December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Prof. Bernstein's appeal brief and two major Amicus briefs online
by John Gilmore 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The EFF Bernstein Legal web page has been updated to contain: * the appeal brief by Prof. Bernstein * the Amicus ("friend of the court") brief by EPIC, ACLU, CDT, CPSR, Economic Strategy Institute, Free Congress R&E, Human Rights Watch, Independence Institute, ISC2, IMC, ISOC, NAM, Privacy International, USACM, Whit Diffie, Peter Neumann, and Ron Rivest * the Amicus brief by NCSA, RSA, Maynard Anderson, Jim Bidzos, Mark Rasch, Gene Spafford, and Ross Stapleton-Gray. http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/ITAR_export/Bernstein_case/Legal/ There are still three more amicus briefs filed with the court, which are not yet on the Web. The Government's reply is due on November 20; we'll provide page images shortly thereafter. The appeal hearing is on December 8 at 9AM at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, 95 Seventh Street, San Francisco. John Gilmore Electronic Frontier Foundation

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Thank You
by Joe Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thank you for your recent inquire. President, Joe Anonymous Free web-based email, Forever, From anywhere! http://www.mailexcite.com

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Thank You
by Joe Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thank you for your recent inquire. President, Joe Anonymous Free web-based email, Forever, From anywhere! http://www.mailexcite.com

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Thank You
by Joe Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thank you for your recent inquire. President, Joe Anonymous Free web-based email, Forever, From anywhere! http://www.mailexcite.com

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CDA: The Sequel -- introduced in the U.S. Senate
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Just when you thought the Internet was safe from government censorship, Sen. Dan Coats has introduced a sequel to the notorious Communications Decency Act. The bill punishes commercial distributors of material that's "harmful to minors" with six months in jail and a $50,000 fine. Unlike the original CDA, it applies only to web sites -- not to chatrooms, newsgroups, or email. Like the original CDA, it's certain to be controversial. Sen. Coats (R-Indiana), chief GOP sponsor of the original CDA, said his bill takes into account the Supreme Court's unanimous vote in June that struck down his first try. "I have studied the opinion of the Court and come before my colleagues today to introduce legislation that reflects the parameters laid out by the Court's opinion," he said on the Senate floor. (ftp://ftp.loc.gov/pub/thomas/c105/s1482.is.txt) Coats' brainchild is strikingly similar to (and in fact not as broad as) an ill-fated version of the first CDA that Rep. Rick White (R-Wash.) and the Center for Democracy and Technology embraced as a "compromise" in December 1995. Like Coats' bill, the White-CDT measure restricted material that was "harmful to minors." (http://www.epic.org/cda/hyde_letter.html) A Coats staffer said the measure requires adult pornographers to place images behind a firewall. "If you're involved in the commercial distribution of material that's harmful to minors, you have to take the bad stuff and put it on the other side of a credit card or PIN number," David Crane said. But the bill applies to more than just visual pornography. Its definition of material that could hurt minors includes any offensive sexual "communication" or "writing" without redeeming value. It applies to text-only web pages -- or bookstores that place sample chapters on the web. Since it covers anyone who "through the World Wide Web is engaged in the business of the commercial distribution of material that is harmful to minors," it could apply to Internet providers and online services as well. The FCC and the Department of Justice would be required to publish on their web sites "such information as is necessary to inform the public of the meaning of the term `material that is harmful to minors.'" Solveig Singleton, a lawyer at the Cato Institute, says: "The Supreme Court struggled for years to come up with a national defintion of obscenity. They failed. Harmful to minors is obscenity-lite. The FCC and Department of Justice won't have any luck coming up with a definition of obscenity-lite." Not a problem, predicts former porn-prosecutor Bruce Taylor, now the head of the National Law Center for Children and Families. "This bill will ensure that the hardcore pornographers don't get off the hook," he says. Next step for Coats is to attract co-sponsors and to forward his bill to the Senate Commerce committee. Some judges criticized Congress for holding no hearings on the original CDA; Coats isn't going to make that mistake again. "There will be a concerted effort to build a substantial legislative history," says David Crane. This bill won't be the end of Congressional interest in cyberporn. "You'll probably see other legislation come forward. Introducing this is not abandoning our other concerns," Crane says. -Declan

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Re: Some IDIOT called CRYPTO CZAR INTERNATIONAL
by bureau42 Anonymous Remailer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Tue, 11 Nov 1997, VME Encryption wrote: > p.s. - I wonder if you know what's the source of all the bad rep we've got > - nobody knows us and we never posted anything on your forum, so what the > heck ? Exactly. You have not posted the source code to your allegedly secure crypto algorithm, so every serious cryptographer will laugh at you. Without independent verification, and lots of it, the only people who will consider your product are lobotomized IT departments. We've never heard of you before; we don't even know who your developers are, so we can only assume they haven't "done their homework." In essence: you have now been branded as complete morons. The only way to avoid having to leave the country is to make the complete source for your crypto available on your website in the next 24 hours. Noncompliance will lead to your mysterious reciept of a suitcase, followed shortly by the mysterious disappearance of a large portion of your city. AlgorithmMonger

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Re: SET
by John Deters 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:18 AM 11/12/97 -0800, Jeremey Barrett you wrote: >Robert Hettinga writes: > > > > Unfortunately, I think that no MIS manager will get fired for using SET, and > > it'll take a serious demonstration of a security breach before people will > > listen to anything else. At least until someone demonstrates a transaction > > protocol which is, say 3 orders of magnitude cheaper... > >Perhaps... OTOH, SET is SO bad that it will be impossible to deploy, >probably forcing everyone away from it anyway. Having spent the last ten years at this retail outfit, I can assure you that "impossible to deploy" != "won't be deployed". If Mastercard tells us that they will jack our rates by 0.5% for every transaction processed without SET, then management will demand SET be rolled out. Function be damned, security be damned, as long as some bookkeeper somewhere is satisfied that SET happens, then we avoid a huge rate increase. If the security of SET is questioned in the trade rags, our management's approach will be to assume that Mastercard will fix it in the future, but roll it out now anyway. OTOH, it's obvious (even to them) that SET couldn't possibly be any *less* secure than current authorizing techniques. *Sigh*. Look for copyrighted swirly red/orange logos to appear on retailer's doors' soon: "SET(tm) Transaction Processing -- It's safe to use your Mastercard here" John, who will get dragged into implementing it. Got any suggestions? -- J. Deters "Don't think of Windows programs as spaghetti code. Think of them as 'Long sticky pasta objects in OLE sauce'." +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | NET: mailto:jad@dsddhc.com (work) mailto:jad@pclink.com (home) | | PSTN: 1 612 375 3116 (work) 1 612 894 8507 (home) | | ICBM: 44^58'36"N by 93^16'27"W Elev. ~=290m (work) | | For my public key, send mail with the exact subject line of: | | Subject: get pgp key | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+

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Re: CDA: The Sequel -- introduced in the U.S. Senate
by Lizard 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 06:05 PM 11/12/97 -0500, Colin Rafferty wrote: > >By the way, my signature contains an ascii art rendition of an adult >about to have sex with a child. I believe that (i) it appeals to a >prurient interest in sex; (ii) it depicts, in a patently offensive way, >a simulated sexual act; and (iii) lacks any value whatsoever. > >Now all I need to do is put it up on a web page on a for-profit company. > More to the point, since Deja News will bring it up if you post to Usenet with it, they become 'porn distributors'.

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Re: Scared of US; Where to relocate?
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anonymous wrote: > > It has become very clear to me over the past few years that amerika > is headed for some pretty rough times, and I've decided to leave before > it becomes illegal for me to do so. The only question is, where to? Comet CypherPunk Bop-Shoo-Bop will be approaching close to earth in late 1999 to drop off Jesus and pick up the CypherPunks. We're meeting at Tim's place. {Anyone who makes it to the pick-up site get's a T-shirt that says, "Darwin was right!"} Do[n't]

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Incoming!!!
by TruthMonger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

:: Anon-To: whitehouse.gov Andy Dustman wrote: > On Wed, 12 Nov 1997, Robert A. Costner wrote: > > At 10:05 AM 11/12/97 -0500, Andy Dustman wrote: > > >FYI, here is the list of things blocked at cracker: ... > > >Addresses: whitehouse.gov (ONLY address in .gov domain). > > Anonymous political speech is one the most highly protected forms of > > constitutional speech. I think that whitehouse.gov should be unblocked. > Well, I agree, and since it's your ass, it's done. Dear Bad BillyC, Realizing that a plethora of death-threats were undoubtedly sent your way through the Georgia Cracker remailer even before the ink on Andy's computer screen had dried (only two of them were from me--I'm beginning to like you), I thought I would dash off a quick note to you, hopefully arriving before you send the National Park Janitors SWAT Team out to Bob and Andy's cities of residence in order to raze them to the ground. Outwardly, I am a fool and a cynic, but inwardly, I am a fool and a secret believer in Truth, Democracy and the American Way (TM). (God, the Flag, Mom's Apple Pie, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"...) Although I am a member of a CryptoAnarchist non-organization which requires all of its non-members to have "NUKE DC" tattooed on their foreheads in invisible ink (paranoid enough , nonetheless. to make certain it is covered by our cleverly designed aluminum foil hats), I still have a small ember of hope burning deep inside that perhaps there is still someone within the belly of the Great Beast (that consumes the souls of all elected officials) who remains capable of reading the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution, and saying, "My God, what have we done!" The Anonymous Remailers are a public service provided by those who believe that "_mostly_ free speech" =/= "free speech." The anonymous remailer operators are willing to risk abuse, loss of ISP service, prosecution, and a host of other headaches in order to provide a mechanism by which those who fear retribution for speaking freely can raise their voice anonymously, just as our country's founding fathers did. No matter how eloquent the speech of those who claim that words spoken by free men must be stifled if they are 'dangerous' to the goals of democracy, national security, etc., the fact remains that if the citizens are not allowed full freedom of speech, then there is no democracy to defend, and no nation worth securing. Nothing personal, but if you have your hand resting on the Big Red Button and still feel the need to call out the militia every time someone tells you to "Beware the Ides of March.", then maybe you ought to lift weights, or something, and see if you can't raise your level of confidence in your physical security. Has no one in DC ever heard the phrase, "Sticks and stones will break my bones...?" Never seen Kato, in "The Pink Panther?" Personally, I think that you should institute National Death Threat Week, where everyone is encouraged to send death threats in one form or another to their legislative representatives, employers, workers, family, neighbors, et al. Why? Because I don't believe that the first indication of a 'problem' should be seeing the muzzle flash and, if one is lucky, hearing the shot. The Founding Fathers did not write the Constitution 'off the cuff.' They did not fail to consider someone shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. They were aware of the existence of words such as "nigger" and "cocksucker." Yet they still wrote that the right to free speech should not be abridged. Figure it out... What has democracy come to when quoting those who wrote our country's defining documents has become a cause for being labeled a fanatic, radical terrorist/pedophile/drug-dealer (and a Horseman To Be Named Later)? Why does it take me half a day to find copies of the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence when searching government web sites, but only a few minutes to find by searching the sites of those declared by the government to be guilty of uttering 'dangerous' free speech? I know that it can be just as thankless being President as it can being an anonymous remailer operator, so you, above all, should recognize that they are trying to keep the alligators off their ass while still remembering to drain the swamp. I have no doubt that there are several hundred laws that you or others could use to force the Georgia Cracker remailer operators to block anonymous email to whitehouse.gov, but I hope that you realize the value, in your position, of having at least one forum where people can communicate with you at a level that goes beyond ass kissing, fear of retribution, etc. My final offering of wisdom: Have "NUKE DC!" tattooed on your forehead. I have no doubt that this would create a groundswell of popular support for you that would result in the citizens storming Congress to have you declared "President For Life." Then you could have some *real* fun, without worrying about political fallout. ("Did I say 'inhale'? I meant 'exhale'! Hee...hee...") Your pal, TruthMonger "It's not FUD until *I* say it's FUD!"

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