January 2006 - cypherpunks-legacy

[Clips] The Wisdom in Wiretaps
by R. A. Hettinga 08 Jan '06

08 Jan '06

Delivered-To: clips(a)philodox.com Date: Sat, 7 Jan 2006 17:47:28 -0500 To: Philodox Clips List <clips(a)philodox.com> From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: [Clips] The Wisdom in Wiretaps Reply-To: rah(a)philodox.com Sender: clips-bounces(a)philodox.com <http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB113659640180740425.html> The Wall Street Journal January 7, 2006 REVIEW & OUTLOOK The Wisdom in Wiretaps January 7, 2006; Page A6 The Bush Administration's use of warrantless wiretaps in the war on terrorism continues to generate controversy, and Congress is planning hearings. Some of the loopier elements of the Democratic Party have even suggested the wiretaps are grounds for impeachment. But the more we learn about the practice, the clearer it is that the White House has been right to employ and defend it. The issue is not about circumventing normal civilian Constitutional protections, after all. The debate concerns surveillance for military purposes during wartime. No one would suggest the President must get a warrant to listen to terrorist communications on the battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan. But what the critics are really insisting on here is that the President get a warrant the minute a terrorist communicates with an associate who may be inside in the U.S. That's a loophole only a terrorist could love. To the extent the President's critics are motivated by anything other than partisanship, their confusion seems to involve a 1978 law called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA provides a mechanism by which the executive can conduct warrant-approved surveillance under certain circumstances. But FISA covers only a limited number of intelligence-gathering scenarios. And no Administration -- Democrat or Republican -- has recognized FISA as a binding limit on executive power. Jimmy Carter's Attorney General, Griffin Bell, emphasized when FISA passed that the law "does not take away the power of the President under the Constitution." And in the 1980 case of United States v. Truong, the Carter Administration successfully argued its authority to have conducted entirely domestic, warrantless wiretaps of a U.S. citizen and a Vietnamese citizen who had been passing intelligence to the North Vietnamese during the 1970s Paris peace talks. In 1994, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick also asserted an "inherent authority" not just to warrantless electronic surveillance but to "warrantless physical searches," too. The close associate of Hillary Rodham Clinton told Congress that much intelligence gathering couldn't be conducted within the limits placed on normal criminal investigations -- even if you wanted to for the sake of appearances. For example, she added, "it is usually impossible to describe the object of the search in advance with sufficient detail to satisfy the requirements of the criminal law." Some critics have argued that the surveillance now at issue could have been conducted within the confines of FISA. But that doesn't appear to be true. FISA warrants are similar to criminal warrants in that they require a showing of "probable cause" -- cause, that is, to believe the subject is an "agent of a foreign power." But if the desired object of surveillance is a phone number found on 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's computer, you may not even know the identity of its owner and you can't show probable cause. Nor does the actual track record of FISA argue for the sacredness of judicial oversight of intelligence gathering. In the 1990s, FISA judges nitpicked warrant requests to the extent that Ms. Gorelick and others believed FISA required a complete "wall" of separation between foreign intelligence gathering and U.S. criminal investigators. One consequence was the FBI's failure to request a warrant to search alleged "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui's computer. Only after 9/11 did FISA's appeals panel rule that such a wall had never been necessary, and did the Patriot Act destroy it once and for all. Other critics accept the President's inherent power but say he still should have asked Congress to approve the wiretaps. But some in Congress were informed of the wiretaps and did nothing to stop them. Instead, the ranking Democrat on Senate Intelligence, Jay Rockefeller, wrote a private letter to Vice President Dick Cheney expressing his "lingering concerns" and saying he'd keep it on file for posterity -- or more precisely, for posterior-covering. The Senator then released the letter after the story became public as a way to play "gotcha." If Mr. Rockefeller had been serious about his objections in 2003, he should have told Mr. Cheney to cease and desist or that he'd try to pass legislation to stop it. After reading Mr. Rockefeller's letter of self-absolution, we can understand if Mr. Cheney concluded that the wiretapping was too important to the war on terror to risk seeking an explicit legislative endorsement from so feckless a Congress. The way the Members have played politics with the Patriot Act is another reason not to give Congress a chance to micromanage war-fighting decisions. As for the judiciary, one question that Congressional hearings should explore is whether FISA itself is unconstitutional. That is, whether it already grants the courts too much power over the executive branch's conduct of foreign policy by illegitimately imposing the "probable cause" standard. Laurence Silberman, a former deputy attorney general, testified on this point while Congress was debating FISA. He also pointed out that while fear of exposure is a strong disincentive to executive abuse of surveillance power, "since judges are not politically responsible, there is no self-correcting mechanism to remedy their abuses of power" in such matters. In other words, FISA grants the judiciary a policy supremacy that the Constitution doesn't. The upside of the coming Congressional hearings, we guess, is that Americans will get a lesson in the Constitution's separation of powers. We're confident they'll come away believing the Founders were right to the give the President broad war-fighting -- including surveillance -- powers. -- ----------------- 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' _______________________________________________ Clips mailing list Clips(a)philodox.com http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips -- ----------------- 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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08 Jan '06

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by Salvador 08 Jan '06

08 Jan '06

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[e-gold-list] Dr. Jackson - Business Week Article Response
by R. A. Hettinga 07 Jan '06

07 Jan '06

Date: Fri, 6 Jan 2006 22:15:41 -0500 To: "Philodox Clips List" <clips(a)philodox.com> From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: [e-gold-list] Dr. Jackson - Business Week Article Response Date: Fri, 06 Jan 2006 21:39:52 -0500 Subject: [e-gold-list] Dr. Jackson - Business Week Article Response To: "e-gold Discussion" <e-gold-list(a)talk.e-gold.com> From: "Bill Cunningham" <bcunningham(a)businessadvisersinc.com> In on-going conversation with Dr. Jackson, he replied to a recent Business Week article with the following letter. He has agreed to allow me to share it on this forum as well as other information outlets. _________________________________________________________________ Letter from Dr. Douglas Jackson; Chairman, e-gold, Ltd. e-goldF has recently been the subject of a slanderous and unfounded article in Business Week. e-gold strongly refutes the allegations and presumptions of this article. The article chose to focus through anecdote and suspicion only on an exception - criminal abuse - and ignores the overwhelming majority of e-gold usage. It also fails to note that all online payment mechanisms including credit cards and intermediaries such as PayPal are targeted by criminals,likely at a much greater magnitude than e-gold, and fails to relate the very proactive steps e-gold takes to eliminate any criminal behavior involving e-gold. e-gold and its Operator, Gold & Silver Reserve (G&SRF), including G&SR's exchange service OmniPayF in cooperation with the United States Government and pursuant to a lawfully issued written request, did allow an examination of the e-gold and OmniPay computer systems and data. The examination occurred on December 16th after normal business hours so as to avoid disrupting access to the system. The examination utilized the full resources of e-gold's system and prevented customer access. We were told by the government examiners that the outage would be for a few hours, however, due to the volume of data maintained by e-gold for its customers' protection, a surprise to the examiners, the examination occupied e-gold's computing capacity for 36 hours. e-gold apologizes for any inconvenience of the system down time caused by the government's request. No charges have been filed against e-gold, G&SR, OmniPay or any of its principals. e-gold operates legally and does not condone persons attempting to use e-gold for criminal activity. e-gold has a long history of cooperation with law enforcement agencies in the US and worldwide, providing data and investigative assistance in response to lawful requests. I'm proud of what we have accomplished so far with e-gold. e-gold, now in its 10th year online, is growing exponentially because of a network effect, a global cascade of Users telling their friends who then tell their friends. For the first time since our launch in 1996, this growth is providing the revenue and resources needed for e-gold to accelerate technical development and other refinements to make it more reliable and even less hospitable to those who would seek to abuse it. We are processing the same volume of transactions and growing at the same exponential pace that PayPal was in the second quarter of 2000. One difference, though, is that they had to give away $tens of millions of their investors' money to build a critical mass of user balances and were continuing a burn rate of about $10 million per month during this period. Altogether they burned through about $275 million of capital losses before their IPO. e-gold, in contrast, lacking significant outside investment: o has attained a circulation larger than Canada's official gold reserves currently 3.46 metric tonnes of gold, equivalent to about $55 million at current exchange rates). o has web traffic surpassing etrade.com and citi.com and is neck and neck with kitco.com as the most heavily trafficked gold related site on the Web o settles 50 to 60 thousand user-to-user payments per day, a daily value of about $10 million o has active Users in every country, (including more than 150,000in China)despite our lack so far of foreign language versions - a high priority on our to-do list e-gold is the only payment mechanism that is truly global, enabling any merchant to accept payment online even if the payer lives in a third world country,has no credit card, or is perhaps 'unbanked' altogether. e-gold enables the migrant worker of modest means to send value back to his family in Mexico or Bangladesh at a fraction of the cost of conventional international remittance mechanisms. e-gold alone is free of chargeback risk, yet the fee for receiving payment in e-gold is a tiny fraction of those charged by any other systems. Thanks to e-gold, for the first time in history, normal people of modest means worldwide have the option of using currency that is designed from the ground up to be immune to debasement, with a governance model that precludes even its management and founders from having the power to subvert it. Gold & Silver Reserve has been operating for over nine years. Seeking to comply with every applicable law, G&SR has reached out to the Government dozens of times, has repeatedly met with officials from the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, SEC and a variety of other Federal agencies, and has been told q in no uncertain terms q that we were operating legally and in full compliance with all laws, rules and regulations. Additionally, the Government has requested from us q on more than three hundred occasions q information regarding individuals it believed to be lawbreakers. Gold & Silver Reserve complied with every single request in a professional and timely fashion. Numerous Government officials have gone so far as to commend us in writing for our efforts in complying with their requests and aiding them in their investigations. Very recently, however, the Government concluded that it was unable to lregulaten our business under any current statutes or regulations. Rather than moving Congress to enact legislation, the Government apparently chose to undertake to regulate us under pre-existing statutes which are totally and utterly inapplicable to our business. To do so, the case the Government brought against Gold & Silver Reserve centered around false statements and fabrications made to a Magistrate Judge in Washington, D.C. A week later, when challenged by that Judge, the Government, fearing it would lose its case filed a second suit against Gold & Silver Reserve. We are now addressing that action and are confident that we will be victorious in a very short time. Both OmniPay and e-gold have been substantially harmed. Both sites were off-line altogether for 36 hours - an interval during which we were at a loss to know what to announce or even how to announce it. There were other direct interventions as well that I am not yet at liberty to discuss that nearly crippled OmniPay's ability to honor its obligations to and on behalf of users. The worst effect of course is on our reputation. This irresponsible smear piece will surely impair our efforts to build strategic relationships with the host of businesses and individuals that would benefit from an embrace of e-gold. Let me be very clear. e-gold in no manner condones persons or organizations attempting to use e-gold to support criminal acts. The exact opposite is true. e-gold limits accounts that are suspect of illicit activity and has a long history of cooperation with law enforcement agencies. There are two elements that make e-gold about the dumbest choice a criminal could make if seeking to obfuscate a money trail or otherwise hide the proceeds of crime. 1. it is impossible for a general user of e-gold to send/add money(value in any form) into the system... he can only get e-gold by receiving an e-gold Spend from someone who already has some. 2. there's a permanent record of all transfers, that is, a permanent record of the entire lineage of every particle of value in the e-gold system. There is nothing "anonymous and untraceable" about e-gold. e-gold Spends settle by book entry - it isn't so-called "digital cash". e-gold is not about crime. e-gold is not a hospitable environment for criminals. e-gold maintains an efficient and highly capable investigative staff to aid in the identification, apprehension and prosecution of any criminal abusing the system. Our staff has participated in hundreds of investigations supporting the FBI, FTC, IRS, DEA, SEC, USPS, and others. This is the reality of every payment system, the need to aid in rooting out criminal abuse, whether it is child pornographers taking advantage of the multiple layers and indirection of credit card middlemen, or smurfs aggregating cash via international remittance processors or even state lotteries. e-gold has taken a proactive approach, reaching out to law enforcement agencies and NGO's (Non-Governmental Organization) to foster closer cooperation in combating crime online. For example, e-gold is a charter member of the Financial Coalition to eradicate Child Pornography, organized by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, along with Visa, MasterCard, Microsoft, AOL, PayPal, First Data and some of the major banks. I hope to have additional and useful facts shortly and will communicate them when appropriate. I can assure you e-gold is up and running, supporting its customers, and continuing to grow. Dr. Douglas Jackson _____________________________________________________________________ Bill Cunningham Business Advisers bcunningham(a)baiadviser.com 321-773-4385 www.businessadvisersinc.com "Dedicated to Making Your Success a Reality" --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: rah(a)shipwright.com To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-e-gold-list-507998N(a)talk.e-gold.com Use e-gold's Secure Randomized Keyboard (SRK) when accessing your e-gold account(s) via the web and shopping cart interfaces to help thwart keystroke loggers and common viruses. -- ----------------- 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' -- ----------------- 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: phone records for sale
by coderman 06 Jan '06

06 Jan '06

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-privacy05.html ---cut--- Steven M. Bellovin Fri, 06 Jan 2006 14:02:12 -0800 18 USC 2702(c) says A provider described in subsection (a) may divulge a record or other information pertaining to a subscriber to or customer of such service (not including the contents of communications covered by subsection (a)(1) or (a)(2)) ... (6) to any person other than a governmental entity. ... If the phone companies are not giving it out voluntarily, perhaps they're being tricked or perhaps they have corrupt employees. ---end-cut--- from the article: ""In some cases, telephone company insiders secretly sell customers' phone-call lists to online brokers, despite strict telephone company rules against such deals, according to Schumer."" the call center employees and other data services API's (less common) is exactly how they do it. t-mobile, verizon, sprint, they all contract out to call centers for various things which provide the call center operators a restricted environment in which to use their internal applications (usually IE, sometimes Remedy or Oracle Forms, graphical Java apps, etc). obviously part of the features of these applications is search by name, MIN, account, etc. often you can access a person's entire account through such systems and very little if any oversight is provided. the carriers sole focus (as it seems) is to prevent fraudulent equipment/phone deliveries to operators using customer accounts. they could care less about unauthorized access given their lack of any attempt to halt such activity. in addition to this, many of these internal networks are horribly insecure, as was well demonstrated by the t-mobile hacks earlier this year. [1] the only reason they continue to get away with such poor practice is that these networks are (in theory) all internal with dedicated lines from the call center back to the carrier networks on which the applications are run. and the fallout from their insecurity is not directly attributable back to them (they can and do blame various middle men, from devious operators to negligent call center policies, etc) [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/16/t_mobile_hacker_guilty/ ---- more fun quotes: "To test the service, the FBI paid Locatecell.com $160 to buy the records for an agent's cell phone and received the list within three hours, the police bulletin said." "I would say the most powerful investigative tool right now is cell records," Rizzo said. "I use it a couple times a week. A few hundred bucks a week is well worth the money."

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06 Jan '06

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Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists
by Eugen Leitl 06 Jan '06

06 Jan '06

(as boingboing correctly stated, the right way to do it is to use the Amazon API) http://www.applefritter.com/bannedbooks Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists Submitted by Tom Owad on January 4, 2006 - 7:37pm. Security Vast deposits of personal information sit in databases across the internet. Terms used in phone conversations have become the grounds for federal investigation. Reputable organizations like the Catholic Worker, Greenpeace, and the Vegan Community Project, have come under scrutiny by FBI "counterterrorism" agents. "Data mining" of all that information and communication is at the heart of the furor over the recent disclosure of government snooping. "U.S. President George W. Bush and his aides have said his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to monitoring international phone and e-mail communications linked to people with connections to al-Qaeda. What has not been acknowledged, according to the Times, is that NSA technicians combed large amounts of phone and Internet traffic seeking patterns pointing to terrorism suspects. "Some officials described the program as a large data mining operation, the Times said, and described it as much larger than the White House has acknowledged." (Reuters) Combining a data mining operation with the Patriot Act's power to access information makes it all too easy for the federal government to violate the Constitution's prohibition against unreasonable search. Ars Technica has an article, The new technology at the root of the NSA wiretap scandal, that describes the ease with which widespread wiretapping can now be implemented. It quotes Philip Zimmermann, the creator of the PGP encryption software: "A year after the CALEA [Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act] passed [in 1994], the FBI disclosed plans to require the phone companies to build into their infrastructure the capacity to simultaneously wiretap 1 percent of all phone calls in all major U.S. cities. This would represent more than a thousandfold increase over previous levels in the number of phones that could be wiretapped. In previous years, there were only about a thousand court-ordered wiretaps in the United States per year, at the federal, state, and local levels combined. It's hard to see how the government could even employ enough judges to sign enough wiretap orders to wiretap 1 percent of all our phone calls, much less hire enough federal agents to sit and listen to all that traffic in real time. The only plausible way of processing that amount of traffic is a massive Orwellian application of automated voice recognition technology to sift through it all, searching for interesting keywords or searching for a particular speaker's voice. If the government doesn't find the target in the first 1 percent sample, the wiretaps can be shifted over to a different 1 percent until the target is found, or until everyone's phone line has been checked for subversive traffic. The FBI said they need this capacity to plan for the future. This plan sparked such outrage that it was defeated in Congress. But the mere fact that the FBI even asked for these broad powers is revealing of their agenda." It used to be you had to get a warrant to monitor a person or a group of people. Today, it is increasingly easy to monitor ideas. And then track them back to people. Most of us don't have access to the databases, software, or computing power of the NSA, FBI, and other government agencies. But an individual with access to the internet can still develop a fairly sophisticated profile of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens using free and publicly available resources. Here's an example. There are many websites and databases that could be used for this project, but few things tell you as much about a person as the books he chooses to read. Isn't that why the Patriot Act specifically requires libraries to release information on who's reading what? For this reason, I chose to focus on the information contained in the popular Amazon wishlists. Amazon wishlists lets anyone bookmark books for later purchase. By default these lists are public and available to anybody who searches by name. If the wishlist creator specifies a shipping address, someone else can even purchase the book on Amazon and have it shipped directly as a gift. The wishlist creator's city and state are made public on the wishlist, but the street address remains private. Amazon's popularity has created a vast database of wishlists. No index of all wishlists is available, but it remains possible to view all wishlists by people of a particular first name. A recent search for people named Mark returned 124,887 publicly viewable wishlists. For an all inclusive search by name, you could compile a comprehensive list of first names and nicknames from the baby names databases available on the internet. Armed with this list, and by recording the search results for each first name, it is possible for you to retrieve the vast majority of public wishlists on Amazon. For the purposes of this exercise, only a single name was chosen . a common male name that returned over 260,000 wishlists. I'm not going to divulge what name was actually used. Let's pretend it was "Edgar," in honor of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Before writing a script to download all the 260,000 "Edgar" wishlists, I confirmed that my actions would not violate Amazon's Conditions of Use. I also checked the robots.txt file which contains a list of directories Amazon requests not be traversed by scripts. User wishlists are not in this list, nor did the actions to be taken violate the conditions of use. I started by doing a wishlist search for people named "Edgar" and got back a page linking to the wishlists of the first 25 matches. The url looked something like this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/search.html/?encoding=UTF8&type=wishlist&… eld-name=edgar&page=1 Two variables extracted from the above url are of particular note: * field-name=edgar * page=1 Changing "edgar" to "george", would generate the first page of matches for people named George. Change '1' to '2' and you'd get matches 26 through 50 instead of 1 through 25. Using a simple 6-line shell script and the popular wget command line tool, I configured two computers on two different DSL connections to begin downloading all 260,000 wishlists in increments of 25,000. Each group of 25,000 wishlists took about four hours to download, for a total download time of less than one day. Each wishlist is located at an address like this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html/?encoding=UTF8&type=wishlis… id=1DBHU3OCV72ZW 1DBHU3OCV72ZW is the wishlist owner's unique Amazon identification number. I made up the one you see here. By directing wget only to download pages at urls similar to this one, and by incrementing the search page from 1 to 10,400, it is possible to download all 260,000 wishlists without user intervention. Using a pair of 5-year-old computers, two home DSL connections, 42 hours of computer time, and 5 man hours, I now had documents describing the reading preferences of 260,000 U.S. citizens. I downloaded all the files to an external 120 GB Firewire drive in UFS format. The raw data occupied little more than 5 GB. I initially wanted to move all the files into a single directory to facilitate searching, but as the directory contents exceeded 100,000 items, the speed became glacially slow, so I kept the data divided into chunks of 25,000 wishlists. Next comes the fun part . what books are most dangerous? So many to choose from. Here's a sample of the list I made. Feel free to make up your own list if you decide to try some data mining. Send it to the FBI. I'm sure they'll appreciate your help in fighting terrorism. * On Liberty by Stuart Mill. First sentence: "The subject of this essay is not the so-called 'liberty of the will', so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of philosophical necessity; but civil, or social liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual." What more do you need? * Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. The classic anti-war novel. * Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Dystopian. * Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. More dystopian. * 1984 by George Orwell. Most dystopian. * Critical Thinking by Alec Fisher. Can't have any of that. * Build Your Own Laser, Phaser, Ion Ray Gun and Other Working Space Age Projects by Robert Iannini. Obviously. * Apple I Replica Creation by Tom Owad. Building your own computer should be illegal. (ok, it's also here because I wrote it.) * The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual And Spiritual Origins by Mark & Louise Zwick. Keywords * Michael Moore. The fringe left. * Rush Limbaugh. The fringe right. * Ralph Nader. * Greenpeace. Because frankly, we all know there's only one sort of person who would want a "Greenpeace: Standing Up for the Earth" 2006 Calendar. * Torah. * Quran & Koran. Like the Catholic Worker and Greenpeace, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has also been the subject of FBI investigations. * Bible. Sure, a lot of books use "Bible" in the title, but I cast a wide net. What harm are a few false positives? My Amazon seller ID is attached to these links. If I get any interesting statistics on how many copies of On Liberty, etc., are sold as a result of this article, I'll post them in a follow-up. If I get a call from the FBI, I'll let you know that, too. To search for specific books, I used ISBN numbers, for the rest, keywords. All the search terms were saved to terms.txt, one term per line, for use with grep: ls -1 | xargs grep -HiFof /Volumes/UFS/terms.txt > /Volumes/UFS/matches.txt This command searches all wishlists in the current directory for the terms in terms.txt, then saves the results to matches.txt. Results are stored one per line, in the format: filename:keyword Now that I have a list of which keywords appear in which wishlists, I can sort them. I created a new folder "results" and within it created subfolders for each search term. The TCL script below creates links (similar to aliases or shortcuts) for each matched file, and stores the links within the new subdirectories: #!/usr/bin/tclsh set fdgrep [open "/Volumes/UFS/matches.txt" "r"] while {![eof $fdgrep]} { gets $fdgrep line set mylist [split $line :] if {[llength $mylist] > 1} { lappend mylist [string toupper [lindex $mylist 1]] if {![file exists "/Volumes/UFS/results/[lindex $mylist 2]/[lindex $mylist 0]"]} { exec ln /Volumes/UFS/wishlists/[lindex $mylist 0] "/Volumes/UFS/results/[lindex $mylist 2]/[lindex $mylist 0]" } } } Now, for example, the folder called "Greenpeace" contains every wishlist with that term. Another folder named "Rush Limbaugh" contains the wishlists of all the those interested in reading Rush. On an aside, if you want to delete all the files beginning with the word "search" in a 25,000-file directory, the correct line is: find . -name 'search*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm This line deletes all the files: find . -print0 -name 'search*' | xargs -0 rm Good thing I had backups. There's also a bug, in grep 2.5.1 that corrupts output when grep is run with both the -i and -o flags. Version 2.5.1-1, available through the Fink project, fixes this problem. One curiousity revealed by this project is that there are quite a few people who show up for multiple books. Reading On Liberty and Build Your Own Laser, Phaser, Ion Ray Gun and Other Working Space Age Projects? We really should have a special list for you. Here are the books, along with the numbers of people interested in reading each: Book # of people interested On Liberty 7 Slaughterhouse-Five 82 Fahrenheit 451 63 Brave New World 1 1984 76 Critical Thinking 7 Build Your Own Laser 2 Apple I Replica Creation 4 The Catholic Worker Movement 1 Rebuilding Labor 2 Michael Moore 232 Rush Limbaugh 42 Ralph Nader 74 Greenpeace 5 Torah 42 Quran & Koran 74 Bible 3,771 The first match for "Bible," ironically, was a wishlist containing The Cannabis Grow Bible: The Definitive Guide to Growing Marijuana for Recreational and Medical Use. Right person. Wrong list. Another match was for The Linux Bible: GNU Testament. With Nader, I foolishly searched for last name alone. Thus, there are quite a few hits for The Lemonader along with the correct results. If some results look suspiciously low, it's probably because in many cases I searched for a specific ISBN while the book is available in multiple formats. Only the first page of each user's wishlist was downloaded. Books are always added to the front of the wishlist which pushes older titles off the first page, so there is also a slight bias in favor of newer books. It is possible for users to associate a shipping address with their wishlists, so that others can order them gifts. Though the full address is hidden, city and state remain visible. I already have first and last name. With this information, I can do a Yahoo People Search to obtain an exact street address and phone number. Viewing the wishlists that contained Apple I Replica Creation, I found that all four provided the user's city and state. Of these four, one was a common name that produced multiple hits in his town, two were unlisted (although one of them was in the Intelius database which I opted not to pay for), and the final individual was present on Yahoo People. So I sent him a signed copy and thanked him for his interest. Thanks to Google Maps (and many similar services) a street address is all we need to get a satellite image of a person's home. Tempted as I was to provide satellite images of the homes of the search subjects, it just seemed a bit extreme even for this article. Instead, I opted only to pinpoint the centers of the towns in which they live. So at least you'll know that there's somebody in your community reading Critical Thinking or some other dangerous text. City and state were extracted using a regular expression to create a file for each book containing the locations of its readers. Locations were stored one per line, in this format: Sunnyvale:CA Salt Lake City:Utah Reston:Virginia South Hadley:MA Nevada City:CA Walnut Creek:CA Eagle Nest:NM Memphis:TN North Hollywood:CA Seattle:WA . Using the free Ontok Geocoder service, I was able to quickly convert city and state to latitude and longitude coordinates. Ontok uses the public domain TIGER/Line data available from the U.S. Census Bureau to perform its conversion. It took less than an hour to convert all locations from city and state to longitude and latitude: -122.035011, 37.369011 -111.903656, 40.696415 -77.341591, 38.968300 -72.574860, 42.259102 -121.013496, 39.262192 -122.063980, 37.906521 -105.263031, 36.555302 -90.045448, 35.148762 -118.377838, 34.173100 -122.329430, 47.605701 . Google has released their Maps API, so a map of these locations can be embedded in this article. The API is simple. Plotting each point requires only three lines of code: var point = new GPoint(-122.035011, 37.369011); var marker = new GMarker(point); map.addOverlay(marker); This plots all of the locations on a satellite image of the United States that can be zoomed in to house level. Here are a few interactive samples: Readers of 1984. Readers of the Torah. You. The map pinpointing you (your local ISP, actually) requires a good bit of on-the-fly processing, so if the server is exceptionally busy it may not load correctly. In the future, I may make more sophisticated maps using additional data. Maybe a map that includes all the books in the 260,000 wishlists? Simply searching for any book would present a map of the United States showing the locations of all the people interested in reading it. All the tools used in this project are standard and free. The services, likewise, are all free. The technical skills required to implement this project are well within the abilities of anybody who has done any programming. The network connection used to download these files was a standard home DSL connection. The computer that processed the data was a 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4. The operating system is Mac OS X 10.4, though everything could have been done just as easily with Linux (and probably with Windows). Not a penny was spent in the writing of this article, just 30 hours of time. This is what's possible with publicly available information, but imagine if one had access to Amazon's entire database - which still contains every sale dating back to 1999 by the way. Under Section 251 of the Patriot Act, the FBI can require Amazon to turn over its records, without probable cause, for an "authorized investigation . . . to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities." Amazon is forbidden to disclose that they have turned over any records, so that you would never know that the government is keeping records of your book purchases. And obviously it is quite simple to crossreference this info with data available in other databases. On a final note, the FBI is now hiring computer scientists to implement a project that sounds very similar to what I just did: "Currently, the FBI is strengthening systems engineering in order to tie new systems together architecturally and ensure that standards for custom and packaged applications are enforced, and it needs engineers to accomplish this goal, the agency said. "The FBI is also focusing on data warehousing as well as federated search technology, which allows a single search query to be deployed across a number of databases, regardless of whether those databases belong to the same protocol or platform. "'Warehousing has been very successful, yet enterprise extraction, translation and loading processes must be fine-tuned,. the FBI said. .Data engineers are needed to model legacy databases for federated search and participate in legacy transition planning.'"(Computerworld) This article is the first in a weekly series that will deal with security on the internet and practical steps you can take to protect your privacy. Much thanks goes to Robert Warwick for his help with this project and particularly for writing several of the scripts. Thanks also to Nancy Trump for editing, Michael Fincham for brainstorming and Dr. Bob for bandwidth. Article submissions are welcome. If you'd like to contact me, please do so via email. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[dave@farber.net: [IP] The connection between NSA wiretapping and telephone industry concentration]
by Eugen Leitl 05 Jan '06

05 Jan '06

----- Forwarded message from David Farber <dave(a)farber.net> -----

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