December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

cpunk-like meeting report
by Major Variola (ret.) 16 Dec '03

16 Dec '03

I went to a meeting of the Irvine Underground (irvineunderground.org) which reminded me of late-90s SF CP meatings. Although the overall tech level was probably lower and social implications weren't a big topic. Also, at this meeting, there were far more cameras or videocams than were present (at least overtly :-) at the few CP meats I attended. However, nyms were used more than they were (overtly :-) at CP meatings; this may have been due to a "introduce yourself" poll. The IU group seems to be a bit more social, going to movies for instance, than the topic-only CPs were. The meeting was held in a room at an IHOP (pancake restaurant for furriners) The exploit mentioned in http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-12-11-microsoft2_x.htm was demonstrated, we were debriefed on the recent LA 802.11b War Flying mission (and the EMI resistance of 1960's era single-engine airplane instruments :-). Toorcon organizers were present. About 30+ people were there, with what appeared to me to be a bimodal distribution of skills, some advanced, some admitted unix newbies, etc. There was even recreational lock picking. A WiFi LAN, net connectivity through someone's cell phone eventually. A video projector. I didn't notice persons with exceptional Euler numbers, though black was definately the color of choice for garments. Ages appeared well distributed from undergrad to hoary. One gent noticed a certain TLA on my cypherpunks T-shirt and admitted that he had once worked in Ft Meade, though he wouldn't say on what :-)

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Remailers and TLAs
by Nomen Nescio 16 Dec '03

16 Dec '03

Even though I agree this issue is important I wouldn't be surprised if NONE were run by TLAs today and NONE has ever been run by TLAs. We will never get any such answer and therefore these speculations will continue. Personally I think it sounds really stupid when I read comments like "you can only trust remailers from pre 9/11" (these kinds of silly/stupid/dumb-paranoid comments are often seen on A.P.A-S). The reason being really that I think they are too stupid and perhaps doesn't really understand what good it would do them to actually operate a few. I may be wrong I guess. When thinking of these things I also remeber having read several comments by remops that actually have been visited by police. Both in U.S. and abroad. The feeling I got from reading their comments is that the police (in case of U.S. I think it was FBI who was inviolved) actually didn't even know what a remailer was. If (and this is a bif "if") that is true in general amongst FBI agents I don't think th ere's a major risk of beeing flooded by TLA operated remailers any time soon. But who knows.

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Re:Textual analysis
by Major Variola (ret) 16 Dec '03

16 Dec '03

At 10:36 AM 12/14/03 -0500, John Kelsey wrote: >It's not obvious to me how you'd change your writing style to defeat these >textual analysis schemes--would it really be as simple as changing the >average length of sentences and getting rid of the big words, or would >there still be ways to determine your identity from that text? Its like steganalysis. Its an arms race between measuring your own signatures vs. what the Adversary can measure. If sentence length is a metric known to you, you can write filters that warn you. Similarly for the Adversary. You end up in an arms race over metrics ---who has the more sensitive ones that the other does not control for?

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Re: Zombie Patriots and other musings
by Anonymous 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

Nomen pondered: > Why robbing banks? Aside from allowing the > government to regulate them, what have they > done to deserve being robbed Why not? Revolutionaries need money, and the financial sector has always been asshole buddies with the police, politicians, and other pigs.

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U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
by Anonymous 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

The U.S. official's way of behaving like Texas rednecks are embarrassing. Not only are they cheering "we got him" like a child who can not withhold his enthusiasm. Displaying Saddam the way they did are also possibly a clear violation of the Geneva convention as far as I can tell. What was that quote by Nietsche again? One person who actually did behave in a respectable manner was the President. No lame "we got him" or cowboy hats there. At least not this time.

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Re: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
by privacy.at Anonymous Remailer 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

>The U.S. official's way of behaving like Texas rednecks are embarrassing. Not Crosspost from nettime: Subject: <nettime> wrong signals If symbols really do matter we might conclude that American administration's PR machine has got it badly wrong. In the carefully orchestrated news management of Saddam's capture, once again, the public opinion which *really* matters in the middle east: Arab public opinion, has been conclusively misread The image of an Arab leader (however terrible) being objectivised by a white gloved American medic like a bug on a lab bench, will not be read in the Arab world as a moment of liberation. It will be seen as a special kind of humiliation, the kind which typifies the depth of ignorance which has inspired this campaign from its outset. Once again the images (chosen with great care one imagines, given the time lapse between Saddam's capture and the John Wayne style triumphalism of the announcement) treats Arab opinion to a further demonstration of the power of the west to objectivize the world under a coolly scientific gaze. In this context no mediaeval torturer could have conceived of a greater humiliation than the medical torch's pencil thin beam illuminating the inside of the tyrant's mouth. A stupidity of almost incomprehensible proportions seems bent on prosecuting a war against terror in which the twenty-four hour news machine is mobilized to disseminate images that do little more than fan the flames of hate.

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Re: Zombie Patriots and other musings
by Anonymous 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

A question for the moment might well be how many if any of the remailers are operated by TLAs?

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Re: Idea: Simplified TEMPEST-shielded unit (speculative proposal)
by Anonymous Sender 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

While I agree with much of what you say I don't think it's likely that any kind of advanced SIGINT operation was what brought him down. The most important thing to have is intelligence from humans. From insiders. This is partly the problem with the intelligence agencies today. They think too much of the technology and it's possible uses. Good old fashion "spies" will always be the most powerfull way to get information if you can get someone to cooperate. This is also why it is a bit harder in countries with a lot of people willing to kill or be killed for the sake of ideas. Even so it seems that someone sold him for the money in this case. It was bound to happen sooner or later since it's not possible to be on the run without trusting at least one or a few individuals from time to time.

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Hack the Vote: cause a blackout
by Major Variola (ret) 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

(This inspired by comments in Scheier's cryptogram) Do all the newly electronic voting places have UPS? I doubt it. Think of the fun you could cause if you downed a few substations or poles. >> And because elections happen all at once, there would be no means of recovery. Imagine if, in the next presidential election, someone hacked the vote in New York. Would we let New York vote again in a week? Would we redo the entire national election? Would we tell New York that their votes didn't count? >>What we need are simple voting systems--paper ballots that can be counted even in a blackout.

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Using PCR to find Hussein via the sewers? [GATTACA]
by Major Variola (ret) 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

At 04:50 AM 12/15/03 -0800, John Young wrote: >There's a good possibility that Saddam was traced by Tempest >sensing, airborne or mundane. I wonder if you can trace DNA in sewers back to the source, esp. in an inbred locale? (Peter? PCR with Saddam specific primers?) Or did he just dig a cat-hole instead of using the infrastructure? You can trace industrial contamination up sewer lines back to the source. How about the cells we shed? Just theoretically. Papers fnord says someone used to the good life narced, couldn't handle a jail cell.

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