December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Banking Secrecy and Nazi Gold
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May wrote: > > I try to deconstruct events, to determine what the real issues are. > > Take the case of the ongoing flap over Switzerland and claims that Swiss > banks hid gold, jewels, and other forms of money for high-ranking Nazis. > Adding to the flap--actually, making it a newsworthy event--is the > allegation, probably true, that some of the gold was taken from Jews and > others sent to extermination camps. When I caught this on the news I immediately shifted my attention to viewing the announcement from the perspective of the people involved not really giving a rat's ass about the Jews. What was left of the announcement once the banner of "mom's apple pie and freedom and justice for all" was removed was a shallow justification of a mugging technique I call "extortion by guilt." > the notion that "Switzerland must do something!" is pernicious and > inimical to banking secrecy and basic privacy issues. A drumbeat is > building which will serve to undermine banking secrecy around the world. > I suspect the U.S. pressure on Swiss banks has a political dimension > related to forcing a New World Order on international banking. > The clamor to break banking secrecy and > "force" the banks to disclose all records is part of a larger political > game. It's a muscle job designed to weaken the mark for the next level of extortion. Today the Swiss are guilty of collusion in the holocaust and tomorrow they will be guilty of collusion with drug dealers and pornographers. Only next time the Swiss will fold their hand behind closed doors in order to save themselves the global embarassment that has so sleazily been heaped on them. {Somewhere deep in the bowels of D.C. there is someone working late into the night in an attempt to link the holocaust to cryptography. Headline: DEATH CAMP TATTOOS PROVEN TO BE EARLY FORM OF 128 BIT ENCRYPTION } What I find frightening is a sudden rise of obvious power plays by government without bothering any longer with the formality of engaging in a lengthy campaign to create a threat to the citizens in the minds of the public. It's no wonder that the list conspiracy theorists have been quiet as of late. Once the power mongers are kicking in your door, then it's rather late to wonder if they are tapping your phone as well. How long can it be before the government no longer feels the need to inform us about the details of who they are saving us from, and why? I am worried about falling asleep tonight. I fear that I will go to sleep in my bed and wake up in a prison cell, with a jackbooted guard informing me, "It's OK. You're safe now." (.)(.)

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Re: FC: Responses to Tim May's criticism of SAFE, and a rebuttal
by jimbell＠pacifier.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 13:21 5/07/97 -0400, Jeff Barber wrote: >The NRA knows this. They just don't trust the Supremes to agree >with their conclusion. Understandably so, given the court's record-- >not to mention its usual reluctance to overturn precedents. > >This is a problem with constitutions or any other sort of written >documents. Pinheads can always say the document doesn't *really* mean >what it clearly says. There's obviously no way to fix that through >the document itself. > >(I'm sure Jim Bell will say he has a solution though. :-) As if on cue! If the NRA had any guts, they would announce that they have concluded after years of observation and study that there are enormous costs to having the RTKBA continue to be poorly respected, costs which translate into (at least) potentially hundreds or maybe even thousands of innocent deaths per year, not to mention the continuing degradation of respect for various other constitutional rights. It would then observe that if we come to the reasonably egalitarian conclusion that the life of a Supreme Court justice or Senator or Representative is no more valuable than the life of an ordinary citizen, the solution to the 2nd amendment problem is clear. (Some (many?) courts seem to recognize the "lesser evil" defense, the idea that if a person has to choose between tolerating a greater evil or committing a crime ("lesser evil") to prevent it, he is entitled to do the latter. I'm not suggesting that they would view this philosophy as applicable in this particular case; merely that it is appropriate to do so.) The NRA is a fairly large organization. At any one time, there are probably over a hundred members with terminal illnesses, or others who would be willing to give their lives in the performance of a task to punish somebody for violating citizens' rights by official actions. A public announcement by the NRA that they will gladly pay upwards of a million dollars in "life insurance benefits" to to the heirs of any member who dies in this type of supreme service (or a million dollars in legal defense, etc) would put the "fear of God" into the thugs. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: My editorial in Oregonian newspaper published today.
by jimbell＠pacifier.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 17:20 5/07/97 -0700, Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote: >JB's editorial is so mild-mannered I can barely resist comment. >this from the JB we all know and love? this is so bland as to >be almost PC, and frankly I agreed with every statement in >it, virtually. how did he manage to avoid the label "assassination >politics"? in fact how does he avoid the label "assassination" >entirely? Hey, doofus, the article was 840 words long, 40 words longer than the length recommended by the newspaper. It ALSO avoids any mention of cryptography, or digital cash, both of which would have not only just confused the average newspaper reader, but would have ballooned the article far past the length that the newspaper could reasonably consider publishing. >I think the main flimflammery in the essay is the concept of >"criminal". JB always advocated in the past that merely being >a bureacrat was virtually criminal, and that people would donate >money toward their demise. Repeat same point above about length and detail. >note to everyone: jim bell's editorial has virtually no relation >to his past essays. I propose that someone send that newspaper >his AP article. They certainly had access to it. The guy I talked to at the newspaper claimed he had read it. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Interactive Week exclusive - Clinton Admin. to announce new Crypto regs. this PM
by Will Rodger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Something you might find interesting.... By Will Rodger Washington Bureau Cheif Inter@ctive Week The US government will announce later today that will soon lift controls on technology crucial to doing business over the Internet, White House advisor Ira Magaziner said yesterday evening. Under plans expected to be outlined at a noontime press briefing today, the federal government will require that producers of specialized, narrowly focused data scrambling products submit only to one-time government approval before they sell powerful encryption products abroad. Current policy requires case-by-case approval in most instances. "Basically it will say that for basic financial and electronic applications there will be no export restrictions and no requirement for key recovery," Magaziner said. US Undersecretary of Commerce William Reinsch is expected to give details of the plan. Reinsch could not be reached for comment. Computer industry executives and public interest groups said the new arrangement, though far short of deregulating all encryption, was a step in the right direction. "This is evidence that the administration acknowledges that manufacturers of foreign encryption products do exist," said Peter Harter, public policy counsel at Netscape Communications Corp. "Their policy has put American industry in the back seat and now were trying to catch up." David Banisar, policy analyst at the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, called the move a "small step forward." Nonetheless, "it still doesnt reach the needs for secure e-mail or other purposes," he said. Computer software and hardware eligible for decontrol under the proposed regulations must fit several criteria, said Kawika Daguio, a public affairs specialist with the American Bankers Association who helped hammer out an agreement for the new regulations. .Though products designed for use by the general public may be unlimited in the strength of the encryption techniques they employ, they must also be strictly limited in use, he said. Software written for home banking, for instance, must be usable only for bank transactions and not easily modified for general use. Most programs handed out by banks for PC banking at home fit that criteria, he said. Programs that use the industry SET standard for credit card purchases over the Internet should easily meet Commerce Department criteria, too, since the SET standard encrypts only those data essential to making online purchases; the limited uses of the standard render it all but useless for general use. Visa, MasterCard and American Express developed the standard. "Id expect programs written with SET to get very rapid approval - within weeks," Daguio said. In addition, US companies will have leeway to export any kind of encryption to any bank as long as that encryption is used only for legitimate, internal bank functions. Products designed for merchant-to-merchant transactions without a bank in between would still be subject to stricter controls, including use of weak software routines that make decoding by law enforcement easy, or deposit of decoding keys with law enforcement bodies prior to export. Commerce Department regulations will spell out details this month or next, Daguio said. Though more sweeping in nature than past government regulations, the US banking industry has long enjoyed more freedom to use powerful encryption technologies abroad than other industries. Successive administrations have granted banks that leeway since by definition they must have greater safeguards over employee behavior than all but a handful of industries. In addition, financial applications have long been easier to design for export since they typically require encryption of only a few standard data fields. If sufficiently limited in design, the reasoning goes, they pose no threat to law enforcement concerned about smugglers or terrorists who may want to evade detection by law enforcement. The government and the computer industry have for years been locked in disputes over the relative importance of encryption technologies and their potential for misuse. Since encryption encodes sensitive information like credit card numbers, voice traffic over public networks and anything else that can be converted into an electronic stream of ones and zeroes, proponents of electronic commerce have insisted the technology must be widely deployed to assure the security of computer networks worldwide. Absent US encryption exports, they claim, American companies will soon lose their leadership role in a technology crucial to the countrys competitiveness. Federal officials, on the other hand, have said export of the technology threatens global security, since terrorists and criminals in outlaw states like Libya and North Korea could easily use the technology to defeat wiretaps and data searches increasingly prized by law enforcement and national security agencies. In response, they demand that exports of powerful encryption include so-called key recovery - a method by which law enforcement can gain access to the encryption keys used to encode messages. Many public interest groups have condemned the plans, however, saying such a transfer of power to law enforcement threatens to usher in an era of ubiquitous and illegal eavesdropping. Several bills pending in Congress would do away with nearly all controls. Reinsch was expected to testify at congressional hearings on one of the bills this morning. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBM3HngkcByjT5n+LZAQHL+Af/WdDoOuORps0gkZQmI4B6mgY63HeTzKZH kW19knlqU6SMC/GSdFrZLiWZhkDec2/wLzq57wdzlPjdPd+5wCvTYWmJAX68Kf6b 9g6cm3AbhZSKmaOtUtwOmUwAtuS5DPaGiPejAc9716K0/U9+0YBNKMZ/qVYAhrLc yR4yxLqpXd68zhirYIxtjHcB1fDzRO6F91stxvvDsg2bg2pPvLidWOBoknMZmCQt ALV5Z1yuik6tNOIPx+4ty7kWMMIQ0E3DqVKPxVAbFchCTohcee55U6Pmg3pbYtVg rrhYr4W8s/juv/9JrVa99+usyt/ohe+N3HcYtJ5WVLF2ED3UT/YDBg== =Q3/z -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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mailing list
by Rory Picard 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

james(a)accesshub.com

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IP: Crypto News Flash (fwd)
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From: "Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law" > <froomkin(a)LAW.MIAMI.EDU> >Subject: IP: Crypto News Flash (fwd) >To: CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM > >Amazing if true. Part of my amazement is that Sen. Kerry, who I think of >as somewhat moderate if not somewhat liberal, would be a party to this. ... >---------- Forwarded message ---------- >Date: Thu, 08 May 1997 12:51:01 -0400 >From: David Farber <farber(a)cis.upenn.edu> >Subject: IP: Crypto News Flash > > >CyberWire Dispatch // Copyright (c) 1997 // May 1997 > >Jacking in from the "Take My Crypto, Please" port: > >Washington, DC--A new anti-crypto bill now floating around Washington >would place restrictions on the import of strong crypto products into the >U.S. and possibly outlaw the use of non-government approved encryption >products. > >During a morning briefing at the Capitol, Sen. Bob Kerry >(D-Neb.), talking about his impending new crypto bill, which he will call >the "Secure Public Interest Act" said that the bill WILL include >IMPORT restrictions on crypto software. > >Incredible. We've heard rumblings the folks behind crypto strangling >efforts would jump to import controls on crypto software if key escrow >weren't widely adopted. > >Restricting imports, of course, is a kind of de facto domestic >restriction as well. It means that companies can't import strong >foreign made crypto products to use in their worldwide offices, forcing >them to use the govt. mandated weaker crypto products. > >Next step: outlawing some domestic crypto products. > >Kerry, when asked if there would be restrictions on private encryption, >said "I don't envision that at the outset, but it might end up in the bill." > >Meeks out... > > # 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/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)

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Encryption--RSA v. PGP
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text MIME-version: 1.0 X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by listserv.aol.com id LAA22230 Date: Thu, 8 May 1997 11:02:39 -0500 Reply-To: Law & Policy of Computer Communications <CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM> Sender: Law & Policy of Computer Communications <CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM> From: "Kevin J. Connolly" <kconnolly(a)EVW.COM> Subject: Encryption--RSA v. PGP To: CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- RSA Data Security, Inc. filed an action in the Superior Court of California, San Mateo County, against Pretty Good Privacy, Inc. PGP has been claiming that its license to distribute RSA-based encryption software is based on a chain running from Public Key Partners to Viacrypt, Inc. PGP acquired Viacrypt, Inc. in January 1996 and has been selling RSA-based encryption software for commercial use ever since. The complaint, filed by Tomlinson Zisko Morosoli & Maser, alleges that PGP's license is derived from a license to Lemcom, which in turn has been terminated. This might well mean the end of PGP. This would certainly be a bad outcome for security and freedom on the Internet. I will be following these developments and report to the list. It's ironic that RSA is doing this while complaining about PGP conduct as a freeloader. I doubt that public key encryption would be anywhere as notorious as it has become if it were not for Phil Zimmermannn's crusade; and I haven't noticed RSA offering to help with Phil's legal expenses. Kevin J. Connolly The opinions expressed in this communication are those of the author, not of Eaton & Van Winkle. This communication is not legal advice. If it were legal advice, it would be accompanied by an invoice. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBM3HrGTQOqu5WyMfpAQFX7AP/T0R54+S05FqKJ+zZXVb1uCHMrPZmagEm aiW9Dfgwo/K3tXbkrbS0WEtCc8tZobXbL7fLOT82qzKvXehRsERILV2keeaXlAe7 WN5c66SjaWe/xGfLQ/8UAnzaBl6l+olG8gN2zxGatbLDcKuakP7j0LGRuzhTXAaG BOYGDUbsSAY= =VCFW -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

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El Gamal
by harka＠nycmetro.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk wrote: >PGP has been standardising on El Gamal which is not covered by RSA's >patents, for precisely the reason that RSA Inc has a bad record as a >litigious patent worker. El Gamal is a variant of Diffie-Hellman, >and the patents on Diffie-Hellman are set to expire RSN (later this >year, Sept?) How does El Gamal compare functionally and security-wise to RSA and who developed it? >I think that the initial PGP products are using RSA, however I >understood PGP is moving to El Gamal, where RSA is due to be >relegated to a `for backwards compatibility only' feature. Is El Gamal used in the source for PGP 3.0? Ciao Harka -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBM3JpGjltEBIEF0MBAQFDfQf8CawUGU1ynDlmcmsloy7zsh5oQUhcxPSv Luy17oVmbWVeCWpCbqqiWFoRh1+QzBBc8Yfbb2/2LOw1KFyIq5lQ8Ly64JPuVMgV HUocUDnPE7Q18eVVXOfNyG6vg/s0PBRqREVrx1QWn37idPduMTg0TE/IHZqFVrso 3XdVroh41aX7qVnan2+nRnVCbrV9xMvNteWOUl/nADLHCAkoMl/eCcQVY/XSmFjc SsUbNNgCDBJlZhAwAI/CBLM7CBVt4okZQkdKeLNWsrm1tG2yha7vl/2AI6k1Y70H 2g1zTrhqK7q/rqkNL6DKyam/NZ1FKXtO0BsTLsV6KqmI7SnGN4UZXw== =f4Qu -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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We want to kiss you, NOW
by Shift Control 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A is for Aardvark B is for Bite C is for the Cure D is for Dribble E is for Eurovision F is for Frog G is for Glasgow kiss H is for Halitosis I is for Implants J is for Judas K is for Kiss 'n' tell L is for Lips M is for Mistletoe N is for Necking O is for Osculation P is for Pucker Q is for the Queen R is for Radio stations S is for Snog T is for Tongue U is for Ulcer V is for Vampires W is for Wet X is for X Z is for Zit Shift Control is for kissing, in all its colours Shift Control is ready and waiting with a purse for you Shift Control is at www.shiftcontrol.com __________________________________________ Shift Control is produced by the Guardian's New Media Lab with help from Boddingtons and Stella Artois Dry To unsubscribe from this mailing list send e-mail to shiftcontrol-request(a)nml.guardian.co.uk with the following text in the body of the mail message: unsubscribe

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Mega Death
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

White House press briefing May 8: Q Mike, Attorney General Reno today confirmed that the Justice Department is investigating the possibility of a high-level Israeli spy in the U.S. government. How is it going to impact relations with Israel at this point? MR. MCCURRY: No comment on that subject.

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