December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: The Great Reducer: Line of the Year
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:02 AM 10/7/96 -0400, Brian Davis wrote: >> > I'm >> > well aware that the SC disagrees, but that is simply because they are >> > entirely wrong in this matter. > > >Well then, it is a good thing we have Mr. Bell here to set us all straight! > >EBD The Supremes frequently err (Hugo Black's decision in Korematsu vs U.S. par example). In a larger sense, the existance of an entity like the Supreme Court will probably become generally recognized as "wrong" as we transition to non coercive methods of social organization. Slavery and bleeding were once considered natural and appropriate. DCF

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Re: U.S. presidential debate: URLs, V-Chip, huge databases
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Except for one sentence that will go down in Net.history -- Bob Dole >ended the 90-minute session with what he framed as an appeal to >younger voters: "If you really want to get involved, tap into my home >page at www.dolekemp96.org. Thank you." It's an amazing web site. The first thing that it wants you to do is fill out a Custom Design Form Information on the following form will allow us to customize your personal Dole for President web site. Imagine - a web site for a candidate so spineless he wants to tell you what _you_ believe in, not what he believes in! Dole is one of the few Republicans out there who make Clinton look like he's got principles. Bush would always sneer while he was lying to the public, but at least the man _was_ up to something. Something evil, but _something_. And when Nixon lied to you, it was ok to laugh. (Well, in most circles. And even his die-hard supporters generally understood....) >Ain't it hip to be a netizen? > .... Clinton ... V-Chip ... Dole ... nationalized ID card database >Dole called the use of illegal drugs a heinous crime, accusing Clinton >of being a "liberal." Bwah-hah-hah! <insert much cynical laughter here> Liberal. Yeah, right. I've known liberals, and he's not one. Even the hacked Dole/Kemp web page had the right-wing arrow pointing to the ClintonGore page, and the left-wing arrow pointing to the "You can't go back again" page :-) >Then, responding to a get-tough-on-guns >challenge from his opponent, Dole suggested a database system that >would check your identity and background before allowing you to buy a >gun: "You put your card in there and if it says 'tilt' you get >nothing. No guns. Zippo." Card? What card? Thank you very much! >These are hardly the words of someone who gives a rat's ass about privacy. Declan McCullagh, you have been fined two credits for violation of the verbal morality law. >What's worse, elephantine government databases or V-chip >style censorship? All I know is that neither of 'em has my vote. Isn't it nice to have options! If I weren't voting Libertarian, there's Perot and Ralph Nader (both of whom are _interesting_ statists), or Pat Paulsen (I don't care that he lost the primary), or Barry Goldwater (:-). Or there's Hugh Romney (aka Wavy Gravy, who runs the Nobody for President campaign), or Frank Zappa (who'd make a better president, dead, than most of the major candidates would alive.) Or you can take a decentralist approach - vote for someone you trust. Yourself. Your spouse. One of your neighbors. Your mom. Just spell their name right. (I've met Harry Browne, but he's always been in public-figure mode. I guess he'll do. Jo Jorgensen, the VP candidate, is actually a real person, as is Nancy Lord, previous VP candidate.) # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk Imagine if three million people voted for somebody they _knew_, and the politicians had to count them all.

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Re: Dole web site cracked?
by Murray Hayes 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sun, 06 Oct 1996 23:42:01 -0400, Rick Campbell wrote: >-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > >So, I just finished watching the debate and at the very end, Bob Dole >suggested that people check out www.dole-kemp.org. I was already on >playing decision96.digital.com so I went for it. > >The first page says ``Oops! You've tried to access the old >way. Please choose the new way instead.'' Clicking on `new' gives a >black background page with two yellow arrows, one left and one right. >The left one gives you ``Nope, you can't go back now''. The Right one >gives you www.cg96.org, the Clinton-Gore home page. > Dole did not say www.dole-kemp.org he said www.dolekemp96.org. The clinton gore page is on a com site. mhayes mhayes(a)infomatch.com http://www.infomatch.com/~mhayes

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Re: PGP [2d try]
by travel23＠juno.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Apologies but the word-wrapping was different than the appearance it had as I typed my previous message. It should have read: >...as fertiliser as .... ^^^^^^^^^ "Fertiliser" was, of course, the word to which I was referring when I stated that this was the British/European spelling. I found it to be an interesting clue regarding the author's identity - FWIW..... T.T. ................................................................................. Just consider me an acorn who is trying to deal with the rest of the nuts .................................................................................

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Technically Recoverable Encryption Functions
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

David Sternlight's netnews posting, which Dmitri forwarded to cypherpunks, was about the 2nd Ave. Deli, but it does apply quite well to crypto, and the current government attacks. >>Congregant: "What does "kosher style" mean? >>Rabbi: "Tref". What does "Recoverable-Key Encryption" mean? "Unsecure" # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk Imagine if three million people voted for somebody they _knew_, and the politicians had to count them all.

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Re: Dole web site cracked?
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Long ago, someone registered dole96.org and has been running a satirical site for some time. The Dole campaign registered dole96.com and dolekemp96.org, and dolekemp96.com (and maybe more). It is hard to get all of the variations of a domain name registered. DCF

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Re: legality of wiretapping: a "key" distinction
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>no, all I am asking for is lawyers who are familiar with wiretap law >to make a quick case against it based on a commonly-known precedent >within their field. if you don't want to answer, don't post. This sounds like a very reasonable proposal. But please don't take a lack of response to your speculation as an endorsement of your idea, or a suggestion that it's got even the teeniest shred of merit. I understood you to be suggesting that because nobody's shown to your satisfaction that it's meritless, you've somehow stumbled across something important. >I will write on anything I damn well please and research it poorly or >thoroughly as I like, and whisper questions to any lawyers out there who care >to talk about the subject to an interested layman. This response illustrates precisely why Uni was reasonable in declining to give you references. If you're not willing to look up your own crackpot ideas, you certainly shouldn't imagine that someone else is. (But here's a hint - if you read the statutes, you might discover that some notification to the target of a wiretap is required, although not prior to installation.) >you have a lot of good advice, but I ask none of the things you are >attributing to me. I simply would like to carry on a discussion with >a civilized lawyer who specializes in the subject, rather than have >a people tell me why I cannot even do this, and must become a law >specialized before I can even use the word "wiretap" with any >meaningfulness. You can no more meaningfully discuss law without learning about it than you can discuss cryptography or biology or philosophy or any other area of human scholarship and knowledge. I think it would be a positive change were the law reworked so that it was more accessible to lay people, and so that the practice of law were not such a specialized field. But please note that I talk about that as a *change*, that is to say, different from how it is today. You can, if you want, try to work on similar questions in parallel with established institutions - probably all fields have a group of rogue scholars or dissidents who believe nonstandard things, adopt nonstandard methodologies, etc. Sometimes they turn out to be right, sometimes not. This dynamic exists with law - e.g., what I'd call "Militia Law" (I think they call it "Common Law" but I'm not sure). Jim Bell seems to be working on a similar track - starting with original documents and deriving his own interpretations, rules for statutory construction, and so forth. Perhaps history will smile on Jim or the militia/common-law folks. Perhaps not. But crossover is not possible (as should be clear from the past few days' discussions). Arguments from one school of thought are not useful in the other because the premises are different, and sometimes contradictory. I think that it's interesting and good that people are working on their own theories of law apart from the traditional institutional ones. But I think it's sad when they try to use their theories (which I think are best understood as the laws of a foreign, albeit imaginary, nation) in contemporary state & federal courts. See <http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~jgadams/taxcases.html> for a big list of cases where people with their own versions of the law got spanked in traditional courtrooms. I think it's a shame when people excited about their own legal theories get innocent third parties roped into these peculiar scams. (Then again, there's the argument that this is evolution in action.) So that's a long way of saying "plonk." I don't think it's productive for me to try to keep track of multiple versions of the constitution; and I've settled on the one that's used today in court as the one I'm going to pay attention to. I don't get the impression that you care about how things actually work; you seem much more interested in making some baroque rhetorical point about how all cypherpunks are evil. (In particular, I'm suspicious that you think wiretaps are unconstitutional yet it's evil to try to avoid them with crypto. I think you want someone to write you several pages' worth of memorandum about how wiretaps are legal, so that you can cleverly turn around and argue that defeating something which turns out to be so clearly legal must, in fact, be wrong. And I think you take that position simply to be contrary.) If you are truly interested in the legal questions around notice to subjects and Title III wiretaps, see LaFave & Israel, "Criminal Procedure" (West). It's got quite a few pages of discussion about Title III. I'm not going to summarize it here because my copy is old enough that I don't know if the research behind it is still current, and I'm not in the mood to do free research for people who will ignore my results. But I'm willing to bet that you'll never look it up anyway. >the chief point of my post was to question why the EFF etc. are not >at all interested in challenging the wiretap "status quo" in spite >of what many people here believe/advocate-- that wiretapping was >never legitimate in the first place. this is curious because EFF >etc. *are* willing to back up the cryptography cases out there, >ala Bernstein etc. The EFF's failure to work on your little project seems like it might be caused by: 1. a conclusion that it's not a viable argument, and hence a waste of time/effort 2. a conclusion that the constitutionality of wiretaps isn't specialized enough that they should concentrate on it, they can leave that argument to well-funded defense attorneys for Mafia/drug clients, who deal with wiretap evidence frequently 3. lack of a good case to raise it with My guess is it's mostly (1), though (2) and (3) might be enough to make it uninteresting even if (1) wasn't true. But I don't know poo about how or why EFF decides which issues to work on. Are you even a member? -- Greg Broiles | "We pretend to be their friends, gbroiles(a)netbox.com | but they fuck with our heads." http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | |

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NSA/GCSB spying shown on NZ television
by pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

20/20 today had a segment on the operation of the GCSB (Government Communications Security Bureau), the trading name of the NSA in New Zealand. This was motivated by the recent publication of Nicky Hagers book "Secret Power" which goes into great detail about the operation of the GCSB (it has floor plans of the monitoring stations, details of operations, staff, names and contact numbers, etc etc - it's a very well researched book covering the day-to-day running of an intelligence agency). In the 20/20 segment, Nicky and a reporter managed to get through the security perimeter at the Waihopai base with a camera and ladder, climbed up to the windows, and shot footage of the interior of the base through improperly-closed curtains. The main operations room had racks of equipment which is hard to identify (it's not a very good shot), along with tables containing PClone monitors and HP II's[1]. Unfortunately the resolution isn't good enough to show what's being displayed on the monitors. Another shot of an office showed a desk with Intelsat operations manuals, providing, for the first time, direct proof of whose traffic is being monitored - not the Russians, not the Chinese, but NZ's pacific neighbours and trading partners. The intercepted traffic is then passed straight back to the NSA for analysis. AFAIK there's never been any direct, documented proof of what these bases are intercepting - the dishes are pointed in the right direction for intercepting Intelsat transmissions, but the various agencies have been able to deny the nature of the interception. The footage of operations manuals on a desk would seem to prove beyond a doubt that the agencies are engaged in large-scale interception and monitoring of civilian communications. It was rather unfortunate that the program was shown at the same time as the political leaders debate on another channel (we have an election in four days time), because virtually noone will have watched 20/20. Peter. [1] Given that the windows looked like plain glass and that these things have a control zone that reaches halfway to Antarctica, I'd love to park outside the base with certain pieces of receiving equipment...

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Re: Clipper spin [was Re:Flood Warning]
by Peter Trei 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> [...] > > > > High-Tech Leaders Join Forces to Enable International > > Strong Encryption > > > > See: http://www.ibm.com/news/alliance2.htm > > The "International Strong Encryption" phrase is something that we > need to become active in stopping. Anything which responds to such > announcements should put a different spin on this phrase. If the > Clipper farce is accepted as "strong" encryption then the battle is > lost; maybe something like "it is _international_ strong encryption > because it is the strongest encryption people like Saddam Hussein [insert > bogeyman du jour] want Americans to have access to" > > jim Back when IBM/Lotus came out with it's "International" version, I proposed the term 'espionage-enabled software'. I still like it. Peter Trei trei(a)process.com

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EUB_low
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

10-7-96. WaPo: "Russian Crime Finds Havens In Caribbean" Russian organized crime groups are using unregulated and secretive Caribbean banks to launder their illicit gains, according to U.S. and Caribbean law enforcement officials. One bank that has drawn the scrutiny of U.S. authorities is European Union Bank in Antigua. EUB describes itself as the first bank on the Internet, offering the chance to open accounts, wire money, order credit cards or write checks by computer from anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day. A U.S. official said, "The bank is being investigated for violating U.S. laws with open solicitations on the Net, which is at best for tax evasion and at worst for money laundering." ----- http://jya.com/eublow.txt (10 kb) ftp://jya.com/pub/incoming/eublow.txt EUB_low

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