December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Repeal the 9th Amendment?
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A challenge on the ignored Ninth Amendment: 1-14-97. Washington Times, p. A14: Why not just repeal the forgotten Ninth Amendment Your Jan. 9 article on the "assisted suicide" issue argued before the U.S. Supreme Court does not mention the Ninth Amendment once ("High court wrestles with assisted suicide"). I was not surprised. Democrats and Republicans consistently ignore the Ninth (and appoint judges who likewise ignore it). The Ninth Amendment states: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." By ignoring this plain wording, the judiciary displays a reluctance to "create new constitutional rights," an admirable sentiment. Considering that no one seems to take it seriously, perhaps we should consider repealing the "forgotten" Ninth Amendment. After all, it seems to be written in invisible ink on just about every copy of the Bill of Rights owned by journalists and the judiciary. It is never the basis if deciding cases. Instead, it just clutters up the Bill of Rights and causes libertarians to prattle on endlessly about individual rights. I believe it would be healthy for this country to debate repealing the Ninth Amendment. Although I am opposed to the idea of repealing it, I am just as opposed to the idea of ignoring parts of the Bill of Rights. Perhaps my proposed debate will cause some lawyers, journalists, judges and Supreme Court justices to reconsider their present positions. Jim Ray Miami, Fla. Mr. Ray is chairman of the Dade County Libertarian Party Organization.

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Keyword scanning/speech recognition
by pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I was talking to someone recently about the feasibilty of keyword-scanning phone conversations. He thought it was probably still beyond the reach of current technology, I thought it wasn't (I gave a couple of references in a recent paper on government attitudes to crypto which indicate that it's being used right now by a number of governments). Anyway, I've got bits and pieces of one or two papers here which people might find interesting. The first one is: "Digital Circuit Techniques for Speech Analysis" by G.L.Clapper, presented at the AIEE Winter General Meeting in January 1962. I've only got the first two pages of the paper here, I think the full thing might have been published in the IEEE Trans.Communications in about 1963. This paper mentions a "digit recognizer" built at Bell Labs in 1952, and a Japanese voice-operated typewriter using 3,000 transistors and 6,000 diodes. The paper goes on to describe a means of producing a "compact digital code expressing significant qualities of speech in a form suitable for machine utilization". This was in 1962! A more recent paper is: "Discrete Utterance Speech Recognition without Time Alignment", John Shore and David Burton, IEEE Trans.Information Theory, Vol.29, No.4 (July 1983), p.473. This generates a feature vector every 10-30ms from input speech which is compared to pre-generated reference sequences. It also has references to many other papers covering the same area. Certainly it appears that by the early 1980's it was possible to scan speech for keywords and/or speakers and use this to target the surrounding conversation, and that early work on this had been done since about 1960. This is all from public sources, since certain organisations have a *far* greater interest in this particular area than anyone performing public research it's likely that equivalent classified research was some way ahead of this. Peter.

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Repeal the 9th Amendment? (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, Forwarded message: > Date: Sat, 18 Jan 1997 08:53:59 -0500 > From: John Young <jya(a)pipeline.com> > Subject: Repeal the 9th Amendment? > > Your Jan. 9 article on the "assisted suicide" issue argued before > the U.S. Supreme Court does not mention the Ninth Amendment once > ("High court wrestles with assisted suicide"). I was not surprised. > Democrats and Republicans consistently ignore the Ninth (and > appoint judges who likewise ignore it). > > The Ninth Amendment states: "The enumeration in the Constitution > of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage > others retained by the people." By ignoring this plain wording, > the judiciary displays a reluctance to "create new constitutional > rights," an admirable sentiment. Considering that no one seems to > take it seriously, perhaps we should consider repealing the > "forgotten" Ninth Amendment. Don't forget the 10th, without the 10th the 9th isn't worth the ink it is written on. The two Amendments are meant to work hand in hand. Any party which mentions one without the other is either attempting an end run or else does not really understand what is being stated in them. Jim Choate CyberTects ravage(a)ssz.com

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One time pads and randomness?
by AaronH4321＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Question: I want to use a one time pad pased crypto system. I understand that the randomness of the pad genorator is key to security(other than lossing the keys). What I want to know is if I use a psuedo-RNG that maybe repeats its self every 1000 characters and use it to only encrypt messagase that are 100's of charaters long, will this be a major security risk? Next question: Say I create a 1 million character one time pad that passes all of the randomness tests. It is "truely random". I place it on two computers. Now when these two computers want to send email computer "A" grabs a chunk of the one time pad starting at a random point and encrypts it. It labels the email with the random starting point and sends it to "B". There "B" moves to the random point and begins decryption. During to process both computers mark that section of the OTP used so that they don't retransmit with it. I realize this has a limited amount of messages before it is used up. But would this be secure? Any suggestions, complaints, big gapping holes I missed? Aaron....

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Re: [STATS] Cypherpunks-unedited subscriptions
by i.am.not.a.number＠best.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

dang! i forgot to change. what's the moderated list being called? which is this one? yikes --- i've been paying attention to somether things. At 08:17 PM 1/17/97 -0800, you wrote: >Total subscribers for: > >Tue 14 Jan: 13 >Wed 15 Jan: 15 >Thu 16 Jan: 13 >Fri 17 Jan: 14 > >Looks like one of two things: >Either nobody wants the unedited list, or, some of the "regular people" >subscribe to the edited list and "flames" list separately, to get both. > > >

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No Subject
by T. O'Brien 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Your majordomo is malfunctioning. Unsubscribe

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by T. O'Brien 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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by T. O'Brien 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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One time pads, Next question?
by AaronH4321＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Okay, with the intel I have gotten from the responses let me modify and clarify. So, I now know that you can't use a PRNG to create a OTP. If I did have a RNG that could create a "cryptographically" random, million character OTP and I physically loaded the data onto each computer I wanted to communicate with(e.i. group of laptops all loaded at the same location, same time), how cryptographically secure would the data be. I know that physical security would be a nessescary to the system. If I add some type of error checking to make sure someone that knows the plaintext doesn't modify specific characters, an attacker knows what the message is (e.g. "Send $10 to Bob") the message can be altered (to "Send $99 to Bob") even though it is encrypted. So, lets recap. If the keyig material is kept secure, and if the OTP is cryptographically random, and if error checking is implemented then would this be considered a secure(however encumbering it may be) system. Aaron.....

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Re: Keyword scanning/speech recognition
by Lucky Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:34 AM 1/19/97, pgut001(a)cs.auckland.ac.nz wrote: >I was talking to someone recently about the feasibilty of keyword-scanning >phone conversations. He thought it was probably still beyond the reach of >current technology, I thought it wasn't. I once met a fellow who's company makes high performance key word scanning and speaker recognition products for use by governmental entities in analyzing voice communications. Unfortunately, I lost his business card. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred Make your mark in the history of mathematics. Use the spare cycles of your PC/PPC/UNIX box to help find a new prime. http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm

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