April 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

ecash signature scheme?
by R. A. Hettinga 14 Apr '03

14 Apr '03

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Re: The FBI Has Bugged Our Public Libraries
by Steve Schear 14 Apr '03

14 Apr '03

A brief follow-up to my 6 Nov 2002 posting. I just received a letter from the Alameda County Librarian stating that the library system "...has not been asked by the FBI to produce any records." Considering the ethnic make-up of the county (many middle eastern aliens) I find this a bit difficult to believe. Have any other list members contacted municipal libraries for such information? steve

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Can you spell default? Roman walls have ears..
by Major Variola (ret) 14 Apr '03

14 Apr '03

Iraq owes a billion (US ) pounds (Sterling) to Russia for weapons. Russia spied on Blair for Hussein. Do the math, Tim. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/13/wrus13.xml&…

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And now a word from the BBC Big Brother Central
by Major Variola (ret) 14 Apr '03

14 Apr '03

Pocket tracker monitors children http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2946183.stm [uses triangulation not GPS, like some CALEA phones] Police consider lie detector tests http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2944563.stm [its not just for the DoE http://cryptome.org/doe041403.txt though its empirically crap/psyops]

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Adobe v Sklyarov Episode II: Blackboard vs. Interz0ne Conf., Acidus, Virgil
by Major Variola (ret) 14 Apr '03

14 Apr '03

http://www.interz0ne.com/events/interz0ne_cease_order.html http://cryptome.org/interzone-cd.htm Slightly condensed to savor Gregory S. Smith's terroristic threats: It recently has come to Blackboard's attention that Billy Hoffman and Virgil Griffith are intending to speak as co-panelists in your upcoming InterzOne II conference on April 11, 2003. The website located at www.yak.net/acidus, Mr. Hoffman's website, states that ..... "This will show not only did we hack the system, but we hacked it so far we could build functional readers from scratch." Please be advised that the actions described on Mr. Hoffman's website, including the hacking of Blackboard's system, are illegal, and that any effort by either Mr. Hoffman or Mr. Griffith to convey to others at your Conference any information gleaned in whole or in part from such actions, particularly in an effort to cause Blackboard economic harm, would be improper. Please be advised of our view that it would be actionable for you or your conference to facilitate Mr. Hoffman's and Mr. Griffith's announced plans for, among other things, the disclosure of signals captured, the releasing of code, the description of development of functional readers, and the hardware specs to wire the readers and/or control circuits. .... We are also examining whether the actions of Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Griffin may have violated other federal laws, including (among others) the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the Economic Espionage Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Wiretap Act, and the Consumer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Georgia's Computer Systems Protection Act. Blackboard is filing a motion for preliminary and permanent injunctive relief against Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Griffith, to prevent the anticipated actions their website has announced. Blackboard is actively seeking a temporary restraining order and other injunctive relief in this matter. Failure to comply with these requests may expose you or your organization to an action for injunctive relief or monetary damages, and any other relief permitted under state and federal law, including court costs and attorneys' fees. You may also wish to consider and examine the potential criminal consequences, under theories of aiding and abetting and conspiracy, if you facilitate Mr. Hoffman's and Mr. Griffith's efforts despite their known and admitted hacking.

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Re: The secret government marches on...
by Bill Stewart 14 Apr '03

14 Apr '03

At 10:46 AM 04/09/2003 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: >It's only when an operation has to hide lots of money from even some of >the big agencies (or parts thereof) that they have to resort to moving >drugs and whatnot to fund "Iran Contra" and other extracurriculars. George >W almost certainly piloted one of the planes used to move cocaine into the >US to fund some of those operations. He may have snorted one plane-load of that coke, but this is the first time I've heard an assertion that he flew the planes as opposed to just getting high...

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Swiss ISPs Required to Log and Store Email for Six Months
by Bill Stewart 14 Apr '03

14 Apr '03

SWISS ISPS MUST LOG AND STORE CONSUMERS' EMAIL DATA As of April 1, Swiss ISPs will have to keep a log for six months of all the emails sent by their customers. Experts criticize the measure, saying it will be both difficult and costly to implement. http://www.statewatch.org/news/2003/apr/01switz.htm ===== The law was passed in January 2002, and ISPs had until April 1 to implement. Does anybody know if this only applies to email providers, or exactly what kinds of email providers, or if it also requires ISPs who provide IP transport to eavesdrop it? What about businesses providing email for their employees and other users? How much of the Swiss email business will be driven out of the country, either to US email providers or European providers like Wanadoo and Tiscali? And does anybody know if they have to keep _all_ the spam? Or is keeping one copy of each enough? Or can they give their customers _some_ privacy protection by always giving the authorities all of the spam in addition to whatever they really wanted? --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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Re: "Stay Behind" strategies in Iraq [Terraforming with the Army Corps of Engineers]
by Major Variola (ret) 14 Apr '03

14 Apr '03

At 11:37 AM 4/14/03 +0100, Ken Brown wrote: >Some people say that the draining of the marshes has messed up the water >table in the south (like the ecological disasters in old Soviet Central >Asia, though on a much smaller scale - no doubt similar boo-boos were >made in the US, also on a much smaller scale, Ask a Floridian about the Everglades some time. A few thou died in a hurricane early last century, so the Army Corps of Engineers channelized the marshes. Cut the glades down to about a quarter. It was just swamp then, not a natural treasure. Not quite the toxic dust bowl that the Russkies made, but it did happen here.

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Re: Beach Blanket Babylon
by Tyler Durden 14 Apr '03

14 Apr '03

Tim May wrote... "Not to mention the tens of billions already in thousands of bank accounts in Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, Panama, and other locations. Set up over the past 20 years, and deeply hidden. (One of Saddam's relatives, recently a diplomat in Switzerland, spent most of his professional time distributing money safely. Some of this money may only be retrievable by Saddam, some only by his immediate family, some by "stay behind" and "terrorist" organizations.) Tens of billions in offshore accounts, and hundreds of millions in bullion, $100 bills, and treasure from the museums, plus assorted military know-how and weaponry. Ah, this is gonna fund a _lot_ of merriment! " Well, I'm not so sure. Saddam is not bin Laden...bin Laden is a true believer, from what I can tell. Saddam and his family are pretty much in it for the perks.So the extended set of Saddam connections probably have an extensive "flight capital" organization (a la Boerhman), ready to fund a very high-end lifestyle for a whole cluster of well-connected ex-pat Iraqis. Terrorism will only be considered a useful expenditure if it results in clear and obvious monetary benefit to this extended web of relations. -TD >From: Tim May <timcmay(a)got.net> >To: cypherpunks(a)lne.com >Subject: Beach Blanket Babylon >Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2003 20:15:17 -0700 > >On Saturday, April 12, 2003, at 06:23 PM, Major Variola (ret) wrote: > >>Iraq owes a billion (US ) pounds (Sterling) to Russia for weapons. >> >>Russia spied on Blair for Hussein. >> >>Do the math, Tim. > >Where's the surprise? Certainly none here. According to CNN, Iraq owes >France at least $8 billion, owes Germany some similar amount, and so on. >Some of these debts are for armaments, some for industrial products, etc. > >Iraq's estimated debt is $200 billion. The CNN estimate for France ($8 B) >is probably low. > >The U.S. of course is calling for France and Germany to "forgive" the >debts. (A complication is of course that some of these debts are not owed >to the _nations_ of France and Germany but to corporations, partnerships, >banks, and even individuals. Which makes it hard for France or Germany to >wave a magic wand and erase the debts. Granted, Jacques Randome Frenchie >may have a hard time collecting, but the principle is of course that debts >are not absolved by mere changes in government leadership. (This matters >because the international bodies can make it hard for payments to flow back >to Iraq: they can "attach" payments and send them to the creditors who make >claims. The U.S. can attempt to avert this by bypassing European banking >networks, I suppose. But, fundamentally, the money is still owed and if the >creditors do not forgive the debts (and I mean the creditors, not the >nations of France and Germany), then assets can be attached, even oil >tankers can be impounded.) > >More interesting to me is the exodus of money and weaponry out of Iraq. >Billions in gold bullion exiting the country. And into vaults and hidden >places in Syria, Jordan, Iran, Turkey, and border areas of Iraq. Not only >is there much evidence that the exodus of cash (dollars, not dinars) and >bullion and valuable weapons began months ago, when war became inevitable, >but it accelerated several weeks ago, just before the bombing began. > >Not to mention the tens of billions already in thousands of bank accounts >in Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, Panama, and other locations. Set up over >the past 20 years, and deeply hidden. (One of Saddam's relatives, recently >a diplomat in Switzerland, spent most of his professional time distributing >money safely. Some of this money may only be retrievable by Saddam, some >only by his immediate family, some by "stay behind" and "terrorist" >organizations.) > >Tens of billions in offshore accounts, and hundreds of millions in bullion, >$100 bills, and treasure from the museums, plus assorted military know-how >and weaponry. > >Ah, this is gonna fund a _lot_ of merriment! > >I just hope they're not as incompetent as the less well-funded Al Qa'aida. >I hope they plan to use some of these tens of billions, some of their >weaponry, taking out the real target. > > > >--Tim May >"That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress >to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or >to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from >keeping their own arms." --Samuel Adams _________________________________________________________________ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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'The Future of Freedom': Overdoing Democracy
by R. A. Hettinga 14 Apr '03

14 Apr '03

<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/books/review/13FERGUST.html?tntemail0=&pa…> The New York Times April 13, 2003 'The Future of Freedom': Overdoing Democracy By NIALL FERGUSON THE FUTURE OF FREEDOM Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. By Fareed Zakaria. 286 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95. It is evident to all alike that a great democratic revolution is going on among us,'' the great French liberal thinker Alexis de Tocqueville declared in ''Democracy in America,'' published in 1835. It was, he continued, an ''irresistible revolution, which has advanced for centuries in spite of every obstacle and which is still advancing in the midst of the ruins it has caused.'' Tocqueville had visited the United States, seen the future and decided that it worked. Today he stands vindicated. Something like 62 percent of the world's countries are now democracies. To be sure, Tocqueville was not blind to the defects and potential hazards of American democracy. Political parties were ''an inherent evil of free governments.'' The press was prone to gratuitous muckraking. The electorate tended to vote mediocrities into high office. Above all, there was the danger of the ''tyranny of the majority.'' But that risk, he believed, was held in check by the vitality of some distinctively American institutions that tended to preserve individual freedom: the decentralization of government, the power of the courts, the strength of associational life and the vigor of the country's churches. The big question was whether similar safeguards would operate in Europe when democracy made its inevitable advance there. By the time he published ''The Old Regime and the Revolution'' in 1856, Tocqueville had grown deeply pessimistic. In France, despite several attempts, it had proved impossible to introduce democracy without an intolerable diminution of freedom. The aristocracy and the church -- against which the revolutionaries of 1789 had directed their energies -- had, he argued, been bastions of liberty. Once these had been swept away there was nothing to check the twin processes of centralization and social leveling, which Tocqueville had come to see as the sinister confederates of the democratic revolution. Under French democracy, bureaucracy and equality trumped liberty. The result was a new Napoleonic despotism. In his brave and ambitious book, Fareed Zakaria has updated Tocqueville. ''The Future of Freedom'' is brave because its central conclusion -- that liberty is threatened by an excess of democracy -- is deeply unfashionable and easily misrepresented. (''So, Mr. Zakaria, you say that America needs less democracy. Doesn't that make you some kind of fascist?'') It is ambitious because Zakaria seeks to apply the Tocquevillian critique not just to modern America but to the whole world. In some ways, the book is a magazine article that just grew. In 1997 Zakaria -- now the editor of Newsweek International -- published a brilliant article in Foreign Affairs entitled ''The Rise of Illiberal Democracy.'' His argument was that the ''wave'' of democracy that had swept the world in the 1980's and 1990's had a shadow side. Many of the new democracies -- Russia under Yeltsin and Putin, Venezuela under Chavez -- are routinely,'' as he puts it in ''The Future of Freedom,'' ''ignoring constitutional limits on their power and depriving their citizens of basic rights.'' Just holding elections did not make them free. He develops this point further in the book by adding some background history: why England prospered under aristocratic rather than democratic institutions, why democracy failed in interwar Germany. He also draws on the extensive literature on the relationship between democracy and economic growth, buying -- perhaps rather uncritically -- the deterministic argument that democratic institutions are likely to succeed only in countries with per capita income of more than $6,000. Many poor countries that democratized prematurely in the era of decolonization, the argument goes, ended up lapsing into dictatorship and deeper poverty. Conversely, it is no coincidence that ''the best-consolidated democracies in Latin America and East Asia -- Chile, South Korea and Taiwan -- were for a long while ruled by military juntas.'' The moral of the story is simple: first get rich (thereby acquiring a middle class, civil society and the rule of law), then democratize. Memo to the Arab world: ge! tting rich on rents from natural resources doesn't count. There are a few oddities here. It will strike some readers as surprising that an Indian-born author should have such harsh words to say about his own country's democracy and such kind words to say about the benign despotism of Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, to say nothing of Gen. Pervez Musharraf's less than benign rule in Pakistan. Still, the range of Zakaria's knowledge is impressive. His chapter on the failure of democracy in the Arab world is superb. And I could not agree more that whenever the United States intervenes to overthrow ''rogue regimes,'' at least ''a five-year period of transition . . . should precede national multiparty elections.'' (Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that his call for a ''serious, long-term project of nation-building'' in Iraq will be heeded.) Which brings us to the short time horizon of American politics, one of a number of weaknesses Zakaria detects in the biggest of the Western democracies. Is the United States imperceptibly becoming an illiberal -- or at least a dysfunctional -- democracy? The argument is that the Madisonian system of republican government, which Tocqueville so admired, has been hollowed out in the name of ''more democracy'': ''America is increasingly embracing a simple-minded populism that values popularity and openness as the key measures of legitimacy. . . . The result is a deep imbalance in the American system, more democracy but less liberty.'' Since the 1960's, as Zakaria shows, legislatures, parties and other administrative agencies have sought to make their workings more transparent and responsive to the popular will. Yet the unintended consequence of this ''democratization of democracy'' is that all these institutions have become prey to the activities of professional lobbyists. Open committee meetings in Congress; primary elections to select delegates to national political conventions; changes to the system of campaign funding; the rise of referendums in state and municipal politics -- together, these well-intentioned innovations have tended to debase the political process. Nor has the process of ''overdemocratization'' been confined to the realm of politics. In finance, the law and even religion, the power of the masses has grown at the expense of the elites who once ruled the United States. Tocqueville based his confidence in American democracy on the existence of a professional ''aristocracy'' dividing its time between private work and public service. Zakaria convincingly shows how deregulation has undermined the old American elites, enslaving C.E.O.'s, law partners and evangelical ministers alike to the tyranny of the mass market. Our best hope, he concludes, is to delegate more power to impartial experts, insulated from the democratic fray. Today's independent central banks provide a possible template. Zakaria would like to see a chunk of federal fiscal policy handed to an equivalent of the Federal Reserve -- an autonomous I.R.S. that sets rather than merely collects taxes. A book so wide in its scope is bound to have its flaws. Zakaria follows Mancur Olson and others in embracing a cartoon version of British political development that Herbert Butterfield long ago dismissed as the ''Whig interpretation of history.'' There is also a strangely sketchy quality to Zakaria's political thought. After all, the aristocratic critique of democracy was not Tocqueville's invention. It is one of the central notions of classical political philosophy and history. In Book 3 of his Histories, for example, Herodotus set out the case against democracy in terms remarkably similar to Zakaria's: ''In a democracy, malpractices are bound to occur . . . corrupt dealings in government services lead . . . to close personal associations, the men responsible for them putting their heads together and mutually supporting one another. And so it goes on, until somebody or other comes forward as the people's champion and breaks up the cliques which are out for their own interests. This wins him the admiration of the mob, and as a result he soon finds himself entrusted with absolute power.'' Zakaria's critics will doubtless denounce him for looking backward. Indeed he is -- but not just to the 1950's, or even the 1850's. This is a book that looks back as far as 450 B.C. Whether, in our hyperdemocratic age, there is a market for such a classical defense of aristocratic rule must be doubtful. (Indeed, it would rather undermine Zakaria's own thesis if ''The Future of Freedom'' were to be a runaway best seller.) Yet it deserves a wide readership. Those who fear that while seeking to impose its will on far-flung countries the American republic may unwittingly follow Rome down the path to imperial perdition will read it with a mixture of admiration and unease. Niall Ferguson is the Herzog professor of financial history at the Stern School of Business, New York University. His latest book is ''Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power.'' -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 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'

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