastructure to give the government access to all encrypted communications. In a blatant bid for a police-state surveillance society, Gore warned about "the dangers of unregulated encryption technology." A neutral panel of the National Research Council was set up to make policy recommendations about encryption. The panel called on the government to abandon its efforts to restrict encryption. The NSC panel concluded that increased use of encryption would enhance our national security, not diminish it. Thirteen out of its 16 members had security clearances with access to secret information, and they saw no national security reason to justify the Clinton policy. The Clinton Administration bases its campaign to control private encryption on the alleged need to fight crime through wiretapping. However, the NSC panel concluded that the ability of the private sector to transfer confidential financial and other data over the information highway without interception is far more important. New technologies have given government awesome power to spy on individuals. The Filegate investigation accidentally uncovered the shocking news that, as soon as Bill Clinton entered the White House in 1993, he secretly spent $400,000 on software to create a highly sophisticated computer database to track detailed political, financial, attitudinal, and personal biographical information on 200,000 people, including members of Congress and the media. Known as WHODB for White House Office Data Base, the system was nicknamed Big Brother. Encryption is a First Amendment issue, not a crime issue. If the Clinton Administration is allowed to control encryption, it would be the biggest expansion of federal power since the passage of the Income Tax Amendment in 1913. EAGLE FORUM -- eagle(a)eagleforum.org PO Box 618 Alton, IL 62002 Phone: 618-462-5415 ---------------------------------------------- Are you on our E-mail list? Tell a friend about us! http://www.eagleforum.org

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Anguilla - A DataHaven?
by Vincent Cate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim: > Rather, there is an "archetype," if you will, of what a "remailer" is, what > a "data haven" is, what a "tax shelter" is, etc. While we cannot reasonably > expect a remailer to exactly match the archetype, we can point out obvious > deficiencies. 1) Anguilla has secrecy laws. Professional relationships are confidential. There are strong secrecy laws. I have not given out taxbomber's name, nor will I as I could face legal action if I did. 2) Anguilla has no sales or income taxes. A business does not need to report anything about income, sales, etc, to the government (or anyone else). If a guy wants to sell his data and keep 100% of the profits instead of 50% or 60%, then Anguilla would be a haven for him. 3) We don't have the same laws as other countries, so there are things that can be done here. For example, we can export encryption software. Also, we will have bingo.com in Anguilla. There are deficiencies from a cypherpunk or Libertarian point of view. And these are interesting. And exactly what I want to do is changing. As I said, Anguilla is not the datahaven of cypherpunks wet dreams. I am sure there are no datahavens that match the cypherpunk concept of an ideal datahaven, yet. But I think the term DataHaven applies as well to Anguilla as any other place I know of. Tim, we would all be very happy if you were to locate a country that could be the site of the ideal datahaven, and finance a couple cypherpunks to setup there. It would be a big help to our cause. Could you do this? In the mean time, people may have to exist in cyberspace (like www.taxbomber.com) without having a totally secure physical location. This is not the end of the world, or really even that painful. If done right you could be down for only an hour - just long enough for nameservers to change. Taxbomber is now setup to do it very fast next time, if the need ever comes. Tim, I think you have even advocated this approach, not stressing the physical location, just the cyberspace location. No? -- Vince ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Vincent Cate vince(a)offshore.com.ai http://www.offshore.com.ai/vince/ Offshore Information Services http://www.offshore.com.ai/

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re: National Socio-Economic Security Need for Encryption Technology
by Arun Mehta 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:33 13/08/96 -0700, James A. Donald wrote: >the fact that an engineer who is subject to the power of the Indian >government is not worth very much, as is demonstrated by the fact >that companies with Indian engineering teams often spend a lot of money >to get their employees out of India. > >Demand for Indian programmers is less than supply not because capital >has somehow failed to flow to India, but because an engineer in India >is not free to produce the value that engineers elsewhere are free >to produce. > Whoa! In economies that are highly de-coupled, incomes and prices can easily find quite different equilibria. Of course, the situation changes when trade increases. If you visited Italy in the mid-'70s, prices were much lower than, say, in Germany. Somewhere in the late '70s and early '80s, prices (and I hope wages too) rose to "international" levels. Why hasn't it happened in India? One reason for sure is that despite all the talk of free trade, free movement of people does not take place. Otherwise, plumbing, gardening, and all kinds of services could have been provided in Western countries by Indians, reducing supply and raising wages in India. It really doesn't have much to do with "the power of the Indian government" (except that I wish they had negotiated better at GATT so that when the free flow of goods was talked about, the flow of services was also treated at par). India has its faults, but it still is a relatively democratic and free country. And yes, capital has "somehow failed to flow to India," and for this the restrictive policies of government are to blame. Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta(a)cpsr.org http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/ finger amehta(a)cerfnet.com for public key

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Re: [NOISE] Re: photographed license plates
by Arun Mehta 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 16:04 13/08/96 -0800, Jim McCoy wrote: >Here in the states the easy challenge to >such a ticket would be "it was not me driving when that photo was taken" and >the burden of proof is on the prosecution to prove that you were the driver. In Germany, as I recall, if you use this argument, the cops require you to thereafter maintain a log of who drives the car when. Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta(a)cpsr.org http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/ finger amehta(a)cerfnet.com for public key

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Another CP Meeting request
by Charley Sparks 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Date: Wed Aug 14 10:54:01 1996 Anyone Interested in a DC Metro meeting ?? ( VA, MD, DC ) > The South Florida Cypherpunks will meet at Hops Grill & Bar > in Boynton Beach, FL on Saturday, August 17 at 2:00 PM. As > always, our meeting place is at a microbrewery, and this one > has some very fine brews. Is there anyone who would be interested in a Paris(France) cpunks meeting? Ben. ____ Ben Samman.................................................ben(a)edelweb.fr Paris, France Illudium Q36 Explosive Space Modulator -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCXAwUBMhHoi+J+JZd/Y4yVAQHM3AQMDkTqRIAigy6G5GggdRaXrlBpQrypoXJV sbODRhUFxeP5+mHONfIIntyT+2AO7bW7RA+nSBMF6b/wNT779fGQ2/dZ7rPTzeAL Ob9ltsTr1tdf0T9zMmM+szZER9qJ9bGQ8w6tCektO+BbuV3x/OCwBXAzFS5t1yax 1w1A2+Z9dViyVw== =88D0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Capital and Taxes
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:01 AM 8/14/96 -0400, Brad Dolan wrote: >On Tue, 13 Aug 1996, Timothy C. May wrote: >> Yes, taxes will _someday_ have to be paid...but many of us are hoping, >> praying, and pleading for a cut in the capital gains tax rate...at least a >> rollback to the 22% rate of yesteryear (and 4% or less in states). This >> huge "backlog" of unrealized capital gains (aka gains on paper, but not yet >> taxable) is what is being spoken of when people like Jack Kemp and Steve >> Forbes speak of "unleashing" the capital gains now tied up due to the high >> tax rates. > > >Now imagine that I want to make that $100K investment or, more >realistically, that I want to invest $100K in my kid's college education. >I'm going to have to earn wages of $160K and pay $60K in tax. It would >make me cranky if the guy next door could just clip $100K of coupons, tax >free, to pay for his kid's education. > >While I'm sure Steve Forbes could, I can't think of a moral argument why >income from selling stock should be taxed at a rate lower (or higher) than >than income from wages. Perhaps you've forgotten double-taxation. When a company makes a profit, it is taxed at the full corporate tax rate. Paid to a stockholder, it is AGAIN taxed at the citizen's rate. It's a ripoff, and the strange thing is a lot of citizen-dolts don't understand this or understand its implications. It would be fairer to tax either once the corporation, or the individual, but not both. Now, capital gains is merely the effect of increased value that hasn't yet been paid in dividend. It would make sense, therefore, to simply not tax "income from selling stock" since the taxes have already been paid. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: Schlafly on crypto
by Jim Legg 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Subject: Clinton Is Trying to be Big Brother -- Phyllis Schlafly Column 8/8/96 > [snip!] Beware when politicos speak! Phyllis Schlafly would think nothing of trying to ban speech on the internet when it is something that she doesn't agree with. -jim-

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Stopped Clock. Was: Schlafly on Crypto
by Marc J. Wohler 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:59 AM 8/14/96 -0400, you wrote: >Subject: Clinton Is Trying to be Big Brother -- Phyllis Schlafly Column 8/8/96 It makes me ill to agree with Schlafly on any issue, but 'Even a stopped clock....... Unrepentant Liberial

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Citation for NSA Type III & IV Crypto products
by Mark O. Aldrich 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

C'punks: Most who are familiar with the Fed's crypto products are aware that the NSA categorizes crypto products by "type." Type I is specified as being for classified protections (and relying upon classified key) and Type II being for SBU/other (with unclassified-only key). I recall, however, that there were also categories called Type III and Type IV. I think that Type III had to do with industry use, with Government-generated key. Type IV I can't recall at all. Now, I can't find the citation where these things were described. The EPL cites only Type I & II, Dockmaster has proven of no use, and the search engines can't find anything on the Net. Does anyone recall where a discussion of these types can be found? TIA. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- |Just as the strength of the Internet is |Mark Aldrich | |chaos, so the strength of our liberty |GRCI INFOSEC Engineering | |depends upon the chaos and cacophony of |maldrich(a)grci.com | |the unfettered speech the First Amendment|MAldrich(a)dockmaster.ncsc.mil | |protects - District Judge Stewart Dalzell| | |_______________________________________________________________________| |The author is PGP Empowered. Public key at: finger maldrich(a)grci.com | | The opinions expressed herein are strictly those of the author | | and my employer gets no credit for them whatsoever. | -------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: [SIGNAL] Microsoft's Internet Explorer
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:22 8/14/96, Jüri Kaljundi wrote: > Wed, 14 Aug 1996, Frank Stuart kirjutas: > >> According to C-Net Radio (http://www.cnet.com/) Microsoft will be including >> 128-bit SSL encryption in their Internet Explorer 3.0 for Win 95 and NT 4.0. > >As M$IE 3.0 is now available for download from www.microsoft.com, I did >notice there is also a 128-bit version there, which requires you to first >fill in data about you. Unfortunately microsoft.com is so slow right now, >that I did not have a chance to try to download 128-bit version by filling >in my favourite US politicians name. I don't see the 128 bit version. URL? -- 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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