December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Installation Procedures
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

----- Begin Included Message ----- <forwards have descended> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ INSTALLING THE SOFTWARE: Introduction Thank you for purchasing InCom's PowerComp Libraries. At InCom, customer satisfaction is our number one priority, and we hope that you will be pleased with the power of our libraries. Please follow all of the instructions in order to enjoy a quick and easy installation. Getting Started In this guide, information which you will need to supply will be enclosed in angle brackets, <like this>. Commands which you will have to enter will be indented, like this. You will need to provide a loading directory, in which to load the material from tape (/tmp/pcl is recommended), and a permanent installation directory (/usr/local/pcl is recommended). Loading From Tape First create and change directory to the loading directory: mkdir <working directory> cd <working directory> Now you are ready to load the software from tape. The specific device name needed to load the tape varies with hardware vendors, and may be found in Appendix A, "Vendors and Device Names". Load the software from tape: tar xvf /dev/<device name> You have now loaded all of the software from tape, and are ready to compile and install the PowerComp libraries. Compiling and Installing the PowerComp Libraries Compiling and installing the libraries is handled by a user-friendly shell script. You will need to provide some information to the script, such as your organization name and registration number. To run the script, type /bin/sh pcl/pcl.install -d <installation directory> Follow the script's directions, and provide the information which it prompts for. When the script prompts you for the directory in which the distribution files are located, you will find that you are unable to provide it with any directory which the script will deem satisfactory. That is because it is necessary to order the following additional parts which are necessary to continue with the installation: Part Number Qty Name Price GM-96-3026 1 Goat, male 1000.00 CB-13-2395 1 Candle, black 50.00 CG-63-6376 1 Chalk dust container 10.00 IB-89-3335 5 Incense sticks 5.00 DE-44-8846 1 Dagger, ebon, curved 500.00 AS-87-2319 1 Altar, silver 10000.00 Wait until the additional parts arrive; you will be ready to continue the installation the next Friday the 13th at midnight. Ritual for Successfully Completing Installation Stand in front of the computer. Pour out the chalk dust in an inscribed pentagram around you; be sure that it is without breaks. Set an incense stick at each of the five corners, the altar in front of the computer, and the candle in front of the altar. Light each of the incense sticks and the candles, chanting in a low voice: Daemons and spirits of the netherworld Forces of all that is chaotic and mysterious Essence of Netscape and MicroSoft I am coming here to appease you I offer you this goat That my software may work I bind you here Do not make my system crash Let the software install as advertised Place the goat on the altar, and slaughter it with the dagger. May this goat feed you Sate your lust for blood Into it may your mischief fly Not my computer Make the software work For this is the only way Then spit into the computer's ventilation slots. This will complete different circuits inside the computer, causing its motherboard and cards to function in ways that the engineers never intended, thereby making your system compatible with our libraries. Reboot your computer. The installation is now complete. ----------------- End Forwarded Message ----------------- + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Systems Guides bstaud(a)sysgu.com Bill Staudenheimer Vox: 415-917-8170 PO Box 4130 Fax: 415-917-8172 Mountain View, CA 94040-0130 http://www.sysgu.com ----- End Included Message -----

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oxley amendment
by Ariel Glenn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

a fine statement which I would be proud to echo. however I heard (I've been calling every hour) from a staffer in Tauzin's office that the amendment was defeated after all! he didn't have the numbers and I couldn't find out about the competing propossal, but he was quite sure that oxley went down in flames. I wish I could confirm this from some other source, but the news will be out there one way or another tomorrow morning so we'll all know... yes, I found it on cdt's home page, they must have just put this up! the committee ditched the earlier amendment adding extra export restrictions, but they did approve the white amendment which toughens the criminal penalties for use of encryption to further a crime. *whew* we actually won one! but there is a long way to go yet... Ariel Glenn ariel(a)columbia.edu

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Soviet spies at NSA
by ichudov＠Algebra.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

http://customnews.cnn.com/cnews/pna.show_story?p_art_id=341606&p_section_na… [look at the last paragraph] Former Army Clerk Sentenced for Cold War Espionage AP 24-SEP-97 PHILADELPHIA (AP) A former Army clerk at the National Security Agency was sentenced to 18 years in prison Wednesday for selling secrets to the Soviet Union three decades ago. Robert S. Lipka, 51, pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy to commit espionage. He was arrested last year after his ex-wife betrayed him. "I put this to rest many years ago, and I never dreamed it would come out like this," a tearful Lipka told U.S. District Judge Charles R. Weiner. "I owe an apology to a lot of people." Lipka was trained as an intelligence analyst and had top security clearance with the NSA at Fort Meade, Md., where he was responsible for distributing and destroying classified documents. Between 1965 and 1967, Lipka photographed documents with a camera provided by the Soviets and dropped the film off in a park for up to $1,000 a drop, prosecutors said. He allegedly got a total of $27,000 from the KGB. In the late 1960s, Lipka told his then-wife, Patricia, that he was selling NSA materials to the Soviets. The couple married in 1966 and divorced in 1974. In 1993, after Lipka's wife went to authorities, Lipka recounted the arrangement for an FBI agent posing as a Soviet spy. After his arrest, the coin collector and gambler from Millersville threatened to reveal government secrets on the Internet if his case were not dropped. The judge also fined Lipka $10,000.

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Re: The Telcos oppose Oxley
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 13:23 -0700 9/24/97, Lizard wrote: >At 09:47 PM 9/24/97 +0200, Peter Herngaard wrote: >>They support the penalty enhancement for use of encryption >>in futherance of a felony. > >I don't find this particularly offensive, on the grounds that if you're >convicted of any given crime, the government can more-or-less drum up so >many related charges they can put you away for 500 years ANYWAY, so what >difference does it make? Lizard's position is sadly incoherent. If he believes in civil liberties -- and I know he does -- then he should think twice. Just because the federal government has broad powers doesn't mean we should give them more. Under Lizard's reasoning, he should find a law outlawing "breathing air (or speaking Spanish) in the commission of a crime" acceptable. Or at least not "particularly offensive." -Declan

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Re: Oxley Amendment
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks to Ariel Glenn for pointing to CDT's for quick posting of the SAFE vote against Oxley-Manton, for Markey-White: http://www.cdt.org/crypto/legis_105/SAFE/

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Re: The Telcos oppose Oxley
by Lizard 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 06:32 PM 9/24/97 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote: >At 13:23 -0700 9/24/97, Lizard wrote: >>At 09:47 PM 9/24/97 +0200, Peter Herngaard wrote: >>>They support the penalty enhancement for use of encryption >>>in futherance of a felony. >> >>I don't find this particularly offensive, on the grounds that if you're >>convicted of any given crime, the government can more-or-less drum up so >>many related charges they can put you away for 500 years ANYWAY, so what >>difference does it make? > >Lizard's position is sadly incoherent. If he believes in civil liberties -- >and I know he does -- then he should think twice. Just because the federal >government has broad powers doesn't mean we should give them more. > <shrug> Rather, my position is that the system is ALREADY hopelessly corrupt and imbalanced;altering the letter of the law to say '20 years' as opposed to '10 years' FOR SOMETHING THAT SHOULDN'T BE A CRIME AT ALL is irrelevant. The government can just as easily create two trumped-up ten year charges as it can one 20 year charge;'law' and 'justice' have nothing to do with one another anymore. The whole concept of criminilizing the use of crpytography is offensive;the exact specifics -- 10 years or 20 years -- are pretty much the same. Though, on second thought, there is a serious issue with it -- if, as we hope, encryption becomes widespread, than anyone doing anything will be using it;including 'in the commission of a crime'. This could make petty misdemeanors into 20 year federal crimes, and THAT is something to worry about. Hm. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQA/AwUBNCm7HjKf8mIpTvjWEQL6ywCgrLu61z4DOjcIgboX8wJPZaKxHE4An2yH QzcO/ZeobOWzOnhM5CxeULp4 =pwGM -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Crypto-victory in Commerce; Oxley talks about nuking Congress
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

So I'm sitting here in the lobbyist warren of the Capitol Grille on Pennsylvania Avenue getting sloshed on expensive beer -- and sick on the clouds of cigar smoke from industry representatives flush from their victory in the House Commerce committee earlier this evening. And they do have cause to celebrate. A week ago, the outlook in Congress was dismal. The House Intelligence committee had approved (during a closed hearing) the first-ever domestic restrictions on what technologies Americans can use to protect their privacy. The House Commerce committee seemed certain to follow. Rep. Oxley, who was pushing the proposal, told me last week he had the votes sewn up. The tide changed today when the Commerce committee overwhelmingly defeated Oxley's amendment. In a 35-16 vote, members rejected restrictions on manufacturing unapproved encryption devices and instead approved a modified version of Rep. Goodlatte's original Security and Freedom through Encryption (SAFE) bill. The vote came after a last-minute press by a diverse coalition of industry groups, including some who had never weighed in on crypto before, including the automobile companies and the Baby Bells. (In fact, the Bells may have been the deciding factor in defeating the measure.) The version of SAFE the Commerce committee approved includes: criminal penalties (doubled from the original) for the use of encryption in a crime, a prohibition on mandatory domestic key escrow, delinking certificate authorities from key escrow requirements, a "NET" center to coordinate law enforcement codebreaking, a classfied study to be conducted by the Attorney General, a NIST study on crypto, and liability limitations on firms providing key recovery. It also includes SAFE's original export relaxation on encryption products that are already available overseas or are in the public domain. Many of those changes were proposed by Reps. Markey and White, who had their amendment approved 40-11. The amended bill was approved out of the committee by a 44-6 vote. (One lobbyist just leaned over, martini in hand, and asked me, "Do you need a quote, Declan?" //sigh//) Today's discussion before the committee was all about compromise -- which, after all, shouldn't be surprising. Washington politicians thrive on it. If politics is the art of the possible, compromise is its lifeblood. But to the chagrin of politicans, staffers, and bureaucrats alike, the politics of encryption doesn't provide one. Either you use backdoored crypto or you don't. Either you have unalloyed privacy or you don't. There's no middle ground. Of course it's one thing to compromise on tax bills or spending measures. That's not only expected, it's necessary. But it's another thing entirely to compromise on a bill that deals with fundamental freedoms. How many newspapers is it acceptable for the government to review and censor before publication? How many Americans can be imprisoned without a public trial? Sometimes, including now, Americans should stand on principle and reject that any and all "compromises." A coalition of groups from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Eagle Forum sent out just that letter earlier today. Those groups understand what high tech firms have been slow to realize: Congress will not, and cannot, approve a bill that benefits crypto-liberty. Right now there are no domestic controls on encryption. After Congress passes a bill, that will surely change. The crypto-in-a-crime provisions are destined to stay in. When crypto becomes omnipresent, Congress might just as well punish you for speaking Spanish in the commission of a crime. (By now the lobbyists are drunk. One just leaned over, laughing excitedly, and yelled in my ear: "Cold fusion still doesn't work!" Huh? Whatever. Seriously, folks, I do not make this stuff up. Another fellow says the quote of the day is: "The FBI tried to take the country hostage.") Anyway, today firms saw their arguments used against them. For years companies have testified before Congress that crypto was readily available at the corner software store. One Congressman recently even waved around a shrinkwrapped copy of Lotus Notes as a prop. At last the techno-impaired members of the House Commerce committee have realized that strong crypto was available through a point-and-click download (or for $19.95). But instead of allowing the //overseas// distribution of encryption, they instead came close to banning the //domestic// distribution. By now even the more censorhappy members of Congress are sick and tired of hearing about pedophiles and child pornographers and molesters and such. Even the druglords-wielding-crypto claims pales after a while -- at least if you've heard it 17 times in the past few weeks. So today Rep. Oxley whipped out his trump card: if you don't vote for my amendment, you'll get blown up! "How about some terrorist orgainztion acting with impunity because they have the ability to communicate with impunity gets a hold of a Russian nuclear device and threatens to blow up the Capitol of the United States?" In the end, Oxley's amendment didn't carry the day. It was of course almost entirely the successful lobbying -- and if firms can't win in the //Commerce// committee, where can they win? -- but to their credit, some Congressmen actually talked about the Constitutional issues involved. "This is about our liberty and how far we will go in protecting our liberties," said Rep. Rogan, a former prosecutor and judge who spoke against Oxley. The future, however, is uncertain. The bill now goes to the House Rules committee, whose chairman said today in a strongly-worded letter that he'd only allow a bill to go to the floor if it included Oxley's amendment. Look for a hell of a lot of behind-the-scenes lobbying on this now... -Declan ------------------------- Declan McCullagh Time Inc. The Netly News Network Washington Correspondent http://netlynews.com/

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The Commerce committee votes are up at crypto.com
by Shabbir J. Safdar 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Last night's votes on SAFE in the Commerce committee are in place at http://www.crypto.com/member/ Simply select the member of Congress you're curious about, either by zip code or by state, and you can see how they voted in the three Commerce votes last night. Then, you can call and yell or send kudos. If you're a part of the Adopt Your Legislator program, you'll be receiving a custom-tailored alert soon with all this information. -Shabbir

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Secrets: The CIA's War At Home
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Angus Mackenzie recounts in his new book the US intelligence agencies' and supporters' gradual erosion of Firt Amendment rights since the passage of the National Security Act of 1947. Secrets: The CIA's War At Home Angus Mackenzie University of California Press Berkeley, 1997. 241 pp. $27.50 ISBN 0-520-20020-9 "Secrets" decribes the origination of the Freedom of Information Act and other legislation to make government secrets available, the battles to get the laws passed and to defend them against subsequent attacks by proponents of secrecy who invoke the National Security Act. Mackenzie sets out the ways the intelligence industry, helped by the Department of Justice and the courts, manipulates the media, other governmental agencies and the citizenry by force and by seduction, with special attention to how it coopts its ostensible opponents like the ACLU and investigative journalists. He documents the undisclosed arrangments between the CIA and the media to favor journalism at the public's expense in legislation and in working relations. He carefully traces the long-running campaign to limit governmental employees from revealing what they know through various non-disclosure and lifetime secrecy agreements, sometimes breached by ex-agency heads who reveal secrets to boost careers. The book amply documents the ongoing struggle, now 50 years underway, to open the archives of domestic spying, new attempts to limit public access to governmental information, and moves to invade privacy. Here are the book's closing paragraphs: By the 1990s, reflecting the general conservative shift in Congress, many House members were actively welcoming a secrecy oath. Consideration of the oath, less comprehensive than the standard contract, first came up in the House Select Committee on Intelligence during a discussion of the fiscal year (FY) 1992 Intelligence Authorization Act. That led to a House rule requiring the intelligence committee members and staff to sign the oath. Interest in broadening the use of the oath did not stop there, especially for committee member Porter J. Goss of Florida. Goss's ties to the CIA dated from 1962 and his ten year stint as a clandestine service officer at the Agency. He and his fellow enthusiast, Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, offered amendments to the FY 1993 and 1994 authorization acts that would require secrecy oaths from every member of the House. The amendments did not prosper, but when the 104th Congress convened on January 4, 1995, backers of the oath changed tactics. This time the oath requirement for every House member was included in the packet of rules from the House Conference of the Majority. It became a new rule without debate. In the mid-1980s, Jeane Kirkpatrick sounded the alarm about government censorship. Although a member of the Reagan administration's inner foreign policy circle, Kirkpatrick had a personal encounter with government censors over her refusal to sign the lifetime secrecy contract. Upon returning to her political science chair at Georgetown University from her post as U.S. United Nations ambassador, Kirkpatrick reexamined John Stuart Mill's classic essay On Liberty and delivered a lecture on censorship. "Societies are not made stronger by the process of repression that accompanies censorship," she warned. "Censorship requires an assumption of infallibility, and that seems to Mill invariably negative. Repression of an opinion is thus bad for the censor, who inevitably acts from a conviction of his own infallibility," she told her students, "and bad for the opinion itself, which can neither be corrected nor held with conviction equal to the strength of an opinion submitted to challenge." As the twentieth century draws to a close, the 1947 National Security Act has become the Pandora's box that Ambassador Kirkpatrick and Congressman Hoffman had feared. Placing a legal barrier between foreign intelligence operations and domestic politics in the National Security Act has proved ineffectual. In the decades that followed 1947, the CIA not only became increasingly involved in domestic politics but abridged First Amendment guarantees of free speech and free press in a conspiracy to keep this intrusion from the American people. The intelligence and military secrecy of the 1940s had broadened in the 1960s to covering up the suppression of domestic dissent. The 1980s registered a further, more fundamental change, as the suppression of unpopular opinions was supplemented by systematic and institutionalized peacetime censorship for the first time in U.S. history. The repressive machinery developed by the CIA has spread secrecy like oil on water. The U.S. government has always danced with the devil of secrecy during wartime. By attaching the word "war" to the economic and ideological race for world supremacy between the Soviet Union and the United States, a string of administrations continued this dance uninterrupted for fifty years. The cold war provided the foreign threat to justify the pervasive Washington belief that secrecy should have the greatest possible latitude and openness should be restricted as much as possible -- constitutional liberties be damned. With the collapse of the Soviet Union as a world power in 1990, even the pseudo-war rationale evaporated. But the partisans of secrecy have not been willing to accept the usual terms of peacetime. They have made clear their intentions to preserve and extend the wartime system. They will find a rationalization: if not the threat of the Soviet Union, then the goal of economic hegemony. Thus the U.S. government now needs to keep secrets to give an advantage to American corporate interests. Yet it is entrepreneurs who have been making the most use of FOIA -- not journalists, not lawyers. As of 1994, the great preponderance of all FOIA requests have been for business purposes. As the framers of the Constitution understood, the free exchange of ideas is good for commerce, but this idea has been widely forgotten in the years since the passage of the 1947 National Security Act. Only recently in the history of the world's oldest republic has secrecy functioned principally to keep the American people in the dark about the nefarious activities of their government. The United States is no longer the nation its citizens once thought: a place, unlike most others in the world, free from censorship and thought police, where people can say what they want, when they want to, about their government. Almost a decade after the end of the cold war, espionage is not the issue, if it ever really was. The issue is freedom, as it was for the Minute Men at Compo Hill. The issue is principle, as it was for Ernest Fitzgerald, who never signed a secrecy contract but retained his Pentagon job because he made his stand for the First Amendment resonate in Congress. Until the citizens of this land aggressively defend their First Amendment rights of free speech, there is little hope that the march to censorship will be reversed. The survival of the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights is at stake.

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Re: Oxley Amendment
by Michael Brock 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I wonder if Mr. Solomon of NY will rethink his decision to not bring up SAFE without Oxley to the entire House after the unprecedented coaltion of companies and individual groups that came together to make sure that mandatory key recovery stays a "1984" like dream. I find it incomprehensible that one man, would block the introduction of this bill, after it being proved that this is what his constituents want.... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQA/AwUBNCndC6kD4Ab4OebpEQJYvQCg1YyRAp1npa4euRQdhh/CKjjbY8MAnRr2 cAljqiyA7E8TNF5wvdKwVBXz =bsvt -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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