December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Money orders, debit cards, ...
by daw＠cs.berkeley.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Some court transcripts from the McVeigh case contain interesting information about real-life anonymous systems. See http://www.cnn.com/US/9703/okc.trial/transcripts/may/050697.eve.html Did you know that money orders are not so anonymous as you might think? On the order itself are digits identifying the post office where the order was purchased, as well as the date of purchase. Also, a private company testified on their money order service, and it comes out that they keep a computerized record of every money order purchase in a central database. Eek. And read about a real-life instance of traffic analysis of phone calls based on timing correlations. This one really happened, folks (though it was by mistake). Also, read about how a company offering prepaid debit cards searched through billions of records to find all phone calls to or from a certain number, etc. Read about how they entered a disk containing information on 100,000--200,000 phone calls (!) into evidence. (Note: contents of calls are protected by law, but traffic analysis specifically is allowed, far as I can tell.) And you value your privacy? Too bad!

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Re: The War is Underway
by Blanc 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May wrote: >However, while we may think their power is gone, or is almost gone, they >think otherwise. And we're seeing an accelerating pace of lawmaking, as >laws are being generated by the 50 states, the various municipalities, and, >of course, the Feds. Even the lawmakers can't explain what their laws will >mean, or who will be prosecuted, or how many new prisons will have to be >built to handle the new felons. .......................................................... It's a terrible thing, a terrible course of events. But consider that they are but the tip of the iceberg; what fuels them is all those supportive constituents in their voting districts. What do you recommend be done to *them*? .. Blanc .. Blanc

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Re: Wine Politics Again!
by Blanc 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May wrote: >Give me a break. The "he must be drunk" argument is the cheapest shot, no >pun intended, in the book. > >(And, please, knock of the use of "Timothy" is a post where one disagrees. >If "Tim" is fine for most responses, why the sudden formal "Timothy"? >Another rhetorical device.) ......................................................... I was being facetious, Timmy. .. Blanc (I'd say more, but right now I have to go watch "The 5th Element".) .. Blanc

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Re: Wine Politics Again!
by Blanc 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From frissell(a)panix.com: >At 12:35 AM 5/10/97 -0700, Blanc wrote: >>Timothy must be drunk; I can't believe he said this. Because he wouldn't >>spend so much time writing sensible things of Truth & Light, if he thought >>the better thing to do for achieving libertarian values was to kill so >>indiscriminately with a bomb. After all, he subscribes to utmost >>discrimination. So I think right now he's less in the engagement of >>Reason and more under the influence of maybe some Bud Light. > >He didn't say it was a better thing to do. He said he was coming to understand McVeigh's actions. ................................................................. He didn't explicity say it was the better thing to do. But when there is a decision to be made about a course of action to take, and there are choices available and you select one over another, you have evidenced which one you think is the better. >Tim is helping (in his way) to convince others of the facts of the matter. Dramatic statements carry the message better. Lately Tim has been making extremely dramatic death statements: "Kill them all...they are unworthy of life.", "... I pray for the deaths of these criminals.", "Washington is a cancer than can only be cured with a few megatons of nuclear disinfectant.", "May they all be vaporized.", etc. These are definitely dark in mood and understandable; I also have violently negative & despairing emotions about these people. I just wouldn't ever think of involving those who are innocent bystanders and happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is the same kind of flaw which collectivists make when they set up groups, governments, any kind of organization: they take a broad sweep of the population, without being particular about any exceptions to their rules or their plans. It has always been the defining element in what is different about the U.S. from other countries, that individuals receive more attention and recognition as single entities, with their own defining characteristics, than anywhere else in the world. We are more free to descriminate, to think of people as responsible for their own actions and as deserving of just consequences for them. It muddies this concept, to lump a large aggregate of people into one and treat them all as being the same entity; it takes the mind from being able to think in terms of specifics, into thinking instead in broad considerations which overlook the particulars. Technology delivers to the single person the possibility of efficacy on their level, as compared to having to wait for some overseeing body of authorities to deliver solutions from their stock of tools & means. Technology also makes it possible to be even more precise about cause & effect - so that the tools one uses can be of benefit only to the user without affecting anyone else who is not interested in participating, or in being affected by, what anyone else may be doing. I know that critical times call for critical action, but I just don't expect from anarchist libertarian cypherpunks that they would "throw caution to the wind" (so to speak) and forget how to think about events and actions in terms of specifics and utter precision. .. Blanc .. Blanc

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Re: War & InfoWar
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Lucky Green wrote: > At 09:15 PM 5/10/97 CST, TruthMonger wrote: > > The government has prosecuted dozens of individuals for planning > >to bomb the OK city Federal Building (including executed murderers). > >It has long been listed as a target of choice for anti-government > >paramilitarists. > > Can somebody confirm this? Cite? Below, from the cypherpunks archives: ------------------- As MediaFilter reported: The March edition of Taking Aim, the newsletter of the Militia of Montana, issued a call to arms for April 19, the day of the Oklahoma blast: Federal prosecutors in (Richard Snell's) the '88 trial claimed that the '83 plot_which included counterfeiting, armed robberies and plans to assassinate federal judges and the Arkansas FBI chief_was to begin with the detonation of a truck bomb at the Oklahoma City Federal Building. All of the defendants were acquitted. But that very same building would be blown up by a truck bomb on the very day of Richard Snell's execution. Snell died knowing of the explosion. His last words were a warning to Arkansas Governor Guy Tucker: "Look over your shoulder, justice is on the way..." TruthBomber ----------------------- Planning the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building has long been as standard an exercise for paramilitarists as typing "The quick brown fox..." has been for typists. The trial mentioned above is not the only one in which the targeting of the OKC Federal Building was involved as a goal of paramilitary objectives. To think that federal security personnel in Oklahoma City were unaware of this is ludicrous. The fact that they allowed a daycare to be placed there (or perhaps initiated the action) is as criminal an act as the bombing itself. Naturally, there will be no trial or investigation of government criminality in this regard, but only of the actions of anti-government criminals. Freedom and liberty in the world is not in the hands of the citizens, but in the hands of those who are concerned about it. (The same as high-fashion or many other mental constructs.) There may not be an overt war taking place between the average citizen and the government, but there is one taking place between the government and those who oppose the draconian limitations being placed on their freedom and liberty under the guise of "rule of law." Dr. Roberts ~~~~~~~~~~~

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Re: The War is Underway (fwd)
by Black Unicorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sat, 10 May 1997, Adam Back wrote: > > Tim May <tcmay(a)got.net> writes: > > However, while we may think their power is gone, or is almost gone, they > > think otherwise. And we're seeing an accelerating pace of lawmaking, [...] [The fork in the road is discussed] > > Who will actually win? > > > > I think we will. They think they will. The war is underway. > > So what are we doing to fight our side? (Apart from fantasizing > about nuking the bastards till they glow :-) > > So what can cypherpunks do? > > Write code? Yes. One of the major stumbling blocks I have run into is a lack of code which really is refined and reviewed enough to serve the purposes I need it to serve. FC97 did a lot to make some more obscure things obvious, and familiarize the players with each other, but the details are often hard to come by. Many of the applications out there are painfully behind in interface areas forcing developers to use complicated "toolkits" which often lack the basics we need. Finding an analogy to easily explain even the basics to a customer is very difficult unless the front end jibes with the attempt. The amount of confusion over what represents a good algorithm is also interesting. Take CAST, which seems a promising cipher and which we considered using over IDEA. On asking 4 "experts" about CAST, I got 4 answers. 1> A 64 bit cipher with 40 bits secret. 2> A 64 bit cipher - not expected to be very complete. 3> A 128 bit cipher. 4> "Not worth discussing." In fact, as I understand it, CAST is of variable key length (Up to 128 bits), and quite resistant to many attacks which plague DES and even IDEA. But digging out that information was painfully difficult. (It may not even be correct). > Perhaps it's time for some stego interfaces to remailers. > > Usually around this time Black Unicorn gives us his wish list of > crypto anarchy apps. I'm not sure we've progressed much towards his > wish list since the last time he posted it. Most of what concerns me is the need to keep keylengths "obscenely large" because what is obscene today may not be so obscene after 5 years of chilled crypto development. Given the success (or lack thereof) of my call to arms before, I'm not sure I'll be anxious to repeat it soon. (The largest keylength of any widely used cipher of which I am aware remains at 128. There still is no effective PipeNet, no real mainstream "stealth crypto." No significant work on detering traffic analysis or denial of service with the exception of the below). > I thought the Eternity Service I announced a week or so ago was a step > towards reducing the possibility for government censorship of web pages. > (http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/eternity/) Not much interest to date. > Ideas stand on their merit, but the success of crypto anarchy services > also depends on ease of use, funding, volunteer effort, publicity, and > evangelizing. I haven't done much of the latter yet lacking an > example server to bootstrap the system, I hope to have this up in a > few weeks. Hearty kudos. An online bank is useless if it can be blocked by a few keystrokes. (But that's what secure INMARSAT phones are for too) Still, these are areas that I wish c'punks would start looking at again. Even if strong unforfeited crypto is legal in the U.S., it will not be in other countries for quite some time. There is strength in numbers, not just safety. The more crypto users there are, the less government, or anyone else, can do about it. C'punks should wish to provide clandestine crypto services for the entire population. Laws which may or may not pass in the United States should bore c'punks, because they should realize that legislation is irrelevent because the genie is already out of the bottle. Unfortunately, I don't think the genie is all the way out of the bottle. NOTE: I'm not on cypherpunks anymore, mail me directly for replies. -- Forward complaints to : European Association of Envelope Manufactures Finger for Public Key Gutenbergstrasse 21;Postfach;CH-3001;Bern Vote Monarchist Switzerland Rebel Directive #7:Avoid soccer games when a government assault threatens.

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Re: Mondex
by lucifer＠dhp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim C[unt] May is a pimply dweeb sitting at a computer chortling at his own imagined cleverness. ||||||||||| \~0/ \0~/ < (0) > --oOO--/|||\--OOo- Tim C[unt] May

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Political action and cypherpunks
by Michael Wilson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Given the recent comments on cypherpunks, I thought I would point out a potentially useful resource: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/4843/ It might give the more 'political action' minded some useful ideas. MW Hierarchical organizations of all sorts orient around a monopoly. That monopoly may be of force (as in 'gunpowder empires'), information (particularly in intelligence organizations), command (as in military or political structures), benefit (family or religious structures, where the hierarchical control comes from the ability to dispense food, wealth, etc.), interpretation (as in the Soviet State, which was the arbiter of the dialectic), etc. Monopoly reservation or control of some resource automatically equates to a dependency. What does this say about the battle to control cryptography? This is my PGP key; there are many like it, but this one is mine: -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6.2 mQCNAzKfDM8AAAEEANn6IkHPSVLZS+z74L50to0yKIPyBD1620wvo28N9hZwVdaK w7NvAAbX37NPfmTAikqQyN38AB22h8+LQw6tKJQFMBFCz6slGPlRmgMOmELZQZ0w TO7NtPVpHqoe5nywd4msZr+VPFu0SuG7EWq57v/H8LG8PglvgLXwnqtr0xcZAAUT tCRNaWNoYWVsIFdpbHNvbiA8NTUxNDcwNkBtY2ltYWlsLmNvbT4= =wMsF -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

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test1
by Igor Chudov ＠ home 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

test

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Intel for the War Underway
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The May 10 Economist has a special survey of global electronic commerce. It's a timely piece of battlespace intelligence for Tim's "war underway." It pinpoints financial soft target CyberPromos receiving favorable crypto treatment by the world's governments to manage the Net. Eric Hughes is featured in its analysis of the birth or death struggle of digital cash -- the key battle, if you will, of breaking the global banks and ranks of centralized information. A battle underway in the US by the TLAs, the Key Recovery Alliance and the ABAs of the banks and the lawyers aiming for supremacy -- domestic and global -- by managing ever-thinning wallets.

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