December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: The Natives Are Getting Restless
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

Friday, May 23, 1997 - 16:33:14 MET It has been said that the greatest lesson learned from the vietnam war by the military industrial complex, was the need for effective disinformation and its role in dividing groups that would otherwise hang together against a common enemy. Applied to the home front this translated into "identity" politics. To break up the antiwar and youth movements of the 60s, everyone was defined as a minority with their own agenda and lexicon. Feminists, Vanishing White male, Black Power advocates, Gays/Lesbians, christian peaceniks, hispanic farm workers, etc each was pitted against the other by underscoring their departure points in a machevelian plan to divide and conquer those that had united against the war and the MIC. For the most part this has been extremely successful and any meaningful dialogue on a national scale has long been next to impossible because of it. List members should be the first to rise above the base tactics of the enemy. We need to develop a language of inclusion that unites all of these seemingly disparate peoples against the common enemy. > Blanc wrote: > > > If this society is at war, it is a Civil War, fighting against itself. In > > fact, there are many groups fighting against each other, on many different > > levels: racial, gender-based, religious, economic, philosophical, not to > > leave out political. Companies are fighting each other "tooth & nail" > > for survival in marketing turfs, races are still exchanging vicious barbs, > > homosexuals are under verbal & physical attack by the socially "normed", > > the poor still envy & disparage the rich, women & children seem more than > > ever to be at risk to attacks from roving sex perverts, the liberals would > > love to put the libertarians under, religious groups lecture against the > > moral depravity of all those "other" people, and half the country is either > > stocking up for a National Disaster or forming into militia groups or other > > Think Tanks to fight some sort of government encroachment (even the health > > food stores where I shop are always posting sign-up sheets to vote against > > something or another the government wants to ban or some right-of-choice > > that is being threatened by proposed legislation). > > Second only to Miss Piggy among deep thinkers, Mrs. > Wiggs, the one with the cabbage patch, said this: "In the > mud and scum of things ... Something always always > sings." > > I am grateful that there is at least one female on the list who > is capable of stepping into the middle of the "Dick Wars" on the > list and reminding the men that the "targets" they talk about have > names, faces, and children. > I am aware that there is a human cost inherent in every conflict, > and I accept that it will always be so, but I cannot accept the > idea that one can leave their conscience clear by "criminalizing" > their target and discounting their target's humanity. > I am an anarchist and a realist. If I had a button that would > nuke D.C., I might well push it--but I am also a thinking, feeling > human, and I would cry a river of tears, as well. When I estimate > a "body count", I never fail to count the children. > > Blanc's aim is true when she speaks of the growth of reactionary > posts to the list which fail to include a foundation of creative > thought. > Anyone can return fire when attacked and turn the situation into > a firefight where a random volley of ammo decides the outcome of > the battle. However, a good squad leader already has his defences > in place to deal rationally with situations that can easily be > forseen before they arise. > When "they" come for your neighbor today, will you be surprised > when they come for _you_ tomorrow? When I first heard of Jim Bell's > arrest I began composing a reply to Hallam-Baker's coming post. It > may be vocal and emotionally charged, but it is not done solely > out of blind reactionism. > > God bless Blanc. > > TruthMonger -96 > >

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Re: Crypto use to foil law enforcement?
by Robert Hettinga 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

At 3:21 am -0400 on 5/23/97, Carl Ellison wrote: > With the congress so woefully uninformed that they confuse password > protection with cryptography and naive enough to believe that 1.9E6 > possibilities represents a serious roadblock to entry, it looks like we have > a major education effort to perform. For 35 years we've sown innumeracy, and now it's time to reap the harvest, I'm afraid. Heinlein once half-jokingly proposed that all voters have to prove they can solve a quadratic before they can vote. That joke's not so funny anymore. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

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Re: [NTSEC] 64-bit En/Decryption speed (fwd)
by Ray Arachelian 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 13:22:42 +0000 From: Alan C. Ramsbottom <acr(a)als.co.uk> To: ntsecurity(a)iss.net Cc: stoutb(a)pios.com Subject: Re: [NTSEC] 64-bit En/Decryption speed > Consensus is that Alpha CPUs can run crypto operations 10x faster than > Intel-based systems, but to say it's based on the 64-bit-ness of the CPU > alone is false. Is everyone aware of the RSA DES challenge? In essence the task is to brute-force DES. You can find more information at: http://www.eskimo.com/~joelm/des.html DESCHALL is one of real-world programs written to take up the challenge and reports the figures: DEC AlphaStation 600 5/333 ... 2.944M keys per second Dual Pentium 200 MHz ......... 2.003M keys per second SGI Onyx2 (194 MHz R10000) ... 1.943M keys per second HAL 385 (161 MHz Sparc64-II) . 1.660M keys per second UMAX S900 250MHz 604e ........ 1.368M keys per second AlphaStation 255/233 ......... 1.297M keys per second PowerMac 8500 200MHz 604e .... 1.095M keys per second PowerBook 3400 240MHz 603e ... 1.065M keys per second Sun Ultra2 Dual CPU .......... 1.060M keys per second PowerMac 8500 180MHz 604e ..... 990K keys per second PentiumPro 166MHz ............. 901K keys per second HP 9000/780C 180Mhz ........... 870K keys per second PentiumPro 180MHz ............. 850K keys per second [snip] I do not know how well this program is optimised for specific platforms, if at all. However I can confirm that other programs written for the challenge give similar results on Intel Platforms. Regards, --Alan-- acr(a)als.co.uk

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Accounts payable
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

Timmy C[reep] May's reheated, refurbished, and regurgitated cud is completely inappropriate for the mailing lists into which it is cross-ruminated. ' ' ' ' ^-O-O-^ -ooO--U--Ooo- Timmy C[reep] May

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Reputation Capital
by Mark C. Wallace 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

Does anyone have any papers/sources/url's on reputation capital? [1] I'm contemplating a project which I think might be similar; don't want to unecessarily make a fool of myself. [1] Dejanews and altavista turned up references, but nothing substantive. I've RTFM.

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NYC Crypto Forum
by John Young 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

Ray Arachelian taped the Cryptography Forum at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York last evening and will share once its transcribed. In the meantime: TITLE OF PROGRAM: Guns, Ammunition and Cryptography: Is the Government's Policy on Digital Encryption Creating a Crisis? MODERATOR: Charles R. Nesson, Professor, Harvard Law School PANELISTS: Matt Blaze, Co-author of Risks of Key Recovery paper. (short-notice invitee) Lynn McNulty (ex-NIST now RSA) filling in for Jim Bidzos Scott Charney, Computer Crime Unit, Department of Justice Kenneth W. Dam, Professor, University of Chicago Law School Dorothy E. Denning David J. Farber, University of Pennsylvania Marc Rotenberg, EPIC ----- Nesson asked the audience (about a hundred), "How many use encryption?" Over half raised hands. "Wow!" he said, "If I asked that of a law class at Harvard, maybe two or three hands would have been raised." Nesson then posed to the principal question: "Is the government's policy on cryptography creating a crisis?" Dam, Denning and Charney said no. Other panelists said yes. The audience by show of hands was about evenly split. There was intense discussion among the panelists but no change in position. Some highlights: David Kahn, in the audience, reaffirmed his support for key escrow, stating that it would not change the current legal provisions for electronically snooping, and why ask for more privacy than is now authorized. Blaze summarized the KR risks paper and pointed out the enormous expense of designing, implementing, operating and securing a global key recovery system -- which, as he ironically smiled, could make cryptographers and crypto-corps rich. That such a system might make security weaker by offering fewer choice targets to attack -- the key repositories. Blaze reminded that encryption will become pervasive in all electronic systems, not just communications. That it must be robust and untamperable or more and more crucial systems will be vulnerable to attack. And, the more complicated the security provisions the more likely they will fail. Farber stated that time was being wasted on KR debate while the nation's infrastructure remained immensely vulnerable to electronic attack. He said that with six students he could shut the system down in "a few days, with, say, spoof E-mail to key administrators." That ITEF is working on a next-generation system to prevent that, but meanwhile there is great risk. McNulty reaffirmed industry's position that other countries will develop robust encryption if the US does not allow export. Charney responded by pointing out that the administration seeks global commitment to key escrow among governments, and asserts they will comply for the same reasons the USG wants it. He said, for example, that countries may allow development of strong crypto but, like the US, will not allow export. He cited Japan's refusal to allow NTT's 128-bit export, and said Russia will surely not allow the export of the Sun/Elvis product. Same for France, Germany, and so forth. There was audience derision when Charney noted that the US must do as the Russians and Chinese and French do to control crypto. Interestingly, Charney did not cite The Wassenaar Arrangement, although Dam pointed out how difficult it was to reach agreement on the COCOM predecessor and enforce compliance with it. Nesson summarized Charney's position by saying, "do you mean that key escrow would do no more than help you catch criminals too stupid to use unescrowed crypto?" Charney nodded, and said that "nearly all all criminals we catch by electronic surveillance talk openly about being surveilled but do nothing about to avoid it." Nesson reiterated: "Do you mean that you want a system to catch stupid criminals while the nation's infrastructure is left vulnerable?" Charney, "That's not the right way to put it." Denning gave examples of her recent survey of law enforcement for examples of crypto use to hinder investigations. Finally, Dam noted that encryption policy was a different task than implementing encryption systems. That the detailed understanding of those who follow the encryption debate is not shared by the public nor by most officials. That agreement upon policy will require greater education for those who could not care less about the complications and subtleties being debated. An auditor queried: There seems to be agreement that encryption will work best when it is totally transparent to users, and the sooner that is devised the better. Why not just get on with it,? Blaze shook his head at this cluelessness, howled at the ceiling, sprouted fur, bared teeth, leaped Dave Farber, went for Charney's jugular, clawed Denning. Kahn and the suited audience ran screaming into the safe streets of Manhattan, while shaggy coders roared, "Kill, kill, kill the infrastructure-fuckers."

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NYC Crypto Forum Add
by John Young 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

A supplement to the NYC Crypto Forum: Toward the end Nesson asked, "How about the missing participant here, NSA?" Several panelists noted, "NSA's here, in the audience." (Nonesuch spoke, however.) Nesson went on to ask, "What about national security interests outweighing the right to privacy?" It was here that David Kahn offered his defense of key recovery. Farber and others responded that the problem is that the government is not trusted, that guards against abuse of power have not worked, that national security too often has been a cloak for illicit actions. Here, an audience member said that he worked at Salomon Brothers doing traffic analysis of vast E-mail, and that we should be aware that more electronic snooping is going on than most people know. How could we be sure that law enforcement would not similarly abuse systems set up to catch criminals for other purposes, as NSA allegedly does, and, now using the same methodolgies, as private companies do to spy on employees, customers and competitors. All panelists nodded at this, that it's hard to tell god from the devil, and crypto won't help.

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Re: The Bell Plan
by lucifer＠dhp.com 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- TruthMonger #1 wrote: > John Young wrote: > > The Oregonian, May 20, 1997, Metro Section P-1: > > An affidavit says a Vancouver man arrested Friday talked of > > sabotaging Portland's 9-1-1 computer and Bull Run water > After reading this news article and a variety of posts on the cypherpunks > list (especially by Tim May and Paul Bradley), I have decided that I cannot > in good conscious allow Jim Bell's persecution for exercising his basic > human right to free speech to pass by without taking personal action to > support him. > "Then they came for the CypherPunks, and nobody spoke up..." > - Jonathan Neither can I. Although some on the list claim I live in an ivory tower while they live in the real world I haven't seen these cowards coming forward to engage in any meaningful protest of the railroading of Jim Bell. > Accordingly, I am hereby starting a thread on the cypherpunks list > to discuss "the possibility of putting the fibers down the air vents > of a federal building" to kill its computers, and the feasability > of using other methods to accomplish the same end. While I can't speak for the effectiveness of this approach, I would venture that any action of this sort would have a greater chance of success with the cooperation of a government employee such as myself who has access to the computers in the target area. (We are not all government shills.) > In keeping with what I see as a cypherpunk frame of mind, I am > posting this via an anonymous remailer, but I am also digitally > signing it. I am not hiding my identity, but merely taking > action to prevent my public statement from being used to unjustly > persecute me. I will do likewise. I am forced to slant my regular posts to the list to agree with government policy but unlike my detractors I at least have the courage to take a stance against my employer's unjust actions and challenge them to prove their case if they wish to retaliate against me for exercising my right to free speech. GovernmentMonger -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 5.0 beta Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBM4XjSRpK214wNeaBAQExsgP/fh3tfF+dATYzYtETNEnDf1jn0aCkU7/r 2BVORjdhBDGvOJLvJ/Yh1sHeaTNTiPPV/cv02nt0J+zf0V9RdYXXwGkjRaAXVSSA l5JgrN4XvCYEybUODvFsgXPcLY3p09L2QT4a4fIC264bfZLQuPmTSJqgPQDowSDB n4LKu727Dkg= =z3Er -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 5.0 beta mQCNAy/BlpsAAAEEAOfc0TkSKlc9TQbw4wYUpL+0YZ8rMXTGZOLUHJl5KZgGDHRR EiTtNcRB8Vl8psIT6GZ5FPu1VKduC3aaNuQEV9wKrXYzkmsMjtWIbYxsUZ9Rq/Vs 6Sl4B3GSKPMudhlSuaGWUZxhVTPdn0eLUz9hlRz/kZR2opurmRpK214wNeaBAAUR tCBLZW50IENyaXNwaW4gPGtlbnRAc29uZ2JpcmQuY29tPokAlQMFEDOFUs2X26C5 /DVozQEBR34D/2TzjEn8ING2PNdVB4K0Vy9HcXgKyKf81eACfxhC6J5cBr+MCUIj 7xAbsj2556EBDJKf955Od5xIauPfx7woMb+b7eTJg3lOekar327jSEX1feAfYG+e yhgPid04U0FdkGpLhqMdc6qSXHCYcnD9RVw27x4np+eE/iiQVzy+SF5eiQCVAwUQ L8GYbBvasrrONMAdAQFExwP/UK82Y4+Q7E6q+P8RcC4wPcJEx1I5VAmBuBc3eI1T h+Lw3f4RdJ9eaK6ooip8GQ3SwLOiNRN3Mj0+K/7y+T2smP0wLpcP6IXqs4kO0v0e QGd2uz6dvtWWb02jMuaG6gyt2SqhJ/hgHzgF22RsqO5Wtk5N/W/oG0f6L3trjNPR hh8= =G7R+ -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

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AP=MAFIA ?
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

Italy remembers murdered anti-Mafia judge ROME (May 23, 1997 3:43 p.m. EDT) - Italy on Friday mourned the judge whose ground-breaking Mafia investigations led to his murder five years ago. On Thursday, prosecutors in Sicily requested life jail terms for more than 30 bosses charged with the murder. Judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo and three bodyguards were blown up on May 23, 1992, on a motorway outside the Sicilian capital Palermo. "Institutions and citizens have a duty not to forget," the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies (lower house), Luciano Violante, said in an anniversary message to the families of the victims. He called on Italians "to avoid the rhetoric of commemorations (and to) work with determination in the fight against the Mafia to defend those values of civility and legality" for which Falcone worked. Crimefighters including FBI director Louis Freeh, in Palermo for a memorial service, drove in convoy along the motorway. They stopped to pay tribute at the point where explosives packed under the road were detonated by remote control as Falcone's car passed. "We are not just honouring the memory of a single man but of many policemen, prosecutors and investigators which he represents," Freeh said. Prosecutors in the central Sicilian city of Caltanissetta requested life sentences on Thursday for 32 Mafiosi, including Cosa Nostra's jailed boss of bosses Salvatore Riina and some of his key lieutenants, who are charged with masterminding the murder. For Giovanni Brusca, the most senior member of the Mob to be captured in the past year, prosecutors sought a 30-year jail term. They cited mitigating circumstances since Brusca has admitted using the remote control device that triggered the blast. The trial was halted for five minutes on Friday as a mark of respect. The defence is expected to sum up late next month. A verdict is expected late this year. On Friday night thousands of Sicilians gathered for a pop concert held in Falcone's memory on an undeveloped tract of land in the city's outskirts near a villa where Riina spent part of his 23 years at large before his arrest in 1993. Falcone, a Sicilian, revolutionised Italy's war on the Mafia by tracking financial records that revealed the extent of the Mob's criminal activities and resources, and by persuading captured Mafioso to turn state's evidence. Testimony from "Men of Honour," who are sworn on pain of death to a code of silence or "omerta" when they are initiated into the Mafia, gave unprecedented insight into the feared society and led to the arrest of Riina and other bosses. The murder of Falcone, and two months later of his friend and colleague Paolo Borsellino in a car-bomb attack, horrified Italy and galvanised efforts to crack the Mafia and end the reign of terror imposed by Riina and his bloody Corleone clan. Palermo's chief prosecutor Giancarlo Caselli cautioned on Friday that Italy now risked slipping into complacency. "The Mafia seems to have become a second division problem, or even a non-problem, because people think...that police successes in the last few years are leading to a definitive solution of the problem. "That is not so," Caselli said in a radio interview. "The Mafia is still an extremely robust and highly dangerous beast." _________________________________________________________________ [ Global | Stateside | Sports | Politics | Opinions | Business | Techserver | Health & Science | Entertainment | Weather | Baseball | Basketball | Football | Hockey | Sport Server | MAIN ] _________________________________________________________________ Copyright ) 1997 Nando.net Do you have some feedback for the Nando Times staff? http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/world/052397/world14_3679.html

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Re: Key Recovery / The True Story
by Ernest Hua 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

> And some government spook is going to break into a church's computer > to find out if they are secret terrorists because they oppose this > or that government policy. This is an interesting point on which very little serious debate is taking place: Is it EVER okay for spooks to break into a church's computer to find out if they are secret terrorists? I'm not sure the answer is clearly one way or another, and I am willing to bet that the tone of the answers will mostly be emotional appeals to some idealistic standard or pessimistic nightmares. A meta question is whether the answer to a question like this one above can be answer strictly through a "for all practical purposes it would never affect me so it does not matter" answer. Ern -- Ernest Hua, Software Sanitation Engineer/Chief Cut And Paste Officer Chromatic Research, 615 Tasman Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1707 Phone: 408 752-9375, Fax: 408 752-9301, E-Mail: hua(a)chromatic.com -- Ernest Hua, Software Sanitation Engineer/Chief Cut And Paste Officer Chromatic Research, 615 Tasman Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1707 Phone: 408 752-9375, Fax: 408 752-9301, E-Mail: hua(a)chromatic.com -- Ernest Hua, Software Sanitation Engineer/Chief Cut And Paste Officer Chromatic Research, 615 Tasman Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1707 Phone: 408 752-9375, Fax: 408 752-9301, E-Mail: hua(a)chromatic.com

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