December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Life inside the Beltway
by Chip Mefford 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

New technology for the cops. It brings tears of joy to my eyes to think of all the children that this new technology will save. -------------begin included text-------------------------- Alexandria police have a new high-tech tool to help them catch fugitives and find missing people. Police officials last week unveiled new digital scanners and cellular transmitters that allow cruisers to transmit photographs in less than a minute. That means an officer can scan in a family photo of a lost child and send it to all active patrol cars nearly instantly. The technology also lets the police send photos to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which can then pass information on to other police departments. "In the search for a missing child, time is the enemy," said Ernie Allen, president of the Arlington-based center. "The more quickly we can provide a child's image, the greater the likelihood we can find the child." Alexandria and College Station, Tex., are the first two police departments in the country to get this image technology, officials said. Although the two departments use different computer systems, they are able to send pictures to each other via a computer center in Florida. At a demonstration last week, a College Station car sent a photo to an Alexandria cruiser in about 40 seconds, and a photo from the National Center took about the same time. It takes the same amount of time to send a photo to one car as to broadcast it to all of the cruisers, allowing the department to blanket an area with images immediately, officials said. The same technology will allow Alexandria to send photos to neighboring jurisdictions as soon as they get computers that receive digital images. Federal Highway Administration officials said they expect this kind of system to become widely available over the next two years. Alexandria is spending $800,000 to outfit its patrol cars with the new scanners and portable computers that can run criminal record checks. Adding the scanning technology "is an opportunity we just couldn't miss," said Lt. Michael Clancey, who commands the vice-narcotics division. Most of the money for the computers -- $500,000 -- comes from two federal grants and assets seized from criminals, officials said. The department is buying 82 computers, ensuring that most on-duty cars will have them. "Alexandria has been on the forefront of creative development in the use of technology," said Daniel Rosenblatt, director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. © Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company By Brooke A. Masters --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: FCPUNX:There's no general right to privacy -- get over it, from Netly
by jamesd＠echeque.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:27 PM 6/13/97 -0400, tzeruch(a)ceddec.com wrote: > Today the Nazi's would simply pay Experian (was TRW) for their databases. > I think the IRS already does. I do not see private organizations bothering to collect data on racial identity, except where they are compelled to by the government. > --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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Re: There's no general right to privacy -- get over it, from Netly
by Rich Graves 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- William H. Geiger III <whgiii(a)amaranth.com> wrote: > Well this is rather a poor example. The requirment of a census was written > into the costitution and with good reason. Many of the government actions > are based on demographics congressional districting is a prime example. > > There is a fight going on in cogress right now as the current > administration wants to be able to gestimate the census rather than doing > an actuall head count so it can manipulate the figures any way it wants > (ie change the figures in key congressional districts so they can re-draw > them to favor their supporters). Not that I feel strongly either way, but the other way to look at this is that the current Congress likes its cozy little districts and likes restricting the census to people with permanent addresses, which tends to bias the figures in favor of suburbia. I certainly agree with the fundamental points that censuses and districting have always been important, and hence political[ly corrupted]. Anyone here descended from 3/5ths people? - -rich http://www.stanford.edu/~llurch/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQBVAwUBM6HgHJNcNyVVy0jxAQEmsgH+IWGzDmFvmlCIKSxw26xaP4+tBRHhdRDu BT572zIvqjQfh/4B31qOzOjjWh6cFCEREXE/9bzHaRmyOYA3YfP+EQ== =8mJR -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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The World's Smartest Highway (opened earlier this week)
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The worlds smartest highway opens tomorrow. So far, Highway 407 runs 36 km between Brampton and Markham, Ontario. Eventually it will cover an additional 33 km, and cost a total of $929.8 million over $13,000 per meter. What does that buy for Ontario commuters? The highway has a series of UHF radio antennae that pick up signals from small transponders installed in commuters vehicles. The highway measures the distance a vehicle travels, and deducts a per-kilometer fee from the owners credit card or prepaid account. The fee is 10 cents per kilometer in rush hour, 7 cents in off-peak hours, and 4 cents at night. Thats not a first a few U.S. toll highways have similar systems. But the 407 is the first highway able to send bills to drivers without transponders, without stopping them at toll booths. Overhead gantries along the highway take video images of license plates as vehicles travel the highway. The bill comes in the mail with a $1 premium. Ontario expects to pull in $40 million a year from Highway 407 tolls in theory. The license-plate billing system has never been tested under heavy traffic. The highway will be watching but not charging for the next 30 days or so, while Hughes Aircraft and Bell Canada, the companies who designed the system, hammer out the kinks. Related links: Canadian Highways International Corporation -30- Copyright ) 1997 Convergent Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved. [INLINE] Canadian Highways International Corporation http://www.chichwys.com http://www.theconvergence.com

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Re: Wired News' War Correspondent on kiddie porn
by Rich Graves 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> http://www.wired.com/news/culture/story/4437.html > > Hacker Vows 'Terror' for Child Pornographers > by Steve Silberman [...] > "Basically, we're talking about a Dirty Harry attitude," one network > technician/cypherpunk told Wired News. Though he senses "real feeling" > behind Se7en's battle cry, he feels that the best way to deal with > pornographers is to "turn the police loose on them." Grr. Didn't notice that on first reading. Of course I meant evidence of criminal child abuse that Mike Godwin considers illegal, not "pornography." Since he snipped my name on request, though, I suppose I can't really complain. -rich http://www.stanford.edu/~llurch/

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Wired News' War Correspondent on kiddie porn
by Rich Graves 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Full text: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/story/4437.html Hacker Vows 'Terror' for Child Pornographers by Steve Silberman 2:32pm 13.Jun.97.PDT After 17 years in the hacker underground, Christian Valor - well known among old-school hackers and phone phreaks as "Se7en" - was convinced that most of what gets written in the papers about computers and hacking is sensationalistic jive. For years, Valor says, he sneered at reports of the incidence of child pornography on the Net as "exaggerated/over-hyped/fearmongered/bullshit." Now making his living as a lecturer on computer security, Se7en claims he combed the Net for child pornography for eight weeks last year without finding a single image. That changed a couple of weeks ago, he says, when a JPEG mailed by an anonymous prankster sent him on an odyssey through a different kind of underground: IRC chat rooms with names like #littlegirlsex, ftp [...] On 8 June, Se7en vowed on a hacker's mailing list to deliver a dose of "genuine hacker terror" to those who upload and distribute such images on the Net. The debate over his methods has stirred up tough questions among his peers about civil liberties, property rights, and the ethics of vigilante justice. [I was not aware that he'd sent it to DefCon first, with cypherpunks as a secondary distribution. That explains the language barrier Lizard noticed.] Se7en claims to have already "taken down" a "major player" - an employee of Southwestern Bell who Se7en says was "posting ads all over the place." Se7en told Wired News that he covertly watched the man's activities for days, gathering evidence that he emailed to the president of Southwestern Bell. Pseudonymous remailers like hotmail.com and juno.com, Se7en insists, provide no security blanket [...] A couple of days after submitting message headers and logs to the president and network administrators of Southwestern Bell, Se7en says, he got a letter saying the employee was "no longer on the payroll." The hacker search for acceptance Se7en's declaration of war received support on the original mailing list. "I am all for freedom of speech/expression," wrote one poster, "but there are some things that are just wrong.... I feel a certain moral obligation to the human race to do my part in cleaning up the evil." [...] Pitching in to assist the Feds just isn't the hacker way. As one poster to the DefCon list put it, "The government can't enforce laws on the Internet. We all know that. We can enforce laws on the Internet. We all know that too." The DefCon list was not a unanimous chorus of praise for Se7en's plan to give the pornographers a taste of hacker terror, however. The most vocal dissenter has been Declan McCullagh, Washington correspondent for the Netly News. McCullagh is an outspoken champion of constitutional rights, and a former hacker himself. [Wired forgot the (tm).] "Few people seem to realize that the long-standing federal child-porn law outlawed pictures of dancing girls wearing leotards," McCullagh wrote - alluding to the conviction of Stephen Knox, a graduate student sentenced to five years in prison for possession of three videotapes of young girls in bathing suits. The camera, the US attorney general pointed out, lingered on the girls' genitals, though they remained clothed. "The sexual implications of certain modes of dress, posture, or movement may readily put the genitals on exhibition in a lascivious manner, without revealing them in a nude display," the Feds argued - and won. [Declan fails to recognize that everybody here already knows this, and agrees that Knox was the victim of hysteria.] The menace of child porn is being exploited by "censor-happy" legislators to "rein in this unruly cyberspace," McCullagh says. The rush to revile child porn on the DefCon list, McCullagh told Wired News, reminded him of the "loyalty oaths" of the McCarthy era. [With James Donald, on the other hand, no analogies are necessary.] But McCullagh is not alone. As the debate over Se7en's declaration spread to the cypherpunks mailing list and alt.cypherpunks - frequented by an older crowd than the DefCon list - others expressed similar reservations over Se7en's plan. "Basically, we're talking about a Dirty Harry attitude," one network technician/cypherpunk told Wired News. Though he senses "real feeling" behind Se7en's battle cry, he feels that the best way to deal with pornographers is to "turn the police loose on them." [ROFL. I insisted on not being identified because I didn't want any conflict with Declan, and here he has me AGREEING with him. Cool! And in context, a good addition to the story.] It's not JPEGs of clothed ballerinas that raise his ire, Se7en says. It's "the 4-year-olds being raped, the 6-year-old forced to have oral sex with cum running down themselves." Such images, Se7en admits, are very rare - even in online spaces dedicated to trading sexual imagery of children. "I know what I'm doing is wrong. I'm trampling on the rights of these guys," he says. "But somewhere in the chain, someone is putting these images on paper before they get uploaded. Your freedom ends when you start hurting other people." [I.e., we ain't talking about Knox or Angeli, folks.] -rich http://www.stanford.edu/~llurch/

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Re: Do reporters have special rights the rest of us don't have?
by Secret Squirrel 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May wrote: > (I have no problems with private agents, e.g., Microsoft or > whatever, limiting contacts to the "main" reporters. It's their > property. If they grant interviews to Declan, Brock, John, Steve, > etc., and not to me, I cannot claim my "rights" were violated. > Government functions are another matter, and I would generally favor > letting anyone claiming to be a reporter in to government press > conferences...to do anything else is to give licensing and > credentials to speech, which the government should have no right to > do. If they need to hold press conferences in RFK Stadium, so be > it.) Are you proposing the President can't choose who he meets? Whether such a meeting is called a "press conference" is irrelevant. The legitimization of reporters through the use of "press credentials" by the government can only occur when people operating the news channels and their customers allow it to happen. Panther Modern

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Re: FUCK YOU: There's no general right to privacy -- get over it, from Netly
by Secret Squirrel 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Declan McCullagh wrote: >Ray Arachelian wrote: >> Yes, I do take privacy seriously, and I do protect it. But to say >> anyone has the right to snoop my machines and see what I have there >> is NOT cool. What I leave on my computer is my private business, >> and NOBODY HAS THE RIGHT TO SURF IT WITHOUT MY PERMISSION. Whether >> or not they have root. >I'm not saying that people have a "right to surf (?) it without your >permission." That's a violation of your property rights, a trespass. >But if you connect to my web site, I should be allowed to record >whatever info leaks from your computer. Don't like it? Cut the flow >or don't come. "Trespass" is a misleading term. The person "trespassing" doesn't have to leave their chair. What really happens is that somebody sets up a machine that will transmit information when it receives certain combinations of bits. Then the machine is made available to the whole world. It is most reasonable to put the burden for security on the person who wants to make their machine available to the whole world. The legal approach has several problems. 1. It is ineffective and gives a false sense of security. 2. It undermines the demand for secure machinery. (Intentional: the people in governments believe secure machinery threatens their positions.) 3. It brings up problems with borders and seignority. 4. Such laws are expensive to enforce if we are to observe legal customs like "innocent until proven guilty." 5. The legal prohibitions break down under the very circumstances when we most want our systems to remain secure: times of war and times of social unrest or revolution. Panther Modern

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PLEASE DON'T PASS THIS UP
by 65188000＠22151.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Re: IBM sues critics?
by John Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Can someone explain the difference between key recovery and key escrow? The IBM white paper describes it at http://www.ibm.com/security/html/pp_global5.html in terms of giving a keys or a combination to your neighbors, but the analogy was hard to follow. "John --------------------------------------------------------- Get Your *Web-Based* Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ---------------------------------------------------------

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