December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Voice Stress Analysis of Debates?
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:29 AM 10/9/96 -0400, Vin McLellan wrote: > Jim Bell queried the List about potential AP decision-support tools >like voice-stress detectors which could identify truth-tellers among >politicians and other possible candidates for Mr. Bell's much-debated >proposal to cleanse the body politic. Uh, well, while I don't doubt the potential use there, my bringing up the subject of the voice stress analyzers had nothing to do with AP. (Remember that once AP starts operating, ALL politicians, "honest" and "dishonest" will likely be considered fair game. The way I see it, for each politician there will be enough people who will want him out, REGARDLESS of whether he's honest. This makes a lie-detector only marginally useful.) Rather, I just wanted to point out that the traditional news media is likely to be intentionally ignoring the existence of a technology which could reveal much about a debate, precisely because such a practice would be embarrassing to the politicians. (On the other hand it's possible, I suppose, that the inherent stress of standing up in front of a crowd, knowing that a few tens of millions of citizens were watching, might induce stress having little to do with lying, so it wouldn't surprise me if I later heard that this stress-detector really doesn't work in such situations. Even so, I think it would at least have been tried before and the "flop" publicized if it had failed. I don't recall if any such attempt has been made, or at least the results weren't publicized. What should we conclude from this?) > Dektor's PSE came into some prominence after Col. Bell, then a >civilian, showed up with his black box to assist Italian police during >their huge investigation of the kidnapping of US Army General James Dozier >by the Red Brigades in '82. The fact that Dozier was located and rescued >by the Carabinieri commandos after five weeks in captivity -- while Prime >Minister Aldo Moro had been murdered by the Red Brigades, eight weeks after >his kidnapping in '78 -- led inevitably to stories, probably mythical, that >Bell's PSE was a significant factor in the investigation. As Clarke or >someone said, any technology sufficiently advanced will be considered magic >-- and it is doubtless true that, for many Italians interviewed during the >Drozier inquiry, the quiet presence of the diminutive American civilian, >with his utterly mysterious "truth-detector," inspired fear and awe. > > The Legend that came out of Italy was doubtless a factor in >Dektor's subsequent success selling the $5K PSE into the corporate and >security market. (There was a period where corporate negotiations were >sometimes held in a hotel chosen only just before the start of the talks, >for fear that one party or the other might have pre-installed a PSE.) In >the mid and late '80s, dozens, perhaps hundreds of PIs -- and maybe a few >journalists -- were actually running around using tape recorders to >interview people, then running back to their hotel rooms to spin the tape >for their PSE. Reminds me...Some states have laws against secretly recording conversations in person, even when a telephone line is not involved. (as I understand it, these laws tend to date from the late 1960's, when electronics had shrunk to sizes sufficiently small to make body wires/recorders really practical and inexpensive.) This appears highly inconsistent to the "bugging mentality" of the police. My theory is that this apparent contradiction is explained when you realize that politicians would be the first, best targets of widespread, legal bugging. After all, even honest lobbyists might want to keep records to show that they hadn't violated the law, and to ensure that their recollection of the conversation is correct, and to forward these talks to their employers. Either "honest" or "dishonest" lobbyists might want to record a politician's willingness to accept a bribe, even if one is not offered. Other politicians might want to record negotiations, possibly for later use on the campaign trail. This would be highly unlike most other, ordinary citizens, who are rarely going to be in any kind of conversation that is considered worth recording! Add it all up, and you'd probably discover that the average Senator or Representative would be recorded in dozens of conversations each day, any one of which could pop up at any time on the news or, now, the Internet. Remember the old saying, "One advantage of telling the truth is that you don't have to remember what you said." Well, for politicians the modern corollary is, "One advantage of being an honest politician is that you don't have to worry about what the other guy's recording." But I'll propose that by this standard, there are few if any "honest politicians" in Washington! Imagine how different a typical (read: typically crooked) politician's life would be if everybody had the legal right to record every conversation! Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: Recent Web site cracks
by pjb＠ny.ubs.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

but even after you get through the firewall, you still need to crack the web host. i suppose that anyone that would leave their firewall open would not have very good security on their hosts either. -paul > From cypherpunks-errors(a)toad.com Wed Oct 9 07:02:07 1996 > To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com > Subject: Re: Recent Web site cracks > From: dlv(a)bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM) > Comments: Dole/Kemp '96! > Date: Tue, 08 Oct 96 16:53:43 EDT > Organization: Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y. > Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com > Content-Length: 307 > > stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com writes: > > The DOJ and CIA sites were actually cracked; don't know the mechanisms. > > They used firewalls that are known to be easily crackable. > > --- > > Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM > Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps >

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NOC_ase
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

10-8-96. FiTi: "Offshore financial centres agree to greater scrutiny." The Offshore Group comprises most of the biggest offshore financial centres including the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Caymans, Gibraltar, the Channel Islands, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Panama and Singapore. The agreement says home supervisors should be able to inspect the books of shell branches wherever they are kept. "In no case should access to these books be protected by secrecy requirements in the country that licenses the shell branch," it says. WaJo: "Cold War Spying: Mystery Gives Way to History." The release of the Venona documents tells us more about the state of intelligence agencies today in both Russia and the U.S. than it does about Stalin's spy rings. These and counterpart activities in Moscow dramatize the ongoing campaign American and Russian intelligence agencies are waging in the 1990s -- not against each other but at home, to preserve their budgets and public respect. And with "Venona: The Book" launched at last week's conference, can a CIA/NSA CDROM be far behind? ----- http://jya.com/nocase.txt (10 kb for 2) ftp://jya.com/pub/incoming/nocase.txt NOC_ase ---------- Anybody got a copy of the Offshore Group's agreement? Whither EUB? Or seen "Venona: The Book"? If so, does David Kahn have a part?

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Re: Voice Stress Analysis of Debates? [NOISE]
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As far as the technical issue, can you use digital signal processing to insert/delete the features that the VSE is looking for? Sure, if you know what the VSE product is looking for. (And you can crank up the bass while you're at it.) Doesn't matter if you call it microtremors, it's a characteristic well-defined enough that an $89.95 retail hardware device can detect, so it's a characteristic you've got a not-terribly-complex model for. If all the popular VSEs use the same algorithm, or if you know what brand the TV Networks were convinced to use, you're fine. (If you don't know, that makes it tougher, but you can experiment....) Or you can distribute a cheap software-based VSE program, with hooks that let you feed it "Truth" or "Lying" overrides :-) At 11:28 AM 10/7/96 -0800, jim bell <jimbell(a)pacifier.com> wrote: >I think it's particularly revealing that the TV networks don't try to use >it. They're supposed to be looking for an edge, something to make the news >seem more interesting. The political establishment would see the >publicizing of this as going beyond an unwritten limitation on the media. I've never seen the TV networks use handwriting analysis to spice up their news reporting either, and the only "news" shows I've only seen mention people's astrological signs were the Entertainment-Tonight types. (I'd rate VSE as slightly more scientific than graphology, and both of them somewhat above palm-reading and astrology, and a bit below polygraphs.*) They get more market asking what kind of underwear the candidates wear. Besides, what would they do with it - subtitles "He's Lying" or "He Seems To _Believe_ This Nonsense?" or "He Doesn't Really Care What The Teleprompter's Telling Him To Say"? You'd need to leave at least one of them on during the whole Bipartisan Establishment Debate**, and you don't need any piece of hokey machinery to If they actually _wanted_ to make the shows more interesting, the networks could have reporters ask the candidates real questions. But they wouldn't get invited back next election.... And if they ask questions like "How could you possibly expect us to believe _that_, Mr. President?"***, they'd get thrown out immediately. [*VSE and Graphology have some chance of a causal basis, though polygraphs have the extra advantage that the people administering them get to intimidate the victim while doing the test, which is more likely to get results than running VSE on a speech somebody's practiced and is reading off a teleprompter, even if interpretation of both weren't pretty much subjective anyway.] [**And they'd have to interlace the subtitles with the fnords.] [***Did you ever notice how much George Bush _sneered_ when he was lying? Clinton's polite enough to smile when he's talking.] # 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: Microsoft CAPI
by Peter Trei 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Ravi Pandya wrote: > > ... You can't load an encryption engine into Windows 95 or > > Windows NT unless that engine has been specially signed by > > Microsoft's corporate key. > > And so what happens when the Microsoft key is compromised? It might > be hard to break by purely cryptographic means, but surely there are > some people at Microsoft who aren't millionaires. Much easier would be to patch the OS to disable the signature check by the CryptoAPI. A patching program, once written, would require no particular skill to run. Sort of like 'rechipping' a high-end sportscar. Peter Trei Senior Software Engineer Purveyor Development Team Process Software Corporation http://www.process.com trei(a)process.com

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Microsoft CAPI
by Ravi Pandya 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From today's HotWired Packet http://www.packet.com: "Today Microsoft is using similar technology as part of its Cryptography API: You can't load an encryption engine into Windows 95 or Windows NT unless that engine has been specially signed by Microsoft's corporate key. The reason for this restriction, says the company, is the Clinton administration: Microsoft couldn't have gotten export permission for its operating systems if users could easily plug in crypto engines that hadn't been approved. " This is disturbing, if true, though I suspect there is also a less ominous reason: you certainly want your cryptography provider to be trusted, and you want to be sure the code has not been altered. The implications really depend on Microsoft's policy on signing cryptography engines, and whether they allow a way to delegate signature authority. Ravi

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Re: pgp, edi, s/mime
by ratak 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: jubois(a)netcom.com, cypherpunks(a)toad.com Date: Wed Oct 09 10:19:39 1996 t: > > - S/MIME and PGP are the two leading candidates for encrypting EDI > messages, > S/MIME inside the US, and PGP outside the US where S/MIME is unavailable. > How far along has S/Mime come now, can they offer the same key sizes as PGP...? ___________________________________________________________________ GarGoyle Securities - -Intrusion Assessment Systems - -Security Consultation/Education/Curriculum Development - -Project Management/Research/Analysis World Wide... - -Member of CITDC (Canadian International Trade Development Council) - -Email: ratak(a)GargSec.mb.ca (Jason E.J. Manaigre) - -Web: www.GargSec.mb.ca - -Email for PGP key with phrase 'Get Public Key' as Subject - -2048 PGPKey iD E2 FA 30 E5 F5 AD EC F3 00 9A 9D 33 59 FC DF AD ___________________________________________________________________ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: noconv iQEVAwUBMlvCj/qtmO8M92GRAQFNBAf8CVzTxtle7jvTQFq6UM9MpEGjvrnoSHoO NMidciwyht0AqyGNPqNxczU/arpCAQwluwkhtTRor8lYsUWLLLyZB8d2DGs1i/En 3dE4WIXnNSR/G4YjHf8ln/DwE+YbHHFwEve5zSJAf4Gnvt7+LRo+VJPq34MaJgyc 5888BrSMHKTo5pyISAz+LQhDJptWMZwPsldrZctWI0QW/xgFMCmZr8qt2VYWdlZw XO+Px+QadwvNJlL8pR2ZT3l458rzU5B7kS3CKVJDl0iUlVWK2/xHiuRUHfo1Yu1Z VB6jFEw6IsQI8ukrANu90qgDcab3YQpe99BQCd/imZfKWSzO3vsieQ== =Ew/I -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Jewell shows warrants are frauds
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There was yet another item on Richard Jewell today on the national news. If our goal is to return this country to allowing the government to do only the "reasonable" searches that the Constitution allows, we shouldn't miss the opportunity to take the Jewell case and shove it up their...well...use it to our best advantage. The _theory_ is that the only way the government could have gotten a warrant against Richard Jewell ONLY by showing some likelihood that evidence of the crime would be found. The facts, the end result is quite the opposite; the FBI has had a full opportunity to do their investigation and they've found...nothing. Or, at least nothing they're now willing to leak. Nothing, certainly, which they feel justifies filing charges. So they're probably going to just drop the investigation of Jewell. But at this point, we should consider that practically an engraved invitation: The theory behind ALL warrants is that they are granted only upon a showing to a judge of a legally satisfactory reason to grant the warrant. Given the outcome, it is almost certain that no such showing ever occurred. What happened, on the other hand, was probably just another fraud. Some prosecutor or investigator did some magic dance in front of a judge, pretending to tell the truth, and the judge pretended to believe him. The difference with this case, however, is that a few hundred million people heard about it. That's why this case, unlike nearly all others, presents a marvelous opportunity. All of the various Clipper/GAK proposals are based, ultimately, on the same weakness: The idea that we, the people should be able to trust some overpaid government-thug-sympathizer in a black robe to decide whether or not a given set of evidence is sufficient to decide to grant a warrant. Perhaps the best challenge to this idea is to show a clear example of how the system fails, precisely when it's expected to WORK! The Jewell incident is a good test-case, if for no other reason that it was highly publicized and many if not most people know the basics. In addition, unlike a case which was thought insignificant before and only later became well-known, all of the officials who had anything to do with it were, presumably, fully aware how important it was and could be expected to be "on their toes" about ensuring that they do their jobs correctly. Quite simply, the authorities had every reason to get this one RIGHT, as opposed to getting it wrong. They got it wrong. We should insist that the details of this disaster be exposed to show them for the lying frauds they are. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Have you had your privacy invaded? Be on Oprah!!!
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 15:02:14 -0500 From: marsha-w(a)uiuc.edu (Marsha Woodbury) Subject: Have you had your privacy invaded? Hi-- I am looking for someone who lost a feeling of privacy-- I need a "victim" to tell a story about how he or she had her privacy invaded and how he/she felt about it. The Oprah Show is looking for a real-life example of someone whose name got on a strange list, or whose unlisted phone number was given out, or whose medical records were made known to insurance companies--anything like that. The show is next Wed. and they will pay to get you there if you have a good story to tell (and it had better be a true story!!) Call Dana Newton of the Show if you have story to tell... 312-633-0808 Thanks! Marsha Woodbury, Ph.D. Director of Information Technology Graduate School of Library and Information Science UIUC Chair, CPSR http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~woodbury/ Work: 217- 244-4643 FAX: 217- 244-3302 marsha-w(a)uiuc.edu CPSR's Annual Meeting and Conference, "Communications Unleashed" will be held Oct 19-20 at Georgetown University in Washington DC. For information or to register, see http://www.cpsr.org or e-mail cpsrannmtg(a)cpsr.org

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yellow journalism and Encryption
by Vinnie Moscaritolo 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The following is an example of the asswipe media's attempt to write about encryption. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/examiner/article.cgi?year=1996&month=10&day=0… icle=BUSINESS2814.dtl Encryption controversy pits life against liberty TOM ABATE EXAMINER COLUMNIST The Clinton administration tried again last week to rally support for an encryption policy that would give the FBI the means to tap any electronic communication, without unduly infringing on civil liberties or impeding software exports. At stake in the policy battle are software exports worth millions, Fourth Amendment rights Americans have enjoyed for centuries, and innocent lives that the good guys say might be saved if they're able to keep snooping on the bad guys. And the reason all of this has become a policy jumble is simple. Computers have made it cheap and easy to create unbreakable secret codes to protect phone calls, e-mail and data files against electronic bugging. That's why this technology, called encryption, means profits in Silicon Valley, more privacy for you and me, and a problem for federal investigators. Because secret codes allow criminals to nullify the fed's favorite tool - the wiretap. "Wiretapping is the main issue," said Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the National Security Agency, the CIA's code-breaking and eavesdroping cousin. "For the administration to abandon the position it started with three years ago would be to say, "We are the administration that is going to give up the wiretap as a law enforcement tool,"" he said. That's why last week the administration tried a new variant in its 3-year-old campaign to require that code-making systems be built with a "spare key" investigators could retrieve, under court order, to crack any code. When the administration first proposed this idea in 1993, it involved a device called the "Clipper chip," which would have deposited spare keys with government agencies. Almost no one outside the FBI liked that idea, so last week the administration floated a compromise: to let U.S. firms export strong code-making products, provided they deposited the spare key with some third party. Exports are the odd piece in this policy puzzle. The U.S. government has no authority to regulate secret codes within U.S. borders. But a law passed after World War II put secret codes in the same category as munitions, products that cannot be exported without a license. The government has used this export-licensing authority to indirectly control code-making software here. Most high-tech firms are unwilling to sell two sets of encryption products, one full- and the other half-strength, so they have sold weak encryption products everywhere. In essence, the administration hopes to use export controls to change the balance of power in a new war. This time the enemy isn't the Japanese or the Germans, as during WWII, or even our Cold War adversaries, the Russians. Instead, the administration fears drug smugglers, organized criminals and terrorists will use code-making devices to evade electronic evidence-gathering techniques, notably wiretapping. "If two criminals are discussing a plot over the telephone and we have a wiretap order, the encryption would negate the wiretap," said Michael Vatis, a senior Department of Justice official. The same would happen if investigators seized the computerized bookkeeping records of a drug-smuggling ring only to find they were saved in an unbreakable code. But as frustrating as it might be to seize a mound of indecipherable evidence, it was the prospect of losing the wiretap that got Vatis most aroused. "For serious investigations involving terrorists or organized crime . . . where you're worried about hundreds of people being killed . . . the whole point is to keep the investigation secret or the whole thing blows up," he said. Having access to a spare set of code-breaking keys "is not a shift in the balance of power," Vatis said. "It's preserving the status quo." Not so, argued Daniel Weitzner, an attorney with the civil libertarian Center for Democracy and Technology inWashington, D.C. Forgetting encryption for a moment, Weitzner said, a wiretap is unlike any other tool in the investigator's arsenal. "To get documents sitting on my computer, the FBI has to come into my office with a search warrant," Weitzner said. "I have to know about it." Exactly the reverse is true for a wiretap. To be effective, the subject must be ignorant of the tap. Weitzner said this notion of a "secret search" went against a central principle of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable search and seizure. "When wiretapping was allowed in 1968, Congress basically said they were going to create an exception to this rule," Weitzner said. But in the three years since the Clipper debate began, the FBI has enlarged its interest beyond preserving phone taps and has asked for spare keys to the codes used to protect Internet traffic and stored computer files, Weitzner said. "If the FBI is able to transfer its wiretap authority to the Internet, it would give the bureau access to a new realm of activities," Weitzner argued. Using the spare keys to Internet transmissions could give the agency access to medical records, charge card receipts or other data stored or transmitted on the global network. Moreover, the agency might be able to tap some of this information in transit, without the knowledge of the person being investigated, whereas today agents would have to visit the doctor's office or bank, potentially alerting the target. "If all things in the digital world are open to wiretap-type scrutiny, then we have lost the protection against secret searches," Weitzner said. "What is on the way to happening is that the exception could swallow the rule." The temptation to tap wires is as old as wired communication itself, according to Clifford Fishman, law professor at Catholic University's Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C., and author of a textbook on wiretapping. During the Civil War, both sides tapped telegraph lines to spy on troop movements. Wiretaps were common in the early days of the telephone, and Supreme Court decisions during the 1920s said this was no invasion of privacy because the tap was on a public telephone pole and not inside a home. In response, Congress made wiretaps illegal at the federal level as part of the Communication Act of 1934. But Fishman said state investigators kept right on using wiretaps, as did the feds, who sometimes used unauthorized taps on Mafia and political figures during the long reign of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Congress legalized federal wiretaps in 1968 at a time when Richard Nixon was campaigning against the liberal Earl Warren Supreme Court. "The mood in Congress was to defang the Republicans on law enforcement," Fishman said. "Lyndon Johnson, with palpable reluctance, signed this bill to permit federal officials to obtain a court order to do a wiretap or a bug and use this information in court." Fishman, a former New York City district attorney, considered wiretapping essential to investigating the most dangerous crimes and called the administration's latest spare-key proposal a good compromise. But civil libertarians fear that giving investigators the keys to unlock any coded phone call or electronic document will greatly expand the realm of secret searches and tempt them to abuse a power that was denied them in the days when ensuring privacy meant putting wax seals on envelopes. Much of the coverage of the encryption controversy has centered on the complaints of Silicon Valley firms that they are losing hundreds of millions of dollars in exports to foreign competitors who don't have to limit the strength of their encryption products. Though that may be the case, there's more at stake here than money or jobs. Our wired society is about to decide how easy it should be for investigators to figuratively climb up the telephone pole to put alligator clips on our secrets, whether innocent or criminal. To give investigators the keys to every code might be too much temptation and a threat to civil liberties. To deny investigators the keys may handcuff them in the fight against increasingly sophisticated and deadly forms of crime. That is the nature of the choice on encryption policy, and that is why there is no simple compromise. Tom Abate's column appears every other Sunday. You can reach him this fool mailto:tabate@examiner.com Vinnie Moscaritolo http://www.vmeng.com/vinnie/ Fingerprint: 4FA3298150E404F2782501876EA2146A ------------------------------------------------------- "...and by the way, Mr.Speaker, the Second Amendment is not for killing little ducks and leaving Huey and Dewey and Louie without an aunt and uncle. It's for hunting politicians, like in Grozny, and in the colonies in 1776, or when they take your independence away." --- Rep. Robert (B-1 Bob) Dornan (R-CA) responding to Bill Clinton's "State of the Union" address, January 25, 1994

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