May 2004 - cypherpunks-legacy

Getting Carded
by R. A. Hettinga 04 May '04

04 May '04

<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB108362504078100827,00.html> The Wall Street Journal May 4, 2004 REVIEW & OUTLOOK Getting Carded May 4, 2004 The Scottish historian and philosopher David Hume once wrote that "it is seldom that any liberty is lost all at once." British Home Secretary David Blunkett seems to have taken Hume's lesson to heart with his slow-motion effort to introduce mandatory identity cards in the U.K. Last week, the U.K. began issuing national ID cards with biometric information. The pilot program will issue 10,000 ID cards. But this plan is scheduled to expand. By 2007 cards will be distributed "voluntarily" when renewing a passport; those not interested in a biometric card will be free to surrender their passports. Before the Parliament votes in 2012 or 2013 on whether to give everyone over 16 years of age a card and require people to carry them at all times, 80% of the population will have been issued a card. That's why now is the time for a serious debate over the merits of national ID cards that will include a retinal scan, fingerprints or measurements of the exact dimensions of the face in addition to the usual name, address, and passport number. The cards might make life harder on illegal immigrants, but it's hard to see how they would protect British subjects or anyone else from terrorists. Mr. Blunkett has managed to muddy the water by introducing the cards incrementally and by fueling a stir over whether royals would carry them. He is quoted in the media describing the level of fine for failing to update an address, (#1,000), or failing to carry a card when (and if) the program becomes mandatory (#2,500). A Home Office that argues that such a program would protect against identity theft, benefits fraud and illegal immigration has sought to capitalize on fears and anxieties prompted by terrorist attacks to build support for the program. But all this distracts from the basic debate of whether the net benefit of universal biometric ID cards is worth the cost in terms of civil liberties, privacy and freedom. That debate has nothing to do with recent Home Office hype. It's important to acknowledge what a national ID program would and would not do. Such a program undoubtedly would make life more difficult for economic refugees and other immigrants. That is not to say that immigrants would cease to flee unlivable economic and political situations because of an added layer of regulation, but such persons would be driven into an underground economy to an even greater extent than currently. If Mr. Blunkett wants to debate immigration policy, he should do so. Hiding xenophobic policies behind the terror threat, from which many look to the government for protection, is disingenuous. ID cards might also reduce some social security fraud. But British taxpayers shouldn't see the cards as saving money. ID cards could prevent an estimated 5% of the #2 billion of social-security fraud each year. But once you've paid for the cards themselves (just over #3 billion according to Mr. Blunkett's estimate) and bought 4,500 card readers, it's hard to see a huge net gain. There are better, cheaper and less invasive methods of curbing fraud. Most importantly, ID cards would not protect against terrorists. To argue that a small plastic card would present an obstacle to a suicidal fundamentalist terrorist is preposterous. Mr. Blunkett has danced just shy of this argument, saying, of course it wouldn't prevent terror, and in the same breath arguing that it would help terror enforcement. In the introduction to the bill, he's written "the threat of global terrorism . . . make[s] secure identification more vital than ever." But better protection against false identities wouldn't have prevented the 9/11 attacks, where individuals -- most with clean records and bona fide papers -- entered the U.S., in some cases years before the attacks. Unlike economic migrants, terrorists have the wherewithal to get their papers in order. Al Qaeda terrorists are far too sophisticated to get tripped up by a regulation requiring IDs. The attempt to harness the anxiety from the Madrid bombings and channel it to provide momentum for his bill is intellectually dishonest. Mr. Blunkett at least owes an undisguised debate about ID cards. -- ----------------- 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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Re: [FoRK] Why We Are Losing The War on Terrorism (fwd from andrew@ceruleansystems.com)
by Eugen Leitl 04 May '04

04 May '04

----- Forwarded message from "J. Andrew Rogers" <andrew(a)ceruleansystems.com> -----

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PGP
by R. A. Hettinga 03 May '04

03 May '04

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_of_Great_Price> Main Page | Recent changes | Edit this page | Page history Printable version | Disclaimers Not logged in Log in | Help Pearl of Great Price >From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Pearl of Great Price (PGP) is a collection of scriptures of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The PGP includes: the Book of Abraham, a book dealing with Abraham's journeys in Egypt, containing many distinctive Mormon doctrines such as eternal progression; the Book of Moses, which comes from the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible; the Joseph Smith-History, a history of the early Mormon church by Joseph Smith; Joseph Smith-Matthew, a translation of a portion of the Gospel of Matthew by Joseph Smith; and the Articles of Faith, a brief summary of the major doctrines of the Mormon faith written by Joseph Smith for a newspaper. Considerable controversy surrounds the Book of Abraham, and the Papyri that some claim it was translated from. Others dispute that such papyri have been found, or dispute that Smith used direct revelation from God, rather than any other source write it. External link To read the text, go to http://scriptures.lds.org/pgp/contents. The Pearl of Great Price also refers to a parable told by Jesus Christ, recounted at Matthew 13:45-46 in explaining the Kingdom of Heaven. A man discovered that a certain field had an extremely valuable pearl in it. He then sold all that he had to raise money to purchase the field, so that he could obtain the pearl, with the final result that he was wealthier than before. The Pearl, a 14th century Middle English alliterative poem written by the Pearl Poet, makes allusion to the parable in describing the narrator's dead daughter, Pearl. It begins: Perle, pleasaunte to prynces paye To clanly clos in golde so clere, Oute of oryent, I hardyly saye, Ne proued I neuer her precios pere. Edit this page | Discuss this page | Page history | What links here | Related changes Main Page | About Wikipedia | Recent changes | This page was last modified 16:57, 23 Apr 2004. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for details). Disclaimers. Wikipedia is powered by MediaWiki, an open source wiki engine. Main Page Recent changes Random page Current events Community Portal Edit this page Discuss this page Page history What links here Related changes Special pages Contact us Donations -- ----------------- 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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Re: message, but also test
by Ryan Lackey 02 May '04

02 May '04

I've always used a special vmware instance whenever I wanted to do something anonymously, as I assumed my OS choices and customizations might give me away to the other end as well, especially for anything I don't notice (a good attack would be trying a well-known 0-day OS vulnerability on an interactive counterparty, seeing if his machine drops off the net -- you could do this several times and figure out which OS is running). Running a pretty much standard win2k/xp virtual machine with whatever anonymity functionality running on the windows side OR the unix side seems to deal with that, as well as making it easier to sniff all output from the machine in realtime to make sure nothing else is going through. And it would then be very obvious which nym you're using. I don't think gmail would work well with a 500MB archive -- I've used it, and their UI seems inefficient past a certain point. General web indexing of html archives works pretty well -- ("from, "to" searching would be equivalent to author searches, and keyword + or - terms can be done through a web ui as easily) I think I'd also prefer being able to do LOCAL searches on most of the topics on cypherpunks, vs. web searches on someone else's machine, so I'll just let people download raw archives when reconstructed, with a 5Mbps cap or something. I am not sure how safely spam can be filtered from the list -- each person would have his own view of what is spam. I think ideally there would be all messages in the spool, broken up by month or quarter or year, and then a way to run various filters on it, like kill certain senders, kill keywords, "traditional" spamassassin/bayesian type systems, etc. Then the ability to search over any subset. Google doesn't support enough negative keywords to do this, and it would be computationally expensive to do the filtering and reindexing in realtime for each user. If you had all the spools yourself locally, you could run whatever spam elimination you considered proper once, and then search index, with negative keywords for specific senders (or just excise certain senders permanently as spam) Quoting An Metet <anmetet(a)freedom.gmsociety.org>: > Ryan Lackey writes: > > > I have two questions: > > > > 1) Does anyone have actual performance measurements of ZKS from when > > it was operational/at peak, in terms of bandwidth, MTU, latency, and > > jitter? Is there a good way to quantify just how far from > > "acceptable" it was? > > I don't have any actual measurements, but as far as I can remember it > worked pretty well, i.e., slower than usual but still pages would load > within a few seconds. > > Recently I've experimented with the onion routing system at > www.freehaven.net/tor, and the main problem there is slow startup times > setting up the first path. Seems to take a couple of minutes sometimes > for the first web page to download. I think it's struggling to find a > working path, or something. But then after that the performance seems > comparable to Freedom. > > I'm a big user of anonymity systems, and the worst problem I've had with > proxies is remembering who I am supposed to be at the time. Several times > with Freedom and more recently with other proxies, I have done stuff > using my real name when I was in the mode where my nym was being used, > and vice versa. Oops. That's a pretty big mistake to make and can > totally destroy your pseudonymity, both at the time and throughout the > past lifetime of the nym. > > What I'd like would be some kind of big, glaring indication that I am > in "anonymous" mode, like overlaying some kind of color display on the > screen, or maybe a crawling animation around the edges, or something. > I realize that this is out of scope for most efforts of this type, but > from my experience it's a big problem. > > > (I also subscribed the al-qaeda node, and will probably finish setting > > up the spamfiltered version of the list, as well as passing the back > > archives through the same archiving software as current archives, and > > search-indexing them, next time I get bored) > > Making your deep archive available in search-indexed form would be a > great service, as would spam-cleaning your current one. May you grow > bored soon. > > BTW, how big is the entire CP archive when compressed? Would it fit into > a gmail account that someone could set up and share the passphrase to? > I'd pay quite a few bucks to have a copy of that on my disk. > > _______________________________________________ > cypherpunks mailing list > cypherpunks(a)cypherpunks.metacolo.com > http://cypherpunks.metacolo.com/mailman/listinfo/cypherpunks -- Ryan Lackey [RL960-RIPE AS24812] ryan(a)venona.com +1 202 258 9251 OpenPGP DH 4096: B8B8 3D95 F940 9760 C64B DE90 07AD BE07 D2E0 301F _______________________________________________ cypherpunks mailing list cypherpunks(a)cypherpunks.metacolo.com http://cypherpunks.metacolo.com/mailman/listinfo/cypherpunks

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Re: message, but also test
by An Metet 02 May '04

02 May '04

Ryan Lackey writes: > I have two questions: > > 1) Does anyone have actual performance measurements of ZKS from when > it was operational/at peak, in terms of bandwidth, MTU, latency, and > jitter? Is there a good way to quantify just how far from > "acceptable" it was? I don't have any actual measurements, but as far as I can remember it worked pretty well, i.e., slower than usual but still pages would load within a few seconds. Recently I've experimented with the onion routing system at www.freehaven.net/tor, and the main problem there is slow startup times setting up the first path. Seems to take a couple of minutes sometimes for the first web page to download. I think it's struggling to find a working path, or something. But then after that the performance seems comparable to Freedom. I'm a big user of anonymity systems, and the worst problem I've had with proxies is remembering who I am supposed to be at the time. Several times with Freedom and more recently with other proxies, I have done stuff using my real name when I was in the mode where my nym was being used, and vice versa. Oops. That's a pretty big mistake to make and can totally destroy your pseudonymity, both at the time and throughout the past lifetime of the nym. What I'd like would be some kind of big, glaring indication that I am in "anonymous" mode, like overlaying some kind of color display on the screen, or maybe a crawling animation around the edges, or something. I realize that this is out of scope for most efforts of this type, but from my experience it's a big problem. > (I also subscribed the al-qaeda node, and will probably finish setting > up the spamfiltered version of the list, as well as passing the back > archives through the same archiving software as current archives, and > search-indexing them, next time I get bored) Making your deep archive available in search-indexed form would be a great service, as would spam-cleaning your current one. May you grow bored soon. BTW, how big is the entire CP archive when compressed? Would it fit into a gmail account that someone could set up and share the passphrase to? I'd pay quite a few bucks to have a copy of that on my disk. _______________________________________________ cypherpunks mailing list cypherpunks(a)cypherpunks.metacolo.com http://cypherpunks.metacolo.com/mailman/listinfo/cypherpunks

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Top Italian Mafia Boss Dies in U.S. Prison
by R. A. Hettinga 01 May '04

01 May '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The life, and death, of Mr. Badalamenti is important to cryptography people and cypherpunks for two reasons. First, the so-called "Pizza Connection" case is one of the very few times, if not the first, where actual wiretap data was good enough to convict someone. The other reason it is important is that it was the case in which Louis Freeh made his bones as a prosecutor. Combine the two, and you end up with an FBI director who was singularly ill-disposed to the idea of telephonic cryptography. In his advocacy of the NSA's then-failing "Clipper" chip project, he superheated what was already a firestorm of rage everywhere liberty is treasured. Fortunately, financial -- and not political -- cryptography is the only cryptography that matters. :-). For all the attacks on the chip by political advocates civil libertarian grounds, and, ultimately, its sheer technical incompetence by members of the cryptography community, it was, in fact, the absolute business *necessity* of SSL for credit card transactions and secure access to business information that settled the issue of ubiquitous strong cryptography once and for all. The camel's nose isn't sticking the tent. The camel's nose is stuck *out* of the tent, and the camel is inside, ready to spit in the eye of anyone who wants to take his stash. Physics causes finance. Finances causes politics. It was ever thus. It will ever be thus. Cheers, RAH ------- <http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=50 05854&section=news> Reuters Top Italian Mafia Boss Dies in U.S. Prison Fri Apr 30, 2004 06:29 PM ET By Ellen Wulfhorst NEW YORK (Reuters) - Top Mafia boss Gaetano Badalamenti has died in a U.S. federal prison where he was serving a sentence for international drug smuggling, authorities said on Friday. Badalamenti, 80, died of cardiac arrest at a federal medical center in Devens, Massachusetts., on Thursday evening, said a spokesman for the federal prison system. Badalamenti, born in the village of Cinisi in Palermo in 1923, was one of the key figures in the Sicilian Cosa Nostra in the 1970s. Known as Don Tano, he was a close friend of Charles "Lucky" Luciano, one of America's biggest mobsters in the 1970s, and part of the so-called 'triumvirate' that ran the Sicilian Mafia. Others in the triumvirate were Luciano Liggio and Stefano Bontade. But the 1970s saw the rise of another clan which included Salvatore 'Toto' Riina, who went on to become the Sicilian Mafia's boss of bosses, and Badalamenti was forced to flee to Brazil and then Spain. He later went into business with organized crime figures in New York who were using pizza parlors in a giant operation that smuggled more than $1 billion worth of heroin from Sicily. In 1987, Badalamenti was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison for his role in what was called the "Pizza Connection." In 2002 in Italy, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in absentia for the 1978 murder of a left-wing disc jockey who regularly insulted the Mafia boss. But last October in Italy, he and former prime minister Giulio Andreotti were acquitted of involvement in the murder of journalist Mino Pecorelli in 1979. Badalamenti had been housed until Feb. 27 at a federal prison in Fairton, New Jersey before he was moved to the medical facility in failing health, authorities said. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQJQZ38PxH8jf3ohaEQLgjwCgkS46hzVOH4U+UzZfHHcybowOdc8AoPBg HI6qtQ68QLvnYc0ROdmSyu/w =ntDC -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- 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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no anon conversations?
by An Metet 01 May '04

01 May '04

What technologies currently exist for receiving a/psuedononymous message? With Mixmaster, sending mail, posting news, and even blog posting are possible, However, receiving replies securely or, better, holding a private conversation is difficult or impossible. Best bet seems is to encrypt and spam somewhere very public? Ugly, ugly. No technological method, just a few "trust me" remailers. Other options?

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Google denies FBI interest in Gmail
by R. A. Hettinga 01 May '04

01 May '04

<http://www.zdnet.co.uk/print/?TYPE=story&AT=39153367-39020375t-10000025c> Google denies FBI interest in Gmail Staff CNET News.com April 30, 2004, 11:25 BST Google on Thursday denied that it has had any contact with the FBI regarding the design of its Gmail Web email service. The search firm's denial came after the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC) submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI seeking information about whether the bureau was considering the "possible use of Google's Gmail service for law enforcement and intelligence investigations." EPIC, which gave an award last week to a California state senator who is trying to ban Gmail, announced the request immediately after Google said it was filing for an initial public offering. Critics immediately criticised EPIC's request as a publicity stunt because the nonprofit likened Google's Web-based email service to the FBI's controversial Carnivore wiretapping utility and the Pentagon's discontinued "Orwellian Total Information Awareness program." EPIC's request also asked whether Google had discussed licensing its search technology, in use by customers in the private sector, to the FBI "to further law enforcement investigations or intelligence gathering activities." Google spokesman Nathan Tyler replied: "I cannot confirm whether they're using our technology." -- ----------------- 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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bubbling fondues (Re: NTK now, 2004-04-30)
by R. A. Hettinga 01 May '04

01 May '04

At 4:48 PM +0100 4/30/04, Dave Green wrote: > bubbling fondues > > Mr Blunkett's publicity campaign to gee Britons to get > inky-fingered, red-eyed and funky with their biometric > entitlement cards continued this week. "This is about true > identity," he said on Breakfast with Frost, in an apparent > attempt to win over the Vernor Vinge fans. "Being known, > being checkable, being used in order to ensure we know who's > in the country, what they're entitled to and whether they're > up to no good". And if that first mention of the cards' > unique "Santa Claus" capability to discern moral failings > in carriers isn't terrifying enough, you really should read > the government's new 160 page opus on how they'll be running > the show. It's not about the ID cards: it's about the huge > centralised biometric database the government is planning to > smuggle in on the back of it. Couldn't they just put the > biometrics on the card where we can see them, and then store > a comparison hash or some other translucent database > technique centrally? Of course not. Terrorists would win. > Feel free to add your own comments to the consultation, > which requires replies by July 20th. And we're *so* sure > they'll count all the responses correctly this time. > http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/docs3/identitycardsconsult.pdf > - consultation. "Vindicated" by bomb plot, apparently: > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3607141.stm > - vs http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/archives/000251.html >http://www.libdems.org.uk/index.cfm/page.homepage/section.home/article.6599 > - why not print them out + carry with you at all times? -- ----------------- 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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