December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Zimmermann gets CPSR's Wiener Award
by Susan Evoy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

* * NEWS ADVISORY * * FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE August 22, 1996 --------------------- Contact: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Duane Fickeisen, Interim Director Phone: 415-322-3778 E-mail: dfickeisen(a)cpsr.org Phil Zimmermann, controversial inventor of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), earned the prestigious Norbert Wiener Award of 1996. The Wiener award is for excellence in promoting the responsible use of technology and is given annually by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR). The award will be presented by CPSR board member Nathaniel Borenstein at CPSR's annual meeting on October 19-20, 1996 at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. The award to Zimmermann is related to the theme of the conference, "Communications Unleashed: What's At Stake? Who Benefits? How to Get Involved!," which focuses on the public interest in stewardship of the dazzling array of emerging communications services and issues related to free speech, copyright protection, and privacy online. CPSR is a public-interest alliance of computer scientists and others interested in the impact of computer technology on society. CPSR attempts to direct public attention to difficult choices concerning the applications of computing and how those choices affect society. According to CPSR Interim Director Duane Fickeisen, PGP brings critical privacy issues to public attention, because PGP allows the average person to encode his or her email so only the receiver can read and understand it. Until PGP came along, only governments or large corporations could make their email secure. In computer jargon, PGP is a "public-key encryption software." Zimmermann, 42, created PGP and published it in the U.S.A. as "freeware" (free software) in June of 1991. Since its creation, PGP has spread all over the world, and has since become the de facto worldwide standard for encryption of email. Controversy came with government attempts to control encryption. For three years Zimmermann was the target of a criminal investigation by the US Customs Service, who assumed that laws were broken when PGP spread outside the US. That investigation was closed without indictment in January 1996. Zimmermann wrote PGP from information in the open literature, putting it into a convenient package that everyone can use in a desktop or palmtop computer. "I gave it away for free, for the good of democracy. This technology belongs to everybody," he says. According to Zimmermann, the recent strides in electronic digital communication brought with them a "disturbing erosion of our privacy. In the past, if the government wanted to violate the privacy of ordinary citizens, it had to expend a certain amount of effort to intercept and steam open and read paper mail, and listen to and possibly transcribe spoken telephone conversation. This is analogous to catching fish with a hook and a line, one fish at a time. Fortunately for freedom and democracy, this kind of labor-intensive monitoring is not practical on a large scale." Today, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International are using PGP to protect their people overseas. "PGP has spread like a prairie fire, fanned by countless people who fervently want their privacy restored in the information age," says Zimmermann. Unfortunately, email messages are too easy to intercept and scan for interesting keywords, such as "revolution" or "abortion." This "fishing" can be done routinely and invisibly on a grand scale. When most of the population becomes reliant on email, the government will be able to do "driftnet fishing" -- making a quantitative and qualitative Orwellian difference to the health of democracy, Zimmermann said. Law enforcement and intelligence interests in the government have attempted many times to suppress the availability of strong domestic encryption technology. However, Zimmermann doubts their chances for success. He says, "The rest of the world uses encryption and they laugh at the US because we are railing against nature, trying to stop encoding messages. Trying to stop this is like the buggy whip manufacturers trying to stop the adoption of cars -- even with the NSA and the FBI on the government side, it's still impossible. The information revolution is good for democracy -- good for a free market and trade." "The government has a track record that does not inspire confidence that they will never abuse our civil liberties," says Zimmermann, who is now Chairman of the Board and Chief Technology Officer for Pretty Good Privacy, Inc. (PGP). For more information on the conference or the Wiener Award, contact CPSR at 415-322-3778, 703-739-9320, cpsrannmtg(a)cpsr.org, http://www.cpsr.org/home.html. -- Susan Evoy * Deputy Director http://www.cpsr.org/home.html Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility P.O. Box 717 * Palo Alto * CA * 94302 Phone: (415) 322-3778 * Fax: (415) 322-4748 * Email: evoy(a)cpsr.org *

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Re: <none>
by pjn＠nworks.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-=> Quoting Int:snow@smoke.suba.com to P.j. <=- In> On Thu, 5 Sep 1996 pjn(a)nworks.com wrote: > In> what do you know about hackers > > More than you appariently... > In> Which isn't necessarily all that much. Not for him... P.J. pjn(a)nworks.com ... Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors and m ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.20 [NR]

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/\/\/\/\/HELP\/\/\/\/\ !
by pjn＠nworks.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In> I really need help unsubscribing from the Cypherpunks list! it is In> imperative! Just shoot yourself and it will all go away. . . P.J. pjn(a)nworks.com ... Exercise your right to arm and keep bears! ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.20 [NR]

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One Time Reply Blocks (was Re: strengthening remailer protocols)
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sun, 8 Sep 1996, Lance Cottrell wrote: > Mixmaster prevents replay, so flooding multiple copies of a single message > will not work. This is the reason Mixmaster has no reply block feature. I > can see two ways in which replies can work safely. To paraphrase John Von Neumann, any system which uses reply blocks is in a state of sin. By this I mean that if there is a chain pointing at you, a sufficiently powerful attacker can walk down that chain and find you. Given that, I will join the state of sin by proposing a mechanism which will allow Alice to receive a reply from Bob, but change her mind at any time. The basic idea is to have a one-time reply block which either Bob or Alice can send to. If Alice thinks that too much time has elapsed, and powerful enemies are walking down her reply block chain, she can send herself a reply and break the chain. (She might send a reply thru each link in the chain to break all the links.) It also occurs to me that since email addresses are about the same size as secure symmetric keys, it would be attractive to use real one time pads instead of symmetric key cyphers for encrypting them. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | "Lone Star" - My personal | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | choice for best movie of | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | 1996 | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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Re: [WAS xs4all.nl] Terrorists
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:16 PM 9/9/96, snow wrote: > Then again, the only reason I am not a terrorist is that the government >hasn't YET defined hate speach directed against the government to be >terrorism. Don't be so hasty in saying this. A couple of months ago Clinton signed some sort of bill having to do with terrorism, terrorist organizations, funding of same, and deportation of alien-units suspected of being allied with terrorist organizations. (I seem to recall another such act being passed in early 1995, so there may be more than one of these things...) Given the mounting hysteria about terrorism (by the government, at least), and given the various laws on the books, I would not be surprised to see some Web sites prosecuted as "harboring" terrorists terrorist-symps. If any of you are not citizens of the U.S., and are here on visas, I would give this some real serious thought. Of course, maybe deportation is a blessing in disguise. --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, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Yahoo!'s Picks of the Week (September 9, 1996)
by William Knowles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Did anyone else catch this one? > Welcome to this week's selection of Picks, declassified and hot off > the press thanks to the Freedom of Information Act. Well, okay, not > really. But we like to pretend. On the other hand, if you would like > to peruse what once was private but now is public (in a federal > government sense of the word), head on over to The National Security > Archive. An independent, non-governmental research institute and > library, the NSArchive is where you'll find declassified > U.S. documents that shed light on anything from the Nixon-Presley > Meeting (Elvis wanted to be a Federal Agent at Large!) to the Cuban > Missile Crisis and a handful of White House e-mail in-between. > > http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/ William Knowles erehwon(a)c2.net -- William Knowles <erehwon(a)c2.net> PGP mail welcome & prefered / KeyID 1024/2C34BCF9 PGP Fingerprint 55 0C 78 3C C9 C4 44 DE 5A 3C B4 60 9C 00 FB BD Finger for public key -- Vote Harry Browne for President -- http://www.HarryBrowne96.org

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Re: ... subversive leftists
by drose＠AZStarNet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May wrote: >As to the "Reichskommander," in our country, and on the Net, such jokes are >not illegal. I rather suspect they are in Germany, either the DDR or the >Western side. > >As to "tasteless and insulting," a matter of personal perspective. I find >it helpful to call a spade a spade, and others apparently do as well. Ja, Ja. Das ist gut. Ve make chust a little choke now. VERE ARE YOUR PAPERSS!? ___ David M. Rose "Theft is...a heinous crime, property representing as it does a goodly proportion of a man's life-effort: ergo, his vital force. Property is life; ...do not steal". --J.H. Vance

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Re: Conservation Laws, Money, Engines, and Ontology
by Rick Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Wouldn't the model fit reality better if it were based on biological analogies instead of the raw physics of energy? I recognize there's a desire here to put some controls on one's own equipment ("I don't want to receive spam if I don't want to") and that physics provides the conceptual lever to argue in favor of the desired controls. Biological systems are a poor choice for grained control by people who like to change their minds. But the Internet really is more like an ecology with its own complex notion of "emergent order" than a simple physical process that must obey conservation laws in some narrow fashion. Trees obey physical conservation laws, but they don't exchange micropayments with soil, air, and Sun to ensure the balance is preserved. As things get out of balance, trees die. Other entities flourish. I can't imagine the mechanism by which very precise access charging and cost recovery mechanisms would replace the current "free" model. As we all know, it's not really "free." Information is published and made available because the vendor needs to distribute it and finds the Internet to be a cheap way to make it available. Many vendors exchange information and entertainment for your attention to a commercial message. As long as there are unmetered 'Net resources (and they're unmetered for a plethora of reasons) you'll never get rid of free riders. I think you have to choose between the relatively lawless open world or an enclave where you bar the door with your favorite security measures. You allow spam as long as you allow uninvited guests. And what is cypherpunks but a continuous party of uninvited guests? Regarding these micropayment machines, I think it would be interesting to identify some existing, widely used, real world analogues to them: how big/small are individual transactions, how much money can you securely collect, how much does the mechanism cost to deploy and maintain, how hard is it to attack, etc. Gumball machines? Pop machines? Pay phones? I'm not sure there *is* a real world analogue. Rick. smith(a)sctc.com secure computing corporation

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Terrorists
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:29 PM 9/9/96, Duncan Frissell wrote: >At 01:49 AM 9/9/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: >>And the net effect of crypto anarchy is to destabilize and marginalize >>central governments, which is a net positive effect. If some eggs get >>broken in the process, the biological imperative will generate more eggs. >>No big deal. > >Particularly since governments murdered 160 million in the last 100 years >while we civilians have only managed to murder a paltry 20 million or fewer. >A savings of 160 million deaths leaves a lot of room for a non-harmful >increase in private murder. We could increase the private murder rate by 8 >to 10 times and still break even. > >Note too that most terrorism is aimed at governments (even if practiced on >civilians). In the absence of government, terrorist incentives may be reduced. Remember, folks, it is _governments_ which interfere with natural movements of people, capital, but not birds. I don't want to jeopardize my reputation as a List.Racist, but I think one of the longterm (not in the next 15 years) implications of the things we talk about will be the increased lowering of national borders. (Yes, I have long talked about national borders being only speed bumps...here I'm talking about _physical_ borders.) Some good insights into the "border issue" are in the current movie "Lone Star." See it to appreciate things from a Mexican's perspective, when Texas is viewed as being essentially Mexican. (Some great humor, too. And a good murder mystery. And a love story. Conspiracy, humor, murder, love...all the ingredients of a great story. All three major American races collide, and mix. No role for Asians, though. Another movie...maybe a Wayne Wang movie.) ("Lone Star" is this year's "Pulp Fiction," just as "Usual Suspects" was last year's "Pulp Fiction.") Crypto anarchy means the undermining of governments, and hence handouts to people by government. People will only move physically for physical jobs, and not for handouts. People will flow to where the jobs are, and jobs will flow to where the people are. Isn't this what we really want? --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, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Conservation Laws, Money, Engines, and Ontology
by Greg Kucharo 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>The most basic principle is this: those with resources they control (and >"own") set the rates and policies. I assume you mean this applies to both parties. The ISP has resources that I want to purchase. I have monetary resources it wants in return. Here's an idea; a contract socket. This socket negotiates a info exchange deal based on a base of variables that you have programmed it with. The exchange is made and money changes hands. Build in the usual things like reputation checking and what not to verify that the other guy meets the variables outlined(or at least can be trusted to). ??????????????????????????????????????? Greg Kucharo sophi(a)best.com "Eppur si moeve" -Galileo ???????????????????????????????????????

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