September 2004 - cypherpunks-legacy

Disowned spooks get to be Mohommad's boyfriend for 10 yrs
by Major Variola (ret) 18 Sep '04

18 Sep '04

http://rdu.news14.com/content/headlines/?ArID=55256&SecID=2 ---- Soviets:Chechnya::US:?

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Classified papers up in cost, number
by R. A. Hettinga 18 Sep '04

18 Sep '04

<http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20040917-115320-…> The Washington Times www.washingtontimes.com Classified papers up in cost, number By Audrey Hudson THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published September 18, 2004 The federal government last year spent $6.5 billion to create 14 million new classified documents, a 60 percent increase over 2001 that has alarmed government watchdog groups, according to a report by openthegovernment.com. "While some increase in classification is to be expected in wartime, this dramatic rise runs counter to recommendations by the 911 Commission and the congressional joint inquiry into 9/11, both of which recommended reforms to reduce unnecessary secrets," says the report by the group of journalists and consumer and government watchdogs. Federal officials have used the September 11 terrorist attacks to turn the public's right to know into the government's right not to tell, said Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, a national security watchdog group. "This is what happens when you give government agencies unlimited authority to control information; they are going to abuse it. That doesn't mean though there should not be restrictions. Everyone agrees all kinds of things need to be protected, but they are going overboard and no one seems to be in a position to stop them," Mr. Aftergood said. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States cited "overclassification" of documents as a barrier to information sharing among agencies needed to fight terrorism, and legislators have discussed the issue at hearings held in response to the commission's report. Carol Haave, deputy undersecretary of defense for counterintelligence and security, last month told a House subcommittee on national security and emerging threats that as many as 50 percent of classified documents don't warrant the classification. She said there is a tendency at the Defense Department to "err on the side of caution." A portion of the $6.5 billion also was used to secure existing secrets, which typically are never unsealed for public consumption, even when their information really doesn't need to be protected, experts agree. Only 43,000 documents were declassified last year at a cost of nearly $54,000 compared to more than 100,000 documents declassified in 2001 prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks at a cost of $232,000, according to openthegovernment.com, whose analysis focused on pre- and post-attack numbers. A Congressional Research Service report released in June recommends placing time restrictions on the classification of documents, establishing an oversight board to review such classifications and holding periodic congressional briefings on them. It says that, historically, making information public is a primary way to expose and eliminate fraud and abuse in government. As the number of classified documents continues to rise, so do public requests to disclose government information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Such requests have tripled over the past six years. There were more than 3 million FOIA requests from federal agencies last year, up from 2.4 million in 2002. There also is a proliferation of ad hoc policies to restrict public access to information that is not classified, but still hidden from the public, legislators and experts say. For example, documents inside the Homeland Security Department are increasingly being labeled "For Official Use Only," "Sensitive Security Information," "Sensitive Homeland Security Information," and "Sensitive but Unclassified," the congressional report said. The report said the use of such terminology is dangerous because it prevents the disclosure of information and questionable policy, which, if seen by the public, could spur change. "There recently has been a dramatic upturn in the number of documents that have either been stamped SSI or 'Official Use Only,' including examples of activities that apparently were of a social orientation, and are clearly not of official nature, let alone of a classified matter," said Bob Flamm, executive director of the Federal Air Marshal Association. "It's being abused on a regular basis," Mr. Flamm said. However, Dave Adams, spokesman for the U.S. Federal Air Marshal Service, disputes that assertion and says that the SSI stamp is "not just automatically" being stamped on every document unless it is "sensitive." "Official Use Only" which is described by a Homeland Security directive as unclassified but sensitive information, would include threat assessment information, security plans, and financial information or information that could threaten security operations. Federal air marshals (FAM) say e-mail from management is automatically being stamped "Official Use Only" stating that "no portion of any document can be released to the media, the general public ... release of any FAM Service document, correspondence or law enforcement sensitive material could adversely affect our mission or jeopardize investigative activities." E-mail with the stamps describe medical checkup procedures, vacancy announcements that are also posted on the Internet, and one announced a going-away party for a colleague inviting co-workers "for Krispy Kremes and coffee" for the employee's farewell. "That sounds amazing," Mr. Aftergood said. "It is simply arbitrary. They make it up as they go along, and it's hard to take seriously." -- ----------------- 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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Barbarians at the Digital Gate
by R. A. Hettinga 18 Sep '04

18 Sep '04

<http://nytimes.com/2004/09/19/business/yourmoney/19gator.html?pagewanted=pr…> The New York Times September 19, 2004 Barbarians at the Digital Gate By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN and SAUL HANSELL ARSTEN M. SELF, who oversees a children's computer lab at a youth center in Napa, Calif., spends about a half-hour each morning electronically scanning 10 PC's. He is searching for files and traces of code that threaten to hijack the computers by silently monitoring the children's online activities or by plastering their screens with dizzying - and nearly unstoppable - onslaughts of pop-up advertisements. To safeguard the children's computers, Mr. Self has installed a battery of protective software products and new Web browsers. That has kept some - but by no means all - of the youth center's digital intruders at bay. "You would expect that you could use these systems in a safe and sane way, but the fact of the matter is that you can't unless you have a fair amount of knowledge, time to fix the problems and paranoia," he said. The parasitic files that have beset Mr. Self and other frustrated computer users are known, in tech argot, as spyware and adware. The rapid proliferation of such programs has brought Internet use to a stark crossroads, as many consumers now see the Web as a battlefield strewn with land mines. At the same time, major advertisers and big Internet sites are increasingly tempted by adware's singular ability to display pop-up ads exactly when a user has shown interest in a particular service or product. "Adware has its place, but to grab market share I think a lot of companies are doing things that make consumers feel betrayed," said Wayne Porter, co-founder of Spyware-Guide.com, a Web site that tracks adware and spyware abuses. "I think we're at a very important inflection point that is going to decide how the Internet operates." The exact definitions of spyware and adware, like many things in the ever-changing world of the Internet, remain open to debate. But spyware generally refers to programs that reside in hidden corners of a computer's hard drive and record confidential information like keystrokes, passwords and the user's history of Web site visits. Some of the most insidious versions have to be installed on a computer by someone other than the user - maybe a jealous spouse or lover. Adware, for its part, marries old-fashioned highway billboard pitches to online distribution and the possibility of immediate response. Adware vendors range from fly-by-night operators who hawk pornography and gambling, wherever they can, to more legitimate companies like the Claria Corporation, which tries to aim its ads at the consumers deemed most likely to respond, based on their surfing habits. Claria alone has about 29 million users running its adware products on their computers, according to comScore MediaMetrix, an Internet research firm. That compares with 1.5 million users in early 2000, according to the company. Some spyware creeps onto a computer's hard drive unannounced, often by piggybacking onto other software programs that people download or by sneaking through backdoor security gaps in Web browsers when consumers visit certain sites. In other cases, consumers technically agree to download the software, but critics say that the disclosures are hard to find. FOR all the differences between spyware and adware, their impact on computers is pretty much the same: screens transformed into digital versions of Times Square, and overburdened PC's that operate much more slowly as they struggle with random and uncontrollable processes prompted by the hard drive. Small wonder that consumers are throwing up their hands in despair. "From what consumers are telling us, they feel like their computers are being taken away from them," Mr. Porter said. "We have some consumers saying it makes them hesitant to use the Internet at all because of what an annoyance it has become." Reliable data about the booming adware market is scant, but consumer complaints have become frequent and vociferous. Privacy watchdogs like the Center for Technology and Democracy in Washington have called for closer regulatory scrutiny of the industry. Legislation seeking to protect consumers from abusive adware and spyware has been introduced in Congress. One state, Utah, has even outlawed the installation of any software without users' consent. Consumers can use some tools to fight adware and spyware themselves. Software products like Spybot-Search & Destroy, Spy Sweeper and Adaware can zap some intrusive programs on a hard drive and block attempts to trespass onto a PC. And many analysts like Mr. Porter recommend that consumers switch from Microsoft's Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox, a free browser that they say has fewer security vulnerabilities. (Microsoft has issued software patches for Explorer and released an update to Windows XP that makes it harder for consumers to download software unknowingly.) But critics of the adware industry say solutions to the problems ultimately must come from vendors themselves. Against this landscape, companies that still hope to mine the lucrative promises of adware have choices to make: to abandon the pop-up promotions that consumers find so annoying or to overhaul their practices so thoroughly that they are seen as responsible online citizens. Some companies seem unlikely to follow the second path. Perhaps the most infamous adware purveyor is an elusive enterprise alternately known as CoolWWWSearch or CoolWebSearch. The company operates from computer servers in the United States as well as far-flung places like Russia, Britain, the Virgin Islands and Spain. It has developed adware that can change its name and its location on a hijacked computer several times a day - making it virtually impossible to track. The company did not reply to an e-mail message seeking comment. Spyware Labs Inc., a Hawaiian company, promotes itself as a vendor of anti-spyware tools but peddles a product called Virtual Bouncer that experts like Mr. Porter say functions as spyware and adware once it is installed on a computer. Spyware Labs also did not answer an e-mail message seeking comment. Spyware companies are considered some of the most disreputable players in the industry, because their products can be used for illicit purposes. While many adware companies engage in some of the same practices as spyware companies - both track users' browsing habits, for example - adware tends to occupy a less nefarious position. In the realm of more mainstream adware vendors stands Claria, based in Redwood City, Calif. The company, founded as Gator in 1998, is trying to recast adware as a more consumer-friendly addition to computers. Smart minds and smart money surrounded Claria from the beginning. It was founded by Denis Coleman, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who was a co-founder of the company that became Symantec. Among Claria's earliest investors were Scott D. Cook, founder of Intuit Inc.; Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems; and Philip M. Young, an investor with U.S. Venture Partners, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, Calif. Claria piggybacks its adware on popular programs like Kazaa, the music file-sharing service, and has a lucrative partnership with Yahoo, one of the Internet's busiest sites. Claria's investors and executives say the company has been unfairly grouped with shadier operators and that its goal was never to spy on computer users or to gather personal information surreptitiously. Instead, they say, the aim is to offer useful ads tailored to consumers' real interests and needs, derived from careful monitoring of their Web use. "A technique that provided much more relevant information and advertising to a computer user seemed like a powerful concept," Mr. Young said. "Claria has demonstrated how much more powerful a message is when it's delivered to the right user, and Claria's only scratched the surface of what they're capable of doing when they deploy their software." CLARIA recently canceled plans to take itself public, citing changing business circumstances; it declined to offer a more detailed explanation. But the company's public filings offer evidence of its financial potential. After a few years of losses, the company earned $91,000 in 2002 on $40.5 million in revenue. Last year, it earned about $35 million on $90.5 million in revenue - an enviable profit margin. "At the end of the day it's real simple," said Jeffrey McFadden, a former executive at the Internet portal Excite who is now Claria's chief executive. "Consumers find value in relevant advertising." Advertisers find value in the model, too. Mainstream companies like Verizon, Panasonic and Priceline rely on adware programs because of their power to address people's individual interests. Claria said 425 advertisers - including Cendant, FTD, Netflix and Orbitz - use its adware. Nonetheless, Claria has drawn its share of barbs. Several companies, including The New York Times, have sued Claria, arguing that its pop-up ads violate trademark protections when they appear on the companies' Web sites. Claria has settled most of those suits, including with The Times, but declined to discuss the terms. Claria has also drawn the ire of advocacy groups, partly because of its ubiquity and its role as an industry pioneer. Critics also denounce some of its business practices, particularly the way it bundles its software with other programs and the stealth it has used to land on users' hard drives. "They were very aggressive for a long time, and they turned off a lot of people," said Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "That said, they seem now to be moving in the direction of trying to take steps to make their business more legitimate." It won't be easy, he added: "They still have a long way to go to make their product something people want to have rather than something they're stuck with." Mr. Schwartz said that he believed that Claria's products were not easy to remove from a computer. Claria executives dispute that computer users are "stuck with" their products. They say they have worked closely with Mr. Schwartz and other critics to make their ad programs more visible and palatable to computer users. Scott Eagle, Claria's chief marketing officer, said the company downloads its adware to a user's hard drive only with permission, makes the adware easy to remove and clearly identifies its products. He also says Claria does not collect personal information like last names, phone numbers or e-mail, Internet and home addresses. "We would rather not show you an ad that's not going to be relevant to you, because that doesn't add any value to you or the advertiser," Mr. Eagle said. "The big question is, 'Where does this all go?' Pop-ups and pop-unders are not wildly accepted by consumers." As a result, Mr. Eagle said, Claria will move away from providing pop-ups and will offer more static banner ads on some Web sites. Others in the Internet advertising industry also say that negative reaction has persuaded them to forgo the pop-up route. "Everyone is searching for the magic bullet where the consumer will say yes to pop-ups," said David J. Moore, the chief executive of 24/7 Real Media, a large Internet advertising company. "The average consumer will end up with a few of these adware programs, and it sours them on the entire experience." Mr. Moore said 24/7 had considered buying an adware company but had passed. "We were nervous about the long-term business prospects," he said. "There seems to be a fairly strong groundswell to limit how they do business." WhenU.com, another prominent adware company, began as a comparison-shopping service founded by consultants at the Boston Consulting Group. But the company, based in New York, discovered that comparison-shopping was an unprofitable service, and it, like Claria, began bundling adware with a number of file-sharing companies including, briefly, Kazaa. WhenU, like Claria, uses display ads called sliders - because they slide up from the bottom of the screen. The ads are generated by WhenU's software and can be launched even when a browser is not open - meaning they cannot be stopped by software that blocks pop-up ads. Other WhenU ads appear in front of an open application, interrupting the user, while others hide behind the application until the user closes it. Avi Naider, WhenU's chief executive, says he believes that pop-ups and related intrusive advertising will continue to be viable even if some consumers try to avoid them. "The business spent four years educating advertisers about the performance you can get from these type of ads, and we didn't spend much time educating consumers," Mr. Naider said. "We never talked to consumers about the benefits of software-based advertising." Mr. Naider says WhenU does not keep user information. Instead, he says, the software his company installs on users' machines tracks the Web sites that users have visited and displays relevant advertising. "This is a healthy direction for advertising to go, with a strong set of standards," he said. But he conceded it would be "a battle to transcend the simplistic perception that most consumers have about adware." THE question remains whether a legitimate business can be built on the back of an industry that has annoyed consumers so deeply and has been linked to truly illegitimate practices. "The adware industry has grown so quickly because it works," said Gary A. Kibel, a lawyer in New York who specializes in new media and advertising law. "I'm sure 80 percent of consumers don't want advertising on television, but if you get rid of advertising on television there'd be no more free TV." Mr. Kibel said federal legislation could help formalize and sanitize the business. But some computer users remain unswayed. "Adware and spyware and all the other malwares that are out there just waste a lot of time and make the whole Internet experience a lot less enjoyable," said Orion E. Hill, president of the Napa Valley Personal Computer Users Group, a nonprofit group that educates consumers about PC's. "It's intrusive into your life, and I don't think that's going to change. "The current Internet model is just too wide open, and I don't have any confidence that any of the new models are going to be any better," Mr. Hill added. "The Internet is just too accessible, and it's too easy for people to make anything they want out of it." Copyrigh -- ----------------- 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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The Hand-Marked Ballot Wins for Accuracy
by R. A. Hettinga 18 Sep '04

18 Sep '04

<http://nytimes.com/2004/09/19/politics/campaign/19ballot.html?pagewanted=pr…> The New York Times September 19, 2004 The Hand-Marked Ballot Wins for Accuracy By TOM ZELLER Jr. fter the pandemonium over dimpled and pregnant chads in the 2000 election, nearly everyone agreed it was time to rethink old vote-counting ways. But the stampede to touch-screen voting was not inevitable. Another, demonstrably more reliable technology was already on the rise: optical scan voting, introduced in some parts of the country in the late 1970's. By the 2000 election, optical scanning - which involves marking a paper ballot that is ultimately read and counted by a computer - had overtaken all other voting methods as the most common way to vote in the United States. This year, optical scan systems will be used in more than 45 percent of all counties, according to Election Data Services, a political consulting firm in Washington. After the 2000 election, a study by the Voting Technology Project, a joint effort by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took a hard look at the nation's voting systems. Using a measure of what they called "residual votes" - overcounting, undercounting or not counting votes for any reason - researchers found that two existing voting methods had produced relatively low error rates in the last four presidential elections: old-fashioned hand-counted paper ballots and optical scan systems. The study found that the mechanical lever system, which dominated the market in 1980 and has been in decline ever since, performed considerably worse. In overall performance, electronic voting - both the older push-button variety and the newer touch-screen units - performed scarcely better than punch cards. "The immediate implication of our analysis is that the U.S. can lower the number of lost votes in 2004 by replacing punch cards and lever machines with optical scanning," the report said. "Touch screens are, in our opinion, still unproven." But election officials who decided to change systems overwhelmingly went for the touch screens. Compared with about 13 percent of registered voters in 2000, this year roughly 30 percent of those registered will be asked to vote on electronic systems. Optical scan systems grew as well, although at a much slower pace: from about 30 percent of registered voters in 2000 to just under 35 percent this year, according to Election Data Services. The Caltech/M.I.T. study said that the newest electronic systems had great potential, but were plagued by a variety of problems, like loose cables and confusing interfaces. Change is natural, said Stephen Ansolabehere, a political science professor at M.I.T. and a member of the study team. But "optical scanning is a pretty good interim solution for the next five or 10 years,'' he said. And then what? Litigators, start your engines: the Internet. Professor Ansolabehere is among those who predict that myriad security obstacles will one day be overcome and votes will be cast from the nation's living rooms. "I think it's inevitable," he said. Copyrigh -- ----------------- 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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Ready or Not (and Maybe Not), Electronic Voting Goes National
by R. A. Hettinga 18 Sep '04

18 Sep '04

<http://nytimes.com/2004/09/19/politics/campaign/19vote.html?hp=&pagewanted=…> The New York Times September 19, 2004 Ready or Not (and Maybe Not), Electronic Voting Goes National By TOM ZELLER Jr. ust over six weeks before the nation holds the first general election in which touch-screen voting will play a major role, specialists agree that whatever the remaining questions about the technology's readiness, it is now too late to make any significant changes. Whether or not the machines are ready for the election - or the electorate ready for the machines - there is no turning back. In what may turn out to be one of the most scrutinized general elections in the country's history, nearly one-third of the more than 150 million registered voters in the United States will be asked to cast their ballots on machines whose accuracy and security against fraud have yet to be tested on such a grand scale. Because of the uncertainties, experts say there is potential for post-election challenges in any precincts where the machines may malfunction, or where the margin of victory is thin. Sorting out such disputes could prove difficult. "The possibility for erroneous votes or malicious programming is not as great as critics would have you believe," said Doug Chapin, the director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan group tracking election reform. "But it's more than defenders of the technology want to admit. The truth lies somewhere in between." Since the 2000 presidential election and its contentious aftermath, voting systems that record votes directly on a computer - as opposed to those that use mechanical levers or optically scanned paper ballots - have quickly moved to the center of a rancorous debate. The disagreement pits those who see them as unacceptably vulnerable to vote manipulation and fraud against those who see them as an antidote to the wretched hanging chad. Even in the final run-up to November's elections, the issue remains in flux. In California, the machines have been certified, decertified and recertified again. In Ohio, a closely contested state, an electronic upgrade to the state's predominantly punch-card system was halted in July by the secretary of state there, who cited unresolved security concerns. All the while, a vocal mixture of computer scientists, local voting-rights groups and freelance civic gadflies have relentlessly cited security flaws in many of the machines, with some going so far as to say that the flaws could be intentional and accusing the major companies of having ties to conservative political causes. The companies and election officials have fought back bitterly, accusing the activists of being wild-eyed fearmongers. A study released by Electionline.org last month would seem to suggest that partisan politics plays less of a role than critics have claimed. That report found "no industrywide partisan trend to political contributions among the largest election system companies." The leader in the electronic voting machine market, Diebold, and its executives have given more than $400,000 to Republican interests since 2001, the study found. But other large companies, including Election Systems & Software and Sequoia Voting Systems, "gave a slight edge to Democratic candidates and party organizations." Concerns over the security and accuracy of the machines have proved harder to dispel, though, and they have not always come from the fringe. At the end of June, two prestigious groups - the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights - issued a set of recommendations for technical upgrades and procedures that they said could help shore up high-tech voting systems in time for the November elections. Nancy Zirkin, the deputy director of the Leadership Conference, said she thought that the report had been taken seriously, but conceded that the group did not know how many states or precincts had actually adopted the recommendations. Other critics say that too little has been done in response to numerous problems - and that it is now too late to do much more before the election, because software and technology have to be tested and "frozen" well ahead of voting to avoid malfunctions and electoral chaos. "Switching now, approximately 40 days before the election, would probably introduce more security problems than it would avoid," said Aviel D. Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University who brought many of the vulnerabilities in voting systems to light. Senator Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, is among those who wonder whether the technology is ready for prime time. As she tried out one of Maryland's new machines at a folk festival last weekend, an apparent slip of her hand generated a "no" vote when she intended to vote "yes," before the error was caught and corrected. By last Monday, Ms. Mikulski had signed on to Senate legislation that would require all electronic voting terminals around the nation to generate a paper record for each vote. But there are no such capabilities in the AccuVote TS touch-screen systems that will be used throughout Maryland and in many other states that have adopted touch screens or other electronic voting devices. And it is too late to add them. The Maryland system is far from foolproof, in the view of Michael Wertheimer, a computer security consultant with RABA Technologies, who was hired by the state of Maryland last year to conduct a mock hacking attack against the Diebold machines. A number of security holes were found, including one in the Microsoft operating system that runs the election software, which did not have up-to-date security patches. The flaws, Mr. Wertheimer said, could allow tampering and skewed election results. He also noted that in the presidential primary election last March, Maryland used software on its machines that had not been certified by independent testing authorities, and thus violated state law. But Linda Lamone, the administrator of the state's election laws, has repeatedly stated that her office has taken the necessary steps to improve the Diebold machines. She says that issues of uncertified software have been corrected and that Maryland's election system is secure. The Maryland Court of Appeals appears to agree. On Tuesday, the court rejected a suit brought by a Maryland voter group, TrueVoteMD, which sought to force the state to further improve security on its machines and offer voters a paper-ballot alternative. Still, as the days dwindle, paper remains at the heart of the debate. Nevada, another state that will make near-universal use of touch-screen voting in November, purchased machines manufactured by Sequoia that produce a paper record - a move that received high marks earlier this month from the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative group in Washington. "Without an actual paper ballot, we are then left with only the computer's word for the election results," the group said in a news release accompanying its informal "Election Preparedness Scorecard" three weeks ago. The group gave grades of F to several states - including Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and Tennessee - based on their degree of reliance on paperless electronic voting. Florida, whose results will almost certainly receive intense scrutiny, received an F-plus, while Georgia was given an F-minus. New Mexico, a swing state that will rely heavily on touch-screen voting on Nov. 2, received a D-minus. Harris N. Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, a trade group that represents many of the voting machine makers, concedes that the industry has probably not been sensitive enough to the political nuances surrounding voting technology - particularly in the aftermath of the 2000 election. But he argued that the fears expressed by many of those opposed to electronic voting are driven as much by ignorance as by passion. "What we're replacing is a system that was broken - so broken that Congress passed a special law," he said, referring to the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which was designed to help overhaul the nation's election system in the aftermath of the 2000 debacle. "It was so broken that Congress appropriated over a billion dollars to fix it," he said. The law, which established the Election Assistance Commission, generally encourages the movement away from punch cards and the exploration of other voting technologies. The law also calls for the federal standards agency, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, to develop universal standards for voting systems. But the agency says the $500,000 Congress appropriated last year for such efforts has been exhausted, and Congress did not provide additional funds for the effort in 2004. As for security concerns, Mr. Miller said that vendors submit their source code - the underlying instructions for the machines' software - for independent inspection, to uncover any hidden programming and to ensure that the machines calculate properly. Critics, however, point out that the labs inspecting the software are typically paid by the vendors themselves, and that they somehow failed to uncover the flaws discovered by Mr. Wertheimer, Professor Rubin, and election officials in Ohio, Maryland and elsewhere. While it is too late in the game to make it possible to produce a paper record for each vote on every machine already deployed, Mr. Miller said that vendors would be willing to include that feature in the future if the market demanded it. Most of the major vendors have models that can supply a printed record, but in most cases, Mr. Miller said, election officials have not required it. Paper receipts are not automatically required because no such universal guideline has ever existed. Mechanical lever machines, for instance, which have been in widespread use since the 1930's - and will still be used by millions of voters this year - have never produced a paper record of each vote. And states have traditionally established their own definitions of what constitutes a ballot. Still, the scrutiny and criticism that have dogged electronic voting machines over the last year all but guarantee that a pall of suspicion and distrust will hang over a technology that awaits approximately 45 million registered voters if they go to the polls. Whether the concerns are justified or overblown, experts say, in the wake of the 2000 election controversy, the mere hint of unreliability this time could turn the electronic vote, should the margin of victory be narrow, into one more tinderbox. "The woods aren't any drier than they were in 2000," Mr. Chapin of Electionline.org is fond of saying, "but there are a lot more people with matches." That is a point that Edward S. Morillo, a representative of the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters in California, would probably concede. Mr. Morillo travels the county acquainting voters with the Sequoia AVC Edge, the voting machine that will be used there on Nov. 2. On Wednesday afternoon, he stopped by the Indian Health Center in San Jose. As patients and employees took turns poking at the screen, an occasional "What is it?" or "Oops!" seemed to foretell what ballot workers might expect on Election Day. Mr. Morillo said that reactions to the touch screens have generally been mixed, and that Santa Clara County - like every California county where similar electronic voting is in place - would offer a paper ballot alternative for those who, for whatever reason, are not comfortable with the machines. "The thing about the touch screen,'' he said, "is that you either love it or hate it." John Schwartz and Carolyn Marshall contributed reporting for this article. -- ----------------- 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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Toward A Private Digital Economy: (Trusted transactions in an anonymous world)
by Nostra2004＠SAFe-mail.net 18 Sep '04

18 Sep '04

http://pelagic.wavyhill.xsmail.com/Private_Digital_Economy.html Currently available financial privacy tools have drawbacks arising from centralized ownership and control, and the limitations of presenting specific services. A better approach would be to construct a fully distributed environment for economic activity which mimics the way cash is used in the physical world but is private, anonymous, trusted, and indestructible. A key to this variety is the element of locale, which we will explain in some detail. We will introduce a 'Farmer's Market' model of anonymous commerce and expand it into a detailed functional description. We will explore business models viable in this environment and ways to connect them to the transparent banking world. An anonymous economy must resolve issues of trust and reputation to be practical. We show how properties of number can be used to derive an 'algebra of trust' and exploited to reduce risk in anonymous transactions. Once reduced to a number, trust, like any other asset, can be quantified, evaluated, commoditized and even used as a currency. Algorithms that distribute data storage can distribute risk and trust once they are reduced to data. These things may overcome some of the barriers to the wide adoption of a private digital economy.

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Toward A Private Digital Economy: (Trusted transactions in an anonymous world)
by Nostra2004＠SAFe-mail.net 18 Sep '04

18 Sep '04

http://pelagic.wavyhill.xsmail.com/Private_Digital_Economy.html Currently available financial privacy tools have drawbacks arising from centralized ownership and control, and the limitations of presenting specific services. A better approach would be to construct a fully distributed environment for economic activity which mimics the way cash is used in the physical world but is private, anonymous, trusted, and indestructible. A key to this variety is the element of locale, which we will explain in some detail. We will introduce a 'Farmer's Market' model of anonymous commerce and expand it into a detailed functional description. We will explore business models viable in this environment and ways to connect them to the transparent banking world. An anonymous economy must resolve issues of trust and reputation to be practical. We show how properties of number can be used to derive an 'algebra of trust' and exploited to reduce risk in anonymous transactions. Once reduced to a number, trust, like any other asset, can be quantified, evaluated, commoditized and even used as a currency. Algorithms that distribute data storage can distribute risk and trust once they are reduced to data. These things may overcome some of the barriers to the wide adoption of a private digital economy.

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Re: potential new IETF WG on anonymous IPSec
by hal＠finney.org 18 Sep '04

18 Sep '04

> The IETF has been discussing setting up a working group > for anonymous IPSec. They will have a BOF at the next IETF > in DC in November. They're also setting up a mailing list you > might be interested in if you haven't heard about it already. > ... > http://www.postel.org/anonsec To clarify, this is not really "anonymous" in the usual sense. Rather it is a proposal to an extension to IPsec to allow for unauthenticated connections. Presently IPsec relies on either pre-shared secrets or a trusted third party CA to authenticate the connection. The new proposal would let connections go forward using a straight Diffie-Hellman type exchange without authentication. It also proposes less authentication of IP message packets, covering smaller subsets, as an option. The point has nothing to do with anonymity; rather it is an attempt to secure against weaknesses in TCP which have begun to be exploited. Sequence number guessing attacks are more successful today because of increasing bandwidth, and there have been several instances where they have caused disruption on the net. While workarounds are in place, a better solution is desirable. This new effort is Joe Touch's proposal to weaken IPsec so that it uses less resources and is easier to deploy. He calls the weaker version AnonSec. But it is not anonymous, all the parties know the addresses of their counterparts. Rather, it allows for a degree of security on connections between communicators who don't share any secrets or CAs. I don't think "anonymous" is the right word for this, and I hope the IETF comes up with a better one as they go forward. Hal Finney

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Re: potential new IETF WG on anonymous IPSec
by Major Variola (ret) 18 Sep '04

18 Sep '04

At 06:20 AM 9/17/04 +0000, Justin wrote: >On 2004-09-16T20:11:56-0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote: >> >> At 02:17 PM 9/16/04 -0700, Joe Touch wrote: >> >Except that certs need to be signed by authorities that are trusted. >> >> Name one. > >Oh, come on. Nothing can be absolutely trusted. How much security is >enough? > >Aren't the DOD CAs trusted enough for your tastes? Of course, 'tis >problematic for civilians to get certs from there. DoD certs are good enough for DoD slaves. Hospital certs are good enough for their employees. Joe's Bait Und Tackle certs are good enough for Joe's employees. Do you think that Verislime is good enough for you?

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O'Rourke: Why Americans hate foreign policy
by R. A. Hettinga 17 Sep '04

17 Sep '04

<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;sessionid=X0NZR23ED5X0NQFIQMF…> The Telegraph Why Americans hate foreign policy By P J O'Rourke (Filed: 18/09/2004) Frankly, nothing concerning foreign policy ever occurred to me until the middle of the last decade. I'd been writing about foreign countries and foreign affairs and foreigners for years. But you can own dogs all your life and not have "dog policy". You have rules, yes - Get off the couch! - and training, sure. We want the dumb creatures to be well behaved and friendly. So we feed foreigners, take care of them, give them treats, and, when absolutely necessary, whack them with a rolled-up newspaper. That was as far as my foreign policy thinking went until the middle 1990s, when I realised America's foreign policy thinking hadn't gone that far. In the fall of 1996, I travelled to Bosnia to visit a friend whom I'll call Major Tom. Major Tom was in Banja Luka serving with the Nato-led international peacekeeping force, Ifor. From 1992 to 1995, Bosnian Serbs had fought Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims in an attempt to split Bosnia into two hostile territories. In 1995, the US-brokered Dayton Agreement ended the war by splitting Bosnia into two hostile territories. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was run by Croats and Muslims. The Republika Srpska was run by Serbs. IFOR's job was to "implement and monitor the Dayton Agreement." Major Tom's job was to sit in an office where Croat and Muslim residents of Republika Srpska went to report Dayton Agreement violations. "They come to me," said Major Tom, "and they say, 'The Serbs stole my car.' And I say, 'I'm writing that in my report.' They say, 'The Serbs burnt my house.' And I say, 'I'm writing that in my report.' They say, 'The Serbs raped my daughter.' And I say, 'I'm writing that in my report."' "Then what happens?" I said. "I put my report in a filing cabinet." Major Tom had fought in the Gulf war. He'd been deployed to Haiti during the American reinstatement of President Aristide (which preceded the recent American un-reinstatement). He was on his second tour of duty in Bosnia and would go on to fight in the Iraq war. That night, we got drunk. "Please, no nation-building," said Major Tom. "We're the Army. We kill people and break things. They didn't teach nation-building in infantry school." Or in journalism school, either. The night before I left to cover the Iraq war, I got drunk with another friend, who works in TV news. We were talking about how - as an approach to national security - invading Iraq was... different. I'd moved my family from Washington to New Hampshire. My friend was considering getting his family out of New York. "Don't you hope," my friend said, "that all this has been thought through by someone who is smarter than we are?" It is, however, a universal tenet of democracy that no one is. Americans hate foreign policy. Americans hate foreign policy because Americans hate foreigners. Americans hate foreigners because Americans are foreigners. We all come from foreign lands, even if we came 10,000 years ago on a land bridge across the Bering Strait. America is not "globally conscious" or "multi-cultural." Americans didn't come to America to be Limey Poofters, Frog-Eaters, Bucket Heads, Micks, Spicks, Sheenies or Wogs. If we'd wanted foreign entanglements, we would have stayed home. Or - in the case of those of us who were shipped to America against our will - as slaves, exiles, or transported prisoners - we would have gone back. Being foreigners ourselves, we Americans know what foreigners are up to with their foreign policy - their venomous convents, lying alliances, greedy agreements and trick-or-treaties. America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God. Start thinking and pretty soon you get ideas, and then you get idealism, and the next thing you know you've got ideology, with millions dead in concentration camps and gulags. A fundamental American question is: "What's the big idea?" Americans would like to ignore foreign policy. Our previous attempts at isolationism were successful. Unfortunately, they were successful for Hitler's Germany and Tojo's Japan. Evil is an outreach programme. A solitary bad person sitting alone, harbouring genocidal thoughts, and wishing he ruled the world is not a problem unless he lives next to us in the trailer park. In the big geopolitical trailer park that is the world today, he does. America has to act. But, when America acts, other nations accuse us of being "hegemonistic," of engaging in "unilateralism," of behaving as if we're the only nation on earth that counts. We are. Russia used to be a superpower but resigned "to spend more time with the family." China is supposed to be mighty, but the Chinese leadership quakes when a couple of hundred Falun Gong members do tai chi for Jesus. The European Union looks impressive on paper, with a greater population and a larger economy than America's. But the military spending of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy combined does not equal one third of the US defence budget. When other countries demand a role in the exercise of global power, America can ask another fundamental American question: "You and what army?" Americans find foreign policy confusing. We are perplexed by the subtle tactics and complex strategies of the Great Game. America's great game is pulling the levers on the slot machines in Las Vegas. We can't figure out what the goal of American foreign policy is supposed to be. The goal of American tax policy is avoiding taxes. The goal of American environmental policy is to clean up the environment, clearing away scruffy caribou and seals so that America's drillers for Arctic oil don't get trampled or slapped with a flipper. But the goal of American foreign policy is to foster international co-operation, protect Americans at home and abroad, promote world peace, eliminate human rights abuses, improve US business and trade opportunities, and stop global warming. We were going to stop global warming by signing the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse gas emissions. Then we realized the Kyoto protocol was ridiculous and unenforceable and that no one who signed it was even trying to meet the emissions requirements except for some countries from the former Soviet Union. They accidentally quit emitting greenhouse gases because their economies collapsed. However, if we withdraw from diplomatic agreements because they're ridiculous, we'll have to withdraw from every diplomatic agreement because they're all ridiculous. This will not foster international co-operation. But if we do foster international co-operation, we won't be able to protect Americans at home and abroad, because there has been a lot of international co-operation in killing Americans. Attacking internationals won't promote world peace, which we can't have anyway if we're going to eliminate human rights abuses, because there's no peaceful way to get rid of the governments that abuse the rights of people - people who are chained to American gym-shoe-making machinery, dying of gym-shoe lung, and getting paid in shoe-laces, thereby improving US business and trade opportunities, which result in economic expansion that causes global warming to get worse. One problem with changing America's foreign policy is that we keep doing it. President Bill Clinton dreamed of letting the lion lie down with the lamb chop. Clinton kept International Monetary Fund cash flowing into the ever-criminalising Russian economy. He ignored Kremlin misbehaviour - from Boris Yeltsin's shelling of elected representatives in the Duma to Vladimir Putin's airlifting of uninvited Russian troops into Kosovo. Clinton compared the Chechnya fighting to the American Civil War (murdered Chechens being on the South Carolina statehouse, Confederate-flag-flying side). Clinton called China America's "strategic partner" and paid a nine-day visit to that country, not bothering himself with courtesy calls on America's actual strategic partners, Japan and South Korea. Clinton announced, "We don't support independence for Taiwan," and said of Jiang Zemin, instigator of the assault on democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square: "He has vision." Anything for peace, that was Clinton's policy. Clinton had special peace-mongering envoys in Cyprus, Congo, the Middle East, the Balkans, and flying off to attend secret talks with Marxist guerrillas in Colombia. On his last day in office, Clinton was still phoning Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. "Love your work, Gerry. Do you ever actually kill people? Or do you just do the spin?" Clinton was everybody's best friend. Except when he wasn't. He conducted undeclared air wars against Serbia and Iraq and launched missiles at Sudan and Afghanistan. Clinton used the military more often than any previous peacetime American president. He sent armed forces into areas of conflict on an average of once every nine weeks. President George W Bush's foreign policy was characterised, in early 2001, as "disciplined and consistent" (Condoleezza Rice): "blunt" (The Washington Post), and "in-your-face" (the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). Bush began his term with the expulsion of one fourth of the Russian diplomatic corps on grounds of espionage. He snubbed Vladimir Putin by delaying a first summit meeting until June 2001, and then holding it in fashionable Slovenia. On April 1, 2001, a Chinese fighter jet, harassing a US reconnaissance plane in international air space, collided with the American aircraft, which was forced to land in Chinese territory. Bush did not regard this as an April Fools' prank. By the end of the month, he had gone on Good Morning America and said that, if China attacked Taiwan, the United States had an obligation to defend it with "whatever it took". The President also brandished American missile defences at Russia and China. The Russians and Chinese were wroth. The missile shield might or might not stop missiles but, even unbuilt, it was an effective tool for gathering intelligence on Russian and Chinese foreign policy intentions. We knew how things stood when the town drunk and the town bully strongly suggested that we shouldn't get a new home security system. In the Middle East, Bush made an attempt to let the Israelis and the Palestinians go at it until David ran out of pebbles and Goliath had been hit on the head so many times that he was voting for Likud. In Northern Ireland, Bush also tried minding his own business. And he quit negotiating with North Korea about its atomic weapons for the same reason that you'd quit jawing with a crazy person about the gun he was waving and call 999. We saw the results of Clinton's emotional, ad hoc, higgledy-piggledy foreign policy. It led to strained relations with Russia and China, increased violence in the Middle East, continued fighting in Africa and Asia, and Serbs killing Albanians. Then we saw the results of Bush's tough, calculated, focused foreign policy: strained relations with Russia and China, increased violence in the Middle East, continued fighting in Africa and Asia, and Albanians killing Serbs. Further changes could be made to US foreign policy. For a sample of alternative ideas, we can turn to a group of randomly (even haphazardly) chosen, average (not to say dull-normal) Americans: the 2004 Democratic presidential hopefuls. By the time this is read, most of them will be forgotten. With luck, all of them will be. None the less, it's instructive to recall what 10 people who offered themselves as potential leaders of the world deemed to be America's foreign policy options. Incessant activist Al Sharpton pleaded for "a policy of befriending and creating allies around the world". The way Sharpton intended to make friends was by fixing the world's toilets and sinks. "There are 1.7 billion people that need clean water," he said, "almost three billion that need sanitation systems... I would train engineers... would export people that would help with these things." Ex-child mayor of Cleveland Dennis Kucinich promised to establish "a cabinet-level Department of Peace". The secretary of peace would do for international understanding what the postmaster general does for mail. Former one-term senator and erstwhile ambassador to New Zealand Carol Moseley Braun said, "I believe women have a contribution to make... we are clever enough to defeat terror without destroying our own liberty... we can provide for long-term security by making peace everybody's business". Elect me because women are clever busybodies. This is the "Lucy and Ethel Get an Idea" foreign policy. Massachusetts's thinner, more sober senator, John Kerry, said that he voted for threatening to use force on Saddam Hussein, but that actually using force was wrong. This is what's known, in the language of diplomacy, as bullshit. Previous almost-vice president Joe Lieberman indignantly demanded that Bush do somewhat more of what Bush already was doing. "Commit more US troops," create "an Iraqi interim authority," and "work with the Iraqi people and the United Nations." Perhaps Lieberman was suffering from a delusion that he was part of the current presidential administration. But imagine having a Democrat as commander-in-chief during the War Against Terrorism, with Oprah Winfrey as secretary of defence. Big hug for Mr Taliban. Republicans are squares, but it's the squares who know how to fly the bombers, launch the missiles and fire the M-16s. Democrats would still be fumbling with the federally mandated trigger locks. One-time governor of insignificant Vermont Howard Dean wanted a cold war on terrorism. Dean said that we'd won the Cold War without firing a shot (a statement that doubtless surprised veterans of Korea and Vietnam). Dean said that the reason we'd won the Cold War without firing a shot was because we were able to show the communists "a better ideal." But what is the "better ideal" that we can show the Islamic fundamentalists? Maybe we can tell them: "Our President is a born-again. You're religious lunatics - we're religious lunatics. America was founded by religious lunatics! How about those Salem witch trials? Come to America and you could be Osama bin Ashcroft. You could get your own state, like Utah, run by religious lunatics. You could have an Islamic Fundamentalist Winter Olympics - the Chador Schuss." Since the gist of Howard Dean's campaign platform was "It Worked in Vermont," he really may have thought that the terrorists should take up snowboarding. On the other hand, the gist of General (very retired) Wesley Clark's campaign platform was "It Worked in Kosovo". Kosovo certainly taught the world a lesson. Wherever there's suffering, injustice, and oppression, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening. The winner of South Carolina's JFK look-alike contest, John Edwards, and the winner of Florida's Bob Gramm look-alike contest, Bob Gramm, said that America had won the war in Iraq but was losing the peace because Iraq was so unstable. When Iraq was stable, it attacked Israel in 1967 and 1973. It attacked Iran. It attacked Kuwait. It gassed the Kurds. It butchered the Shiites. It fostered terrorism in the Middle East. Who wanted a stable Iraq? And perennial representative of the House of Representatives Dick Gephardt wouldn't talk much about foreign policy. He was concentrating on economic issues, claiming that he'd make the American Dream come true for everyone. Gephardt may have been on to something there. Once people get rich, they don't go in much for war-making. The shoes are ugly and the uniforms itch. Some day, Osama bin Laden will call a member of one of his "sleeper cells" - a person who was planted in the United States years before and told to live like a normal American, and... "Dad, some guy named Ozzy's on the phone." "Oh, uh, good to hear from you. Of course, of course... Rockefeller Center?... Next Wednesday?... I'd love to, but the kid's got her ballet recital. You miss something like that, they never forget it... Thursday's no good. I have to see my mom off on her cruise to Bermuda in the morning. It's Fatima's yoga day. And I've got courtside seats for the Nets... Friday, we're going to the Hamptons for the weekend..." But how, exactly, did Gephardt plan to make everyone on earth as materialistic, self-indulgent, and over-scheduled as Americans? Would Gephardt give foreigners options on hot dot-com stocks? That might have worked during the Clinton years. As of early 2004, America didn't seem to have the answers for postwar Iraq. Then again, what were the questions? Was there a bad man? And his bad kids? Were they running a bad country? That did bad things? Did they have a lot of oil money to do bad things with? Were they going to do more bad things? If those were the questions, was the answer "UN-supervised national reconciliation" or "rapid return to self-rule"? No. The answer was blow the place to bits. A mess was left behind. But it's a mess without a military to fight aggressive wars; a mess without the facilities to develop dangerous weapons; a mess that cannot systematically kill, torture, and oppress millions of its citizens. It's a mess with a message - don't mess with us. As frightening as terrorism is, it's the weapon of losers. When someone detonates a suicide bomb, that person does not have career prospects. And no matter how horrific the terrorist attack, it's conducted by losers. Winners don't need to hijack airplanes. Winners have an air force. This is an edited extract from Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism by P J O'Rourke (Atlantic), to be published on September 23. To order for #14.99 + #2.25 p&p, please call Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222 -- ----------------- 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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