December 2004 - cypherpunks-legacy

Airport-Screening Rules Are Eased
by R.A. Hettinga 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB110265033103496694,00.html> The Wall Street Journal December 10, 2004 POLITICS AND POLICY Airport-Screening Rules Are Eased By a WALL STREET JOURNAL Staff Reporter December 10, 2004; Page A5 WASHINGTON -- Bowing to passenger outrage over pat-down procedures at airport checkpoints, the Transportation Security Administration will alter its rules beginning Monday to allow passengers to lower their arms during screening. The change is minor and TSA officials say they have no plans to rescind pat-down procedures that require screeners to touch passengers' chest and groin areas while checking for weapons or explosives. Nevertheless, it represents an attempt by the TSA to improve its image among travelers. The agency also backed off a plan announced in late November that would require airports to immediately report any suspicious activities, even routine problems such as unruly or drunken passengers, to TSA headquarters. That reporting now will be optional. -- ----------------- 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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tangled contexts
by R.W. (Bob) Erickson 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

Process and perception This capacity for making high order discriminations about relationships between objects in our world, can be taken as the proper function of our cognitive competency. The attribute of intentionality, to this way of thinking, is best understood as "work product" of a discrete sub-module of our brain. We infer agency from our observations. What is agency? Well first and foremost, it is that which is recognizable to the competencies in process, that form these judgments. Does this sound circular? Surely it is circular in a crucial sense. All that we "know" comes to our attention as the work product of process in various competencies. Ultimately the "authority" of these high order discriminations comes not from a judgment about the correlation between our perceptions and the state of the "objective" world, but instead from their immediacy. This is to say that we do not perceive and then make judgments, our first awareness of every "thing" is located in the moment that the competent module forms some thing out of the possibilities. These awareness's are not in the semantic domain. Our knowing of particular attributes precedes the semantic transform that tags and packages up insights, for storage and shipping. We know what we know and we apologize for not being able to convey this knowing more effectively. That we are able to communicate at all, is a testament to the power of trial and error and the phenomenal similarity of our minds. This similarity is not accidental. Even as each person is an absolutely unique instance of humanity, what we are, is the embodiment of a phenomenally complex tangle of historical accomplishments that is fundamentally common to us all. Creativity emerges via the capacity/ability to merge contexts Biological instrumentality: The complex objects of our knowings come to our awareness as circumstances demand, literally selected by their features. Apprehension of the world via a sophisticatedly evolved biological instrumentality is an entropy hack. Life is the opportunistic bloom of a viral exploitation of regularity in the universe. In the beginning there was sequence, and it begat pattern and context space. Within every context space there is a tree of combinatorial consequences some leaves of which are potentially lucky. Blind evolution isn't trial and error testing of mistakes (mutations), it is the random testing of legal combinations So who set up the game, where did the rules come from, and the design language? The dynamic core of our consciousness consists of transient alignments of Feature Value - Action loops that compete for selection in a flicker-dance-sort of associations and sensory stimuli. Perception is a physics hack. Timing is everything. Three dimensionality is accessible to us via a cross mapping within the temporal manifold. Propagation of coherent correlations between map-mapped sheets of neurons act as a massively parallel delay line with multiple taps. Because both spatial and temporal coherence is preserved, the network sorts up the objects of perception and tracks them real time. Reality is best fit. Misperceptions happen, but its better than being blind. Our competency at this is not postulated, it is stipulated that the high order discriminations we perceive as qualia are exactly as amazing as the incredible complexity of the neurological stack that gives us them. Intentionality is an emergent design goal in secondary consciousness. (before getting upset about intentional language, remember that it works because reality fits.) Phenomenal transform is a semantic label for a context shift. If you insist on thinking of it as a happening, what's happening is that we find ourselves switching lexicons when we discuss certain things. Its not a description of a change of state in the object, it is a handle for referring to a pragmatic feature of discourse about it. The important thing to realize is that this sorting out of the features of the objects of our perception usually is done before we are aware of the process, but this does not mean that the process is different for hard discriminations, just that they are taking longer than the ~400ms self context loop, that feeds a product of the net's immediate state back into itself. Think convolving and converging. Discrimination occurs opportunistically, our competencies do not require conscious attention. In the formation of PV Action loops each project become one of the factions in our interior parliament. We have lots of timing to tap. Response times, flicker fusion times, saccades, pulse, peristalsis, menstruation. The royal road to cognitive illumination is the path of chronus. --bob "me, I'm just a lawn mower"

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Timing Paranoia
by R.W. (Bob) Erickson 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

One of the tools currently being used in the cognitive sciences is the measurement of reaction time to stimulus. It turns out that the length of time it takes to given situations is a credible proxy for how difficult the discrimination is to make. Imagine a paranoia involving mysterious e-mail delays and the length of time it takes to catagorize

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Cypherpunks archives online
by Nomen Nescio 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

There were some talk about archives here recently. I found two here: http://www.mail-archive.com/index.php?hunt=cypherpunks And this does indeed seem to be an active archive of the list: http://www.mail-archive.com/cypherpunks%40minder.net/

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Re: "Word" Of the Subgenius...
by Major Variola (ret) 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

At 11:21 AM 12/9/04 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: > >Well, May seemed to try to make the case that all of those "useles eaters" >were in large part responsible for the very existence of the state, and that >collapse of the state meant the inevitable downfall of huge numbers of >minorities (why he focused on them as opposed to white trailer trash I don't >know). > >But he was definitely advocating that racist viewpoints fall naturally out >of a crypto-anarchic approach. Tyler: A rational person has to admit that many parasitic folks of all albedos are able to exist because they occupy a govt-funded niche. Without a welfare govt, those people would either 1. subsist on private (ie voluntary) charity, 2. become useful by necessity 3. die of starvation 4. die during attempts to coerce others with violence. Depending on your beliefs about human demographics/nature, you will assign variable percentages to these outcomes. It *is* racist to think that genotypes in each bin will differ *IFF* you *don't* ascribe this outcome to culture associated with genotypes. But culturism is not racism, its recognition of how behavior and evolution work. I subscribe to and will defend culturism. (I speak for myself, not TM (tm), though I may or may not be a duly appointed pope of the church of strong cryptography; though recently I've been trending towards being an Earthquaker, who believes in tectonics, esp. during seismic events. Our vatican is in Parkfield BTW :-)

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Re: [p2p-hackers] Re: Memory and reputation calculation (fwd from paul@ref.nmedia.net)
by Eugen Leitl 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

----- Forwarded message from Paul Campbell <paul(a)ref.nmedia.net> -----

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Obligatory Comprehension
by R.W. (Bob) Erickson 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

Say what you mean, mean what you say Speaking in metaphor is anti-social If I cant understand you, I cannot trust you. Encrypted, encoded, or implied Secrets are a threat to the homeland

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re: tangled context probe
by R.W. (Bob) Erickson 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

(curious thing about this spew, it keeps disappearing into the bit bucket, I know its raw verbiage, but is it so incoherent it self-destructs? -bob) Process and perception This capacity for making high order discriminations about relationships between objects in our world, can be taken as the proper function of our cognitive competency. The attribute of intentionality, to this way of thinking, is best understood as "work product" of a discrete sub-module of our brain. We infer agency from our observations. What is agency? Well first and foremost, it is that which is recognizable to the competencies in process, that form these judgments. Does this sound circular? Surely it is circular in a crucial sense. All that we "know" comes to our attention as the work product of process in various competencies. Ultimately the "authority" of these high order discriminations comes not from a judgment about the correlation between our perceptions and the state of the "objective" world, but instead from their immediacy. This is to say that we do not perceive and then make judgments, our first awareness of every "thing" is located in the moment that the competent module forms some thing out of the possibilities. These awareness's are not in the semantic domain. Our knowing of particular attributes precedes the semantic transform that tags and packages up insights, for storage and shipping. We know what we know and we apologize for not being able to convey this knowing more effectively. That we are able to communicate at all, is a testament to the power of trial and error and the phenomenal similarity of our minds. This similarity is not accidental. Even as each person is an absolutely unique instance of humanity, what we are, is the embodiment of a phenomenally complex tangle of historical accomplishments that is fundamentally common to us all. Creativity emerges via the capacity/ability to merge contexts Biological instrumentality: The complex objects of our knowings come to our awareness as circumstances demand, literally selected by their features. Apprehension of the world via a sophisticatedly evolved biological instrumentality is an entropy hack. Life is the opportunistic bloom of a viral exploitation of regularity in the universe. In the beginning there was sequence, and it begat pattern and context space. Within every context space there is a tree of combinatorial consequences some leaves of which are potentially lucky. Blind evolution isn't trial and error testing of mistakes (mutations), it is the random testing of legal combinations So who set up the game, where did the rules come from, and the design language? The dynamic core of our consciousness consists of transient alignments of Feature Value - Action loops that compete for selection in a flicker-dance-sort of associations and sensory stimuli. Perception is a physics hack. Timing is everything. Three dimensionality is accessible to us via a cross mapping within the temporal manifold. Propagation of coherent correlations between map-mapped sheets of neurons act as a massively parallel delay line with multiple taps. Because both spatial and temporal coherence is preserved, the network sorts up the objects of perception and tracks them real time. Reality is best fit. Misperceptions happen, but its better than being blind. Our competency at this is not postulated, it is stipulated that the high order discriminations we perceive as qualia are exactly as amazing as the incredible complexity of the neurological stack that gives us them. Intentionality is an emergent design goal in secondary consciousness. (before getting upset about intentional language, remember that it works because reality fits.) Phenomenal transform is a semantic label for a context shift. If you insist on thinking of it as a happening, what's happening is that we find ourselves switching lexicons when we discuss certain things. Its not a description of a change of state in the object, it is a handle for referring to a pragmatic feature of discourse about it. The important thing to realize is that this sorting out of the features of the objects of our perception usually is done before we are aware of the process, but this does not mean that the process is different for hard discriminations, just that they are taking longer than the ~400ms self context loop, that feeds a product of the net's immediate state back into itself. Think convolving and converging. Discrimination occurs opportunistically, our competencies do not require conscious attention. In the formation of PV Action loops each project become one of the factions in our interior parliament. We have lots of timing to tap. Response times, flicker fusion times, saccades, pulse, peristalsis, menstruation. The royal road to cognitive illumination is the path of chronus. --bob "me, I'm just a lawn mower"

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RE: Blinky Rides Again: RCMP suspect al-Qaida messages
by John Kelsey 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

>From: Tyler Durden <camera_lumina(a)hotmail.com> >Sent: Dec 9, 2004 2:47 PM >To: measl(a)mfn.org >Cc: rah(a)shipwright.com, cryptography(a)metzdowd.com, cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net, > osint(a)yahoogroups.com >Subject: RE: Blinky Rides Again: RCMP suspect al-Qaida messages ... >NSA folks, on the other hand, I would assume have a soft version of a >Variola Stego suitcase...able to quickly detect the presence of pretty much >any kind of stego and then perform some tests to determine what kind was >used. I bet they've been aware of Al Qaeda stego for a long time...that's >probably the kind of thing they are very very good at. Maybe, but I think it would be very hard to write a general-purpose stego detector, without knowing the techniques used for encoding the message. And if you know the distribution of your cover channel as well as your attacker, or can generate lots of values from that distribution even if you can'd describe it, you can encode messages in a way that provably can't be detected, down to the quality of your random number generator and the difficulty of guessing your key. I imagine this as something much like a virus scanner. Look for known stego programs, and also for signatures of known stegp programs. Really good programs might be impossible to find without doing, say, a password search. But it's worth noting that AQ has to do key management just like the rest of us, and that's hard when you are communicating with a lot of different people. If your stego is password-protected, some terrorist's laptop is going to have a post-it note on the screen with the password. ... >-TD --John Kelsey

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[osint] Permanent jail set for Guant�namo
by R.A. Hettinga 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

--- begin forwarded text User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax; CDonDemand-Dom) To: osint(a)yahoogroups.com From: Mike Lee <BMCLEE(a)aol.com> Mailing-List: list osint(a)yahoogroups.com; contact osint-owner(a)yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list osint(a)yahoogroups.com Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2004 07:22:33 -0500 Subject: [osint] Permanent jail set for Guantanamo Reply-To: osint(a)yahoogroups.com [Excerpt: The Pentagon has plans to build a $25 million prison and establish a permanent guard force in its detention center at Guantanamo Bay, The Herald has learned.] {Note: This is almost certainly going to be used to incarcerate U.S. citizens as well. Helps to isolate them from troublesome lawyers, ACLU, etc.} Posted on Thu, Dec. 09, 2004 http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/nation/10372662.htm?1c DETENTION CENTER Permanent jail set for Guantanamo The Pentagon has plans to build a $25 million prison and establish a permanent guard force in its detention center at Guantanamo Bay, The Herald has learned. BY CAROL ROSENBERG crosenberg(a)herald.com Even as federal judges weigh whether the U.S. has the authority to detain and try suspects in the war on terror, the Pentagon is quietly planning for permanency at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, The Herald has learned. Pentagon planners are now seeking $25 million to build a state-of-the-art 200-cell concrete building meant to eventually replace the rows of rugged cells fashioned from shipping containers at Camp Delta. At the same time, the Army is creating a full-time, professional guard force -- a 324-member Military Police Internment and Resettlement Battalion that will replace a temporary, mostly reserve force at Guantanamo. A Department of Army memorandum to Congress obtained by The Herald envisions the new military police force being included in the 2005 and 2006 budgets. ''This action is part of a systematic process to enhance Army's capabilities required to defend the Nation's interests at home and abroad,'' says the undated memo from the Army's legislative liaison office. It gave two key dates: Oct. 16, 2004, to activate the battalion headquarters and its first company, and Oct. 16, 2005, to activate another company. Not all 20 officers and 304 enlisted soldiers have been activated, said Army Col. David McWilliams of the Southern Command. But an advance team is already at the base preparing to take up guard duties in the spring, he said. A second Army memo to answer congressional queries about the new unit says it ''doctrinally supports a sensitive operational requirement'' and ``helps to mitigate the high operational tempo of the military police force.'' Aside from the Marine force that set up the prison nearly three years ago, many troops who guarded captives in Guantanamo have been Army reservists mobilized from civilian law enforcement duties in the Midwest. 550 CAPTIVES The prison today has about 550 captives from 42 nations who have been brought to Cuba from Afghanistan, the first front in the war against terrorism. Only four have been charged with crimes, a trial process now stalled in federal courts. On Nov. 8, U.S. District Judge James Robertson in Washington, D.C., ruled unconstitutional a Military Commission's war crimes trial for Osama bin Laden driver Salim Ahmed Hamdan, 34, of Yemen. The Pentagon then suspended all war crimes trials while the Justice Department appealed his decision. Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green is deciding on habeas corpus petitions brought by civilian lawyers for 53 prisoners alleging they are illegally detained. ''They're betting that the courts are going to, in the end, find for the government, that they can keep these enemy combatants, as they label them, indefinitely, as long as they have some kind of an annual review process,'' said retired Army Col. Dan Smith, a Vietnam veteran who is now a senior military affairs fellow at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker lobby. ''So Guantanamo becomes an extra-territorial -- I don't want to say gulag -- a prison for anyone we want to put down there and label an unlawful enemy combatant,'' Smith said. Bush administration officials describe any possible judicial proceedings there as secondary to the prison's main purpose of holding and interrogating suspects for intelligence on how al Qaeda works. Commanders describe the guards' work there as at times humiliating and testing soldiers' patience because some captives have spewed insults and spit on guards. CAMP DELTA That kind of contact would be reduced under the Pentagon plan to replace Camp Delta, which was projected to last five years when it opened in May 2002. Built by KBR, a subsidiary of Pentagon contractor Halliburton, Delta's cells were welded from steel shipping containers by laborers brought in from South Asia. ''Camp Delta is comprised of temporary facilities that are rapidly reaching the end of their design life, and therefore a more permanent facility is needed,'' said Army spokesman Lt. Col. Leon Sumpter. The new mortar-and-steel prison, called Camp 6, should cost $25 million. Commanders hope to consolidate most Camp Delta prisoners into ''these hardened facilities,'' he said. Pentagon officials are still crunching the prison project's overall cost in response to a 2-month-old Herald request. A Senate tally, as of April 2003, estimated building costs only at $104 million. Virtually all expenditures have come from post-Sept. 11 emergency funding rather than line-item appropriations by Congress. A Pentagon spokesman said it was still unclear how the military would pay for Camp 6. ''There's a lot of unknowns about the project,'' said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Alvin Plexico. Begun as a short-term detention and interrogation solution to relieve overwhelmed troops in Afghanistan, the prison on the Navy base in southeastern Cuba has had a nearly nonstop three-year building boom. CAMP 5 Besides the 1,000-cell Camp Delta, the Pentagon has also built Camp 5, a 100-cell version of the new prison being proposed; a new command center, a laundry, fitness center, movie theater, and extensive dining and recreation facilities -- all sprawled across an area called Radio Range, that overlooks the Caribbean. Reporters got a glimpse of the future in November in a brief tour of Camp 5, which commanders called efficient, effective and humane despite repeated allegations that U.S.-approved interrogation techniques are tantamount to torture. The designs for Camp 5 and 6 copy a medium-security prison in Indiana, the Miami Correctional Facility at Bunker Hill. enditem ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free! http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/TySplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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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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