December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: DL in exchange for fingerprint
by stewarts＠ix.netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> "We keep a memory bank that matches your fingerprints with your > license," [DoPS spokesman] said. "In other words, if you went to > get a new license with a false birth certificate and your > fingerprint didn't match the name, you wouldn't get a license. Totally bogus - _my_ birth certificate didn't have my fingerprints on it :-) Now, it may help stop people from getting duplicate licenses, assuming they use the same finger each time and don't have the sense to put rubber cement or ridge filler or something on their fingers first (and assuming, of course, that the system actually _checks_ the fingerprint in real time, rather than just recording it.) >Just what I would have called it: a great idea. Is it true that 31 >other states take your fingerprint as part of the license application? >I feel sick. Wouldn't be surprising; you didn't think you lived in America, did you? # 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: Workers Paradise. /Political rant.
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"jbugden(a)smtplink.alis.ca" 17-SEP-1996 01:09:37.71 Mind trying to do 72-column or so formatting, BTW? >Canada has a single payer system and we spend about two thirds as much as t= >he >U.S. on health care as a percentage of G.N.P. We manage to insure all Canad= >ians >while about 35% of people in the U.S. have *no* health insurance. Canada also has less smoking, teenage pregnancy, and various other factors which are known to raise health insurance costs. I've seen some studies in which these _entirely_ account for the differences... and keep in mind the rate of health care inflation of the two countries (depending on the study, either the same or higher for Canada.) -Allen

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Re: Judge Kozinski Responds
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"liberty(a)gate.net" "Jim Ray" 17-SEP-1996 02:14:28.24 To: IN%"cypherpunks(a)toad.com" CC: Subj: Judge Kozinski Responds >The statement about anonymous remailers was largely >accurate. I'm not sure that the fact that you (or some of >your associates) are willing to block people from getting >anonymous mail is a sufficient safeguard. Some may not be, >and it only takes one or two who do not adhere to the code >to make life miserable for the rest of us. > >We agree about the need for privacy, but I'm not at all sure >why the right to send messages anonymously trumps the >recipient's right to know who's addressing him. Getting an >anonymous message--even one that is not harassing or >threatening--is an invasion of my privacy. As for The essential problem with this viewpoint is that the right the receiver has is to ignore the message. If he doesn't want to receive anonymous messages, he should set up a mail filtration program that will do a good enough job of filtering them out. Spammed messages can be countered with Internet charging (neccessary anyway for the long-term health of the Net), as can mailbombing. That leaves individual messages that may be offensive (including, apparantly in his case, offensive by virtue of being anonymous), but if offensiveness meant someone should have the right to stop the emission of speech, that would mean the Christian Coalition would have the right to stop speech on evolution, the PC types would have the right to stop speech on genetic differences in intelligence (see Stephen Jay Gould for them on this issue - even leaving aside racial questions which are separate from the individual ones), etcetera. -Allen

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GAK, GAP, GAY
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

GAK -- Government Access to Keys GAP -- Government Access to Patients GAY -- Government Access to You At 3:03 PM 9/18/96, Lucky Green wrote: >On Wed, 18 Sep 1996, Jim Ray wrote: >> I agree, and hope so. "Key Recovery," while not as Orwellian-sounding as >> "GAK," is a step on the path to honesty WRT the English language, though >> it's important to continually point out, as Tim did in his post, that >> *access* -- rather than just recovery -- is obviously what Mr. Freeh wants. >> >> I'd count this likely change in terminology as a "cypherpunk victory," >> albeit a very small and certainly a very hard-fought one. > >Nope. It is a Cypherpunk loss. The use of the term "key recovery" for GAK >now fully obfuscates the distinction between accessing a >backup copy by the legitimate owner (or his estate, employer, etc.) and >GAK. Many PKIs will support the former type of key recovery. And for good >reasons. Thanks to the brainwashers using the same term for GAK, it will >now become impossible to tell from a basic description of a PKI if it >supports GAK or not. Furthermore, those who oppose the latter type of key Further, merely _asking_ your Designated Key Recovery Authority what its release policies are will of course place your name on the SPL (Suspicious Persons List). The FAA is an agency which will have nearly unlimited access to communications, under the Safe Skies and Anti-Child-Hurting Act. (Think about it--Clinton already signed a couple of Presidential Decision Directives and Congress passed various anti-terrorism acts which already give the Feds authority to wiretap and surveil more widely than before, at least legally. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (or court) allows widespread surveillance of suspected foreign agents, without any notification of local courts or of the surveillance target. Won't these many provisions allowing wide surveillance already be used almost instantaneously to force PKIs to disclose keys of all those on the SPL? "If it saves just one child.") On a related note, I read an article yesterday about the proposed new Health Data Base, with all encounters with any medical institution or any health care provider of any sort being cross-linked and cross-referenced. The privacy concerns are supposedly handled by having "security tickets" for various hospital officials, researchers (!!), insurance companies, and law enforcement. (I put the "!!" next to the "researchers" because I don't recall releasing my medical and dietary history to any so-called "researchers." While I have no doubt that many "data miners" would like access to such national data bases, and that some potentially valuable information could be gleaned, I didn't release this information for Joe Gradstudent, Ph.D. candidate to sift through.) [Here are some more details: "Mission: one-stop medical records," Robert S. Boyd, San Jose Mercury News, 1996-09-17, p. 1. "Virtually unnoticed by the public, health-care experts are preparing to create an electronic "Master Patient Index," covering every American's medical records from cradle to grave...."We can't eliminate privacy concerns, but we can minimize them," said Richard Rubin, president of the Foundation for Health Care Quality in Seattle at a planning conference here last week....David Kilman, a computer expert at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the idea for the master index was born....Only people with a 'security ticket'--such as doctors, insurers, scientific researchers or police with a proper warrant--are supposed to be able to see the clinical details....Kathy Ganz, director of the New Mexico Health Policy Commission, said, "Rights to privacy are genuine concerns, but they will need to be balanced against notions of common good.""] Pretty chilling, eh? As we all know, once such medical, dietary, and genetic data bases are established, the likelihood of privacy-invading use is near unity. If the NLETS data base can be routinely accessed (it's how I got Thomas Pynchon's home address, but that's another story), imagine who will hack this data base! The tabloids will love it, as they gain access to "medical records of the stars." Hackers will suck down as much as they can and then sell the records. And such data bases will be tied to True Names, of course, thus allowing the "freezing out" of anyone who is not a True Name, who has fallen behind in child support payments, who is late on his income taxes, and so on. It doesn't matter if cash is still allowed if one cannot interact with any health care person without a proper citizen-unit data base entry. They've got you tracked even if you pay in gold dust. (Putting on my Duncan cap--not to be confused with dunce cap--I wonder what will happen the first time someone dies because a hospital wouldn't treat someone without a proper citizen-unit health care card?) P.S. I fully understand that some doctors will treat patients for cash, without reporting to The Authorities, just as some doctors will treat gunshot wounds without the mandatory reporting of same to the police. This does not mean such doctors will be easy to find. The System, if allowed to win, will win. P.P.S. Many of the things we talk about on the list are being made possible--the good and the bad--by computerization. Obviously. Burnham's "Age of Privacy" (or maybe it was "The Age of Surveillance"--my copy is not handy) made this point many years ago. We are taking the mechanization and systematization procedures the Germans used so efficiently in the 1930s and modernizing them, with every movement and every transactions tracked and recorded in data bases. Now more than ever we need "credentials without identity" and digital cash. Chaum's article about "Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete" is now more urgent than ever. --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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Stego inside encryption
by Mullen Patrick 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

My apologies if this shows up twice. I got an error message from my first posting. *************** I know a lot of times the idea behind steganography is to hide the fact that a secret message is in a seemingly normal file/mail/whatever. This is good for avoiding unwanted interest in your file. The benefit of not having people attempt to crack you code, added to the strength of the cryptosystem is wonderful. However, I propose this-- Don't hide that anything's encrypted! Rather than hide this fact, throw it in their face! I propose hiding an encrypted message inside another encrypted message. Set bits in specific places to data in the real message. The benefit is Oscar not only doesn't know what the crypto is, he attacks the wrong message. Hiding statistically random bits from the true message in statistically random bits from the masking message shouldn't be too hard. Granted, this scheme doesn't get you past measures designed to keep out all encrypted messages, and it surely wouldn't keep you message from generating interest, but it would be very hard to decrypt the message, especially when some algorithm is used which (seemingly) randomly selects which bits to use for the stego. Just a thought... My apologies if someone has already proposed this method. Patrick

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RE: Bernstein hearing reminder: THIS Friday 11:45AM, SF Federal Building
by Batman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

For the 200th time, unsubscrive me of your fucked mail lists.

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No Subject
by mixmaster＠remail.obscura.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Drivers Must Allow Fingerprinting" By Ralph Ellis _The Atlanta Constitution_ 9/19/96 "Georgians renewing or getting a new driver's license after Sept. 30 will have to provide the state with two fingerprints. "The right and left index fingerprints will be taken with an inkless scanning device that is part of a digital imaging system being installed in 82 driver's license examination offices across the state said Gordy Wright, spokesman for the Georgia Department of Public Safety. SNIP "The fingerprints will make it difficult for people to obtain licenses with falsified identification papers, Wright said. "Teresa Nelson of the Ga. Civil Liberties Union said the fingerprinting invades the privacy of law-abiding citizens. "'I have grave concerns,' she said. 'When we think of giving a fingerprint, we think of being arrested. We feel like we've done something wrong, not because we are complying with the law and are doing something right.' "There will be no exceptions to the fingerprint requirement..., Wright said, adding that 'having a driver's license is a privilege,' not a right. SNIP "Wright said...the fingerprints eventually will be available to other law enforcement agencies and courts.... SNIP "The new licenses will include an instant photo....A bar code on the back will contain a laser recording of the driver's index fingerprints...."

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Cypherpunk Enquirer [NOISE]
by Mixmaster 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

THE CYPHERPUNK ENQUIRER "Encyphering minds want to know." The EFF announced an agreement with the Clinton administration that will "guarantee Americans rights to privacy and anonymity on the Internet for the forseeable future". The agreement, which includes unspecified concessions by the President on matters of encryption, privacy, and the export of encryption programs, is to be signed today in the White House Rose Garden. An EFF official, who wished to remain anonymous, chortled, "We got basically what we wanted, and all we had to do was give up Czechoslovakia." Cellular One today announced the signing of noted Cypherpunk Tim May as their official Internet spokesperson. Mr. May will be filming a series of commercials featuring himself in a hot tub calling a variety of 1-900 numbers on a cellular phone, while a voice-over by Cellular One executives extoles their recently announced 'Geek Plan', featuring free calls during computer hacker's normal waking hours of 7pm to 7am, with all calls to pizza parlors for delivery half-price for the first year. The commercials, the first to be filmed entirely in the 'quick-time' format, should be appearing on commercial web pages within the month. The Cypherpunk Academy of Codes and Cyphers has announced the first official offshoot of the Cypherpunks list. The Junior Auxillary, anchored by the new mailing list cyphertots(a)juno.com, will give budding hackers the chance to get out of the house and hear famous Cypherpunks like Bill Stewart and Robert Hettinga lecture on topics such as "The Port 25 Hack - Fact or Fiction", "Hacking the Transmitter on Your Ankle Bracelet", and "SPAM - Cypherbabes are Impressed by a REALLY BIG One." To join, send a message with the body "subscribe cyphertots" to majordomo(a)cybercrime.fbi.gov. (note to juno.com - we don't do personals) In related news, John Young will be tutoring Dr. Dimitri Vulis in English as a Second Language. Scientists flocked to toad.com recently in response to the first authenticated sighting of a Perrygram in months. The Perrygram, only recently thought extinct, was spotted on the cypherpunks mailing list after an absence of several months. Specialists speculate that it may have detected the recent list increase in its favorite food - pure, unadulterated bullshit. The Reputation Capital markets remained in a deep slump after the recent closings of alpha.c2.org and anon.penet. Analysists estimate the loss in over 1 billion in reputation capital, with the effect spilling over to the rest of the market. Since the loss of anon.penet, Black Unicorn is down 12 5/8, Atilla down 4 3/4 to 8 1/2, Jim Ray is down 10, and Tim May, as usual, is being investigated by the Blacknet Securities and Exchange Commission for his timely shorting of Lucky Green. Novell President Joe Marengi announced today that Novell would begin bundling Microsoft's Internet Explorer with Novell Netware in the third quarter. In return, Microsoft announced plans to release his 8 year old daughter Suzanne unharmed. Next in the Enquirer: HIDE THE KIDS! FIRE UP SURFWATCH! Sandy Sandfort's latest party - WE HAVE MPEGS!

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Comments on Emoney regulation
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

JYA has the complete version of this, but I wanted to make a comment that this allegedly pro-consumer group is wanting mandatory receipts - decidedly anti-privacy. Typical; Consumer Reports keeps calling for limits on what can be made available instead of making the information available and letting people decide on their own. There is also the problems associated with welfare-on-a-card - namely limits on what can be purchased, a requirement for full identity disclosures, etcetera. I'd call this effort by government also a form of the pressure-by-economics we saw with the initial Clipper proposal (leaving aside the actual agenda), namely using government purchasing to distort the market (away from anonymous digital cash, in this case). The last statement also brings up the question of why shouldn't banks move out of high-crime areas? I'd appreciate lower bank fees, and so would most people. -Allen > _________________________________________________________________ > Centura > _________________________________________________________________ > REGULATORS TURN SPOTLIGHT ON CYBERMONEY > __________________________________________________________________________ > Copyright &copy 1996 Nando.net > Copyright &copy 1996 N.Y. Times News Service > (Sep 19, 1996 00:41 a.m. EDT) -- As concerns grow about electronic > money-laundering, cybercounterfeiting and bank runs on the Internet, > regulators in the United States and around the world are scurrying to > catch up with the rapid development of electronic money. [...] > Moreover, there is now no requirement that a company that issues > stored-value cards must be a bank or be regulated in any other way. > That raises the question whether these cards, if they become popular, > will become as unruly as the market for prepaid telephone cards, in > which a number of card vendors have failed to deliver the calls that > were promised. [...] > To prevent such problems, a number of other countries have decided to > require that stored-value cards be issued only by banks. > The Federal Reserve has issued proposals on whether the consumer > protections guaranteed for other electronic-funds transfers -- like > direct deposits and debit cards -- will apply to stored-value card > purchases. These protections include the requirement of receipts with > every purchase and a limit on liability if a card is lost or stolen. > The Fed has proposed that card systems that cannot hold more than $100 > and those that have no central records of how much money is on each > card be exempt from the strict consumer-protection rules. > "The Fed proposal is destroying consumer protection," said Janice > Shields, the consumer-research director for the U.S. Public Interest > Research Group in Washington. "They don't want to disclose > error-resolution procedures, and they want unlimited consumer losses." [...] > One force pushing the development of the technology, however, is the > government itself, which has mandated that by 1999 all payments to or > from government accounts must be made electronically. This may have > the most significant effect on the recipients of various welfare > programs, many of whom now do not have bank accounts that could > receive an electronic money transfer. > To deal with this, various groups of state governments are developing > special cards on which benefits payments will be stored. Recipients > will be able to use the cards to withdraw cash at automated teller > machines and to make purchases. > One of the thorniest issues is whether holders of these welfare cards > get the same protections as holders of credit and debit cards issued > by banks. State and local governments do not want to absorb the cost > of issuing refunds, for example, though some readings of the > electronic funds transfer act would require that they do. > Some are also concerned that as banks move more toward offering their > services electronically, they will have more reason to close branches > in inner-city areas. [...] > Copyright &copy 1996 Nando.net

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Re: CIA hacked
by Lord of Entropy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:11 AM 9/20/96 +1000, you wrote: >+http://www.odci.gov/cia >+Seems the DOJ hack was a good inspiration. Heh! Life's good when you're >+willing to work at it. >Did you or anyone get a mirror of the site?! I wanna set one up! ;) http://www.ilf.net/hacked.websites/cia/ -- T 37 5F 68 3F 0F 1B A3 6B 7F 90 EA 40 73 49 2F B0 R Information Liberation Front U NO http://www.ilf.net/ chaoS(a)ilf.Net T E

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