July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

[Politech] John Gilmore on the homeless, RFID tags, and kittens [priv]
by Declan McCullagh 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Politech] HHS announces program to implant RFID tags in homeless [priv] Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2004 11:13:21 -0800 From: John Gilmore <gnu(a)toad.com> To: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> CC: politech(a)politechbot.com Last year I found it almost impossible to adopt a kitten or cat that didn't have an RFID tag implanted under its skin. The city animal shelter and the SPCA both "chip" all their animals -- and pet hospitals who offer adoption get all their pets from these shelters. The people we spoke with in the shelters were confused by our opposition to their "safe, sane, and humane" policy of RFID-tracking every animal that came within chip-gun range of them. When a cat is lost, they scan 'em like a bag of potato chips, pull 'em up in the database, and call their owner. Eventually by reading the bulletin boards in pet stores, we found a local Mexican family who had two litters of kittens. They had been born at home and never subjected to "chipping". Our kittens are now grown and healthy (and untracked). I would not be a bit surprised to see bureaucrats at any level advocating RFID tracking of the homeless. They're already taking blood samples of every newborn, storing them away "just in case we ever need to check their DNA". And giving every infant their own Social Security Number, just to make sure they get tracked from birth to death. A kitten or an infant who comes to the attention of the authorities can't tell you who they are or where they belong. So why not chip the homeless, who frequently can't or won't answer the same question? It's a fair question. What's YOUR answer? John PS: If Larry Hiibel had had a chip implanted in him, Deputy Dove wouldn't have had to arrest him. This would have saved the Supreme Court some work. http://hiibel.com _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/) --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)shipwright.com> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA 'Maybe we should just brand all babies.' -- Ronald Reagan, sarcastically, on the subject of a national ID card.

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NY Times reports that spy program is not narrowly targeted
by Perry E. Metzger 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

According to President Bush, the illegal NSA domestic espionage program he ordered was narrowly targeted against people known to have Al Qaeda links. However, it appears that, as with his previous false claims that espionage only happened with a warrant, that this claim was on its face untrue: Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends By LOWELL BERGMAN, ERIC LICHTBLAU, SCOTT SHANE and DON VAN NATTA Jr. Published: January 17, 2006 WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month. But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans. F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy. [...] President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program as a "vital tool" against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved "thousands of lives." But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. [...] "We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration." [...] Rest of article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/politics/17spy.html I again plead with all of you who care about the future your children live in to call your congressional representatives and demand that action be taken. Congress has already largely forgotten about this -- a few weeks is a long time in the memories of politicians. It is up to you remind them. If you do not, you will have no one to blame but yourself. "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing." -- Edmund Burke Perry --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- 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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FC: South Africa moves to increase Net-surveillance, limit encryption
by Declan McCullagh 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

A quick summary of South Africa's "Interception and Monitoring" bill, which has cleared the Cabinet and is heading for a vote in the Parliament: * Internet providers and telephone companies must provide a pipe to a National Monitoring Center for Carnivoresque surveillance. "The Police Service, the Defence Force, the Agency, the Service and the Directorate must, at State expense, establish, equip, operate and maintain central monitoring centres... Duplicate signals of communications authorized to be monitored in terms of this Act, must be routed by the service provider concerned to the designated central monitoring centre concerned." * Internet providers may not "provide any telecommunication service which does not have the capacity to be monitored." A provider is responsible for "decrypting any communication encrypted by a customer if the facility for encryption was provided by the service provider concerned." This represents an attack on liberty, privacy, and autonomy, and is akin to anti-encryption rules in Russia a few years ago. Though as a practical matter, a lot would seem to turn on the definition of "provide." Does that mean giving someone an SSL-enabled web browser? IPv6 software? * The legislation bans the provision of anonymous Internet access. It says: "A service provider must... require from such person his or her full names, residential, business or postal address and identity number." * Internet providers and telcos must pay for their own surveillance. "A service provider must at own cost and within the period, if any, specified by the Minister of Communications in a directive referred to in subsection (4)(a), acquire the necessary facilities and devices to enable the monitoring of communications in terms of this Act. The investment, technical, maintenance and operating costs in enabling a telecommunication service to be monitored, must be carried by the service provider providing such a service." * Internet providers cannot reveal wiretaps. "No person who is or was concerned in the performance of any function in terms of this Act, may disclose any information which he or she obtained in the performance of such a function" (except to officials or courts). The text of the legislation is here: http://www.pmg.org.za/bills/Interception0107.htm -Declan ******* http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/world/africa/newsid_1484000/1484698.stm Protests over SA 'snooping' bill 2001-08-13 06:10:06 By Philippa Garson in Johannesburg Protests are growing in South Africa against the country's plan to give the security services new powers to monitor terrorists and serious criminals. Opponents say the Interception and Monitoring Bill is draconian, describing it as a charter for government snooping. Given only three weeks to make submissions on the Bill, non-government organisations have been making last-ditch attempts to garner more time to respond before the 13 August deadline. The bill was quietly passed by South Africa's Cabinet last month, largely catching the public unawares. It provides for state monitoring of all telecommunications systems, including mobile phones, internet and e-mail, once permission has been granted by relevant authorities. In most cases a judge must grant the order, but in some instances a police or army officer of a particular rank may do so. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- End forwarded message ----- --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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[Politech] John Gilmore on the homeless, RFID tags, and kittens [priv]
by Declan McCullagh 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Politech] HHS announces program to implant RFID tags in homeless [priv] Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2004 11:13:21 -0800 From: John Gilmore <gnu(a)toad.com> To: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> CC: politech(a)politechbot.com Last year I found it almost impossible to adopt a kitten or cat that didn't have an RFID tag implanted under its skin. The city animal shelter and the SPCA both "chip" all their animals -- and pet hospitals who offer adoption get all their pets from these shelters. The people we spoke with in the shelters were confused by our opposition to their "safe, sane, and humane" policy of RFID-tracking every animal that came within chip-gun range of them. When a cat is lost, they scan 'em like a bag of potato chips, pull 'em up in the database, and call their owner. Eventually by reading the bulletin boards in pet stores, we found a local Mexican family who had two litters of kittens. They had been born at home and never subjected to "chipping". Our kittens are now grown and healthy (and untracked). I would not be a bit surprised to see bureaucrats at any level advocating RFID tracking of the homeless. They're already taking blood samples of every newborn, storing them away "just in case we ever need to check their DNA". And giving every infant their own Social Security Number, just to make sure they get tracked from birth to death. A kitten or an infant who comes to the attention of the authorities can't tell you who they are or where they belong. So why not chip the homeless, who frequently can't or won't answer the same question? It's a fair question. What's YOUR answer? John PS: If Larry Hiibel had had a chip implanted in him, Deputy Dove wouldn't have had to arrest him. This would have saved the Supreme Court some work. http://hiibel.com _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/) --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)shipwright.com> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA 'Maybe we should just brand all babies.' -- Ronald Reagan, sarcastically, on the subject of a national ID card.

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NY Times reports that spy program is not narrowly targeted
by Perry E. Metzger 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

According to President Bush, the illegal NSA domestic espionage program he ordered was narrowly targeted against people known to have Al Qaeda links. However, it appears that, as with his previous false claims that espionage only happened with a warrant, that this claim was on its face untrue: Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends By LOWELL BERGMAN, ERIC LICHTBLAU, SCOTT SHANE and DON VAN NATTA Jr. Published: January 17, 2006 WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month. But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans. F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy. [...] President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program as a "vital tool" against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved "thousands of lives." But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. [...] "We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration." [...] Rest of article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/politics/17spy.html I again plead with all of you who care about the future your children live in to call your congressional representatives and demand that action be taken. Congress has already largely forgotten about this -- a few weeks is a long time in the memories of politicians. It is up to you remind them. If you do not, you will have no one to blame but yourself. "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing." -- Edmund Burke Perry --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- 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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Re: [tor-talk] TorBirdy doesn't work with Gmail?
by Mike Hearn 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

> Your phone messages presumably have a > fixed format and can be logged by the network; drawing attention to Tor > usage is not the goal and I can see that being a serious problem. I think you can also opt to receive a phone call that says something like "Your verification code is 12345". It doesn't mention Google and certainly doesn't mention Tor. But it's been a while since I went through this myself so I don't remember exactly. I should note that this is the worst case scenario. For most users you do NOT have to receive a verification code. We were considering requiring that for all anonymizing proxy users in the past, but did not do so. It's an option we reserve for the future though. For now, answering a security quiz is good enough. Note that you can add a fake phone number to your account (we don't presently verify them) and this acts as a second password, more or less, so as long as it's a number you can remember you can get through ID verification without receiving any phone codes. > I see a cookie called GAPS under accounts.google.com - is this > the only one which needs to persist for authentication to work? Yes, we know that saying "don't clear cookies" rather goes against the advice and design of tools like the browser bundle. Potentially TBB could have some specific hack for Google. The GAPS cookie is the only one that's needed for a login to be recognized as good. It's part of how we propagate goodness around between second factors. Simple example: you log in from an IP address that is nearby to one you previously used (in physical or internet space), and don't have a GAPS cookie. We issued you a new one when you visited the login page. The act of logging in from a good IP whitelists that GAPS cookie. Now you travel and log in from a new country. The IP is unknown but the GAPS cookie you have was seen before. We let you in without hassle because we know that device is legit. Your new IP geo is now whitelisted too. > I believe it would be very much appreciated if your team could provide a > support page with a walk-through for Tor users explaining how to gain > access by the second method I agree. There was actually some work done on this around the time we were considering requiring phone verification for all logins, but I can't find it on our support site now. I think I need to chase that up again. _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[HacDC:Byzantium] October development sprint.
by The Doctor 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I know this list has been quiet since we got back from IS4CWM. We're still alive but swamped in our day jobs. The question is, will there be a Byzantium development sprint in October. The answer is, I don't know. Speaking only for myself, I'm exhausted, physically and emotionally. My day job has been running me flat out since I got back to the States and if I don't get some downtime I'm going to fall over. Everyone else is likely in a different position right now. One of the things we're looking at is UCI (http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/techref/uci) a framework for system configuration that is meant to be used under the hood of other things (for example, the control panel application LuCI). Haxwithaxe, as I recall, is working on a Python API for it that would make it easier to work with. We might be able to leverage it to do the actual work of configuring stuff for us (like starting and stopping services and configuring the network interfaces) so we won't have to write code to do that ourselves. We got it to compile outside of a <mumble> firmware environment on our laptops, so we know it's doable. One of the things that we were debating while in Spain was the direction the UI should go in. There is a rewrite of the 'panel in the works but it isn't done yet. There is also a matter of the sustainability of the control panel as a whole, which was brought to light after talking shop with the Freifunk, Guifi, and Commotion Wireless folks. They're not having any trouble using LuCI to do what they need to do, and I'm all for having one less piece of code to maintain so energy can be spent on other aspects of Byzantium Linux. We also discussed the possibility of migraing to LuCI (https://luci.subsignal.org/trac) so we don't have to maintain a control panel, it's done for us. We know that we can get it to compile on non-<mumble> firmware, we've done it. The question is, is it worth migrating to it? Can we migrate to it without having to rewrite a lot of it? Can we write the modules we need easily? Could LuCI do the job of automagically configuring a node when it starts up? Another possibility is a Python module called sh (https://github.com/amoffat/sh) which exposes any and all shell commands to Python code. that stands to make things a lot easier. So does the Python module Wifi (http://pythonwifi.wikispot.org/) for that matter, though in more specialized fashion. The Python sh module is already in the Git repo and the wifi module can be added, so building packages and making use of them shouldn't be hard. Something else we're kicking around is splitting some code off into a daemon that runs in the background and configures everything on bootup. When the node first comes online it detects network interfaces and configures them appropriately to set up a Byzantium mesh node, and then when the control panel is actually accesses, it will have a configuration all ready to display and possibly alter, but by and large it'll be online and routing traffic. We've also been doing some experimenting with different applications for the messaging framework. During the last sprint we set up ejabberd nodes on our laptops and they worked as expected, but one of the things we're uncertain of is whether or not a MUC (multi-user chat) XMPP channel can be automatically distributed across all nodes without their being clustered ahead of time (which is fairly tricky with ejabberd, but might not be with, say, python-xmpp-server (https://github.com/thisismedium/python-xmpp-server)) If anyone knows for sure, please reply to this, we'd love to know if we should persue this avenue or not. We also did some experimenting with Litter (https://github.com/ptony82/litter) which is a truly distributed workalike for Twitter designed for non-NATted networks that is stupidly, brilliantly simple and good at what it does. Every Litter instance is a single instance, and IP multicast is used to broadcast JSON messages to every other instance on the same multicast group that it can reach (IP multicast address 239.192.1.100). It listens on port 8080 so it's accessed with a web browser (the UI is entirely in JQuery). It uses SQLite for a back end, and all it does is listen for new posts, see if they're in the local database, and if not drop them into the right place in the timeline with a gap filling algorithm. We could use it (or more likely, something working along the same lines) for the microblog/realtime chat application for the Byzantium mesh. We also did some playing with Tahoe-LAFS but got mixed results. I couldn't get it going on any of my machines, but Haxwithaxe and Sitwon did. I'd like to give it another try to see what happens. Anyone else? Status reports? New ideas? Suggestions? We really need to have a sprint this month? - -- The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS] Developer, Project Byzantium: http://project-byzantium.org/ PGP: 0x807B17C1 / 7960 1CDC 85C9 0B63 8D9F DD89 3BD8 FF2B 807B 17C1 WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ "What does it do? How well does it do it?" --Sean Kennedy -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAlCAXOUACgkQO9j/K4B7F8FYQQCeNPRr6wnydIAFsPIlEvE9rliN D9EAn3xoelfBjUR6e/O/Zj5EUgGSeiyl =VZm4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Project Byzantium (Emergency Mesh Networking)" group. To post to this group, send email to Byzantium(a)hacdc.org. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to Byzantium+unsubscribe(a)hacdc.org. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/a/hacdc.org/group/Byzantium/?hl=en. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: Gmail and SSL
by Damian Menscher 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 8:52 PM, <Valdis.Kletnieks(a)vt.edu> wrote: > On Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:59:35 -0800, Damian Menscher said: > > Aurora compromised at least 20 other companies, failed at its assumed > > objective of seeing user data, and Google was the only organization to > > notice, let alone have the guts to expose the attack [0]. And you're > going > > to hold that against them? > > I didn't say that. What I *said* was "one should *expect* a nation-state > adversary to go after your mail hosting company via multiple avenues of > attack, > because it's already been tried before". Google is indeed one of the > better > actors. But if you're a target, maybe it's time to reconsider whether the > phrase "hosting company" should be included in your environment *at all*. > Thanks for clarifying. We're off-topic, but that decision needs to be weighed against the alternatives. If your alternative is running your own mailserver at home, then your risks are: - They can come into your home and walk off with your machines. Even if your hard drives are encrypted, your backups might not be... or maybe you don't have backups? - If you browse from the server they can get you with a trojan impacting Flash or Java. - Even if you don't browse from your mailserver they can try to compromise it remotely if it's not fully patched. How good are you at keeping your system patched. Does it fall a day or two behind when you're on vacation? - Speaking of vacation, how do you authenticate to your system? Does it support 2-factor? Or maybe you don't think you need 2-factor because you have an SSL cert. Did you self-sign it and tell your browser to ignore all other CAs (to approximate Chrome's certificate pinning)? - How does your email arrive/leave? They could be tapping your line... or they could just DoS you off the net. If you really think you can get all of that right, all the time, then I wish you the best of luck. But remembering that most targets are not cypherpunks, telling them to do it themselves is incredibly bad advice. Back on topic: encryption without knowing who you're talking to is worse than useless (hence no self-signed certs which provide a false sense of security), and there are usability difficulties with exposing strong security to the average user (asking users to generate and upload a self-signed cert would be a customer-support disaster, not to mention all the outages that would occur when those certs expired). Real-world security is all about finding a reasonable balance and adapting to the current threats. Damian ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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FC: Ashcroft's replies to questions about Carnivore, MS antitrust
by Declan McCullagh 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

John Ashcroft has replied to written questions sent to him by members of the Senate Judiciary committee, a procedure extended at the behest of Democratic senators. Below are his responses on technology-related questions. You can see the complete Q&A at: http://www.politechbot.com/docs/ashcroft.012701.html In his response to a Carnivore question, Ashcroft seems not to know that Carnivore is already in use. And, as EPIC's Marc Rotenberg points out, Ashcroft did not pledge to work with outside experts on a technical review of Carnivore. -Declan QUESTIONS FROM SENATOR LEAHY Q. Do you believe that there is such a thing as constitutional right to privacy - not specifying if, for example, such a right includes the right to terminate a pregnancy - but, more broadly, is there a constitutionally protected right to privacy? If so, which provision of the Constitution is the source of that right to privacy? A: I believe in the right to privacy. The Supreme Court has held that there is a constitutional right to privacy, that finds its genesis in the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. I also believe that the Third Amendment embodies a constitutional right to privacy. Q. Are you satisfied with thrust of the current antitrust laws or do you intend to recommend that the new Administration review these laws with the intent of proposing some significant changes? A: The basic structure of the antitrust laws has been in place for decades. Although there may be a need for targeted reform, I do not personally perceive a need for a comprehensive overall of the antitrust laws. Before providing any recommendations concerning any concrete proposal, I would certainly consult with the President, the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust and Members of this Committee, as appropriate. Q. Last year, Congress passed a Sense of Congress resolution regarding post-conviction DNA testing and competent counsel. Specifically, Congress declared that it should condition forensic science-related grants to States on the States' agreement to ensure post-conviction DNA testing in appropriate cases. Congress also declared that it should work with the States to improve the quality of legal representation in capital cases through the establishment of standards. Do you agree with this bipartisan Sense of Congress resolution, and as Attorney General, would you work with me to ensure that post-conviction DNA testing and competent legal representation are available in all States? A: I believe that there is no greater injustice than to execute an innocent person. The Sixth Amendment provides constitutional protections for the right to counsel for criminal defendants, a right that is particularly precious in capital cases. I will work with the President and the Congress to help ensure that no innocent person is executed in America and that capital defendants have access to DNA technology to confirm guilt or innocence. Q. During the campaign, President-elect Bush said: "Any time DNA evidence, in the context of all the evidence, is deemed to be relevant in the guilt or innocence of a person on Death Row, I believe we need to use it." Do you agree that DNA evidence should be available to death row inmates any time that it is deemed to be relevant to the issue of guilt or innocence? Would you agree that DNA evidence should also be available to other inmates, such as inmates serving life sentences? A: I believe DNA evidence has great promise for making our criminal justice system fairer and more accurate, and would be happy to work with the President and the Congress to expand its availability to prosecutors and criminal defendants, especially in capital cases. Q. In June 1999, the Supreme Court issued two decisions in Florida Prepaid and College Savings Bank that effectively immunized the States from damages liability for violations of intellectual property rights. Would you support my legislative effort to restore effective federal protection for intellectual property as against the States, in a manner that avoids any conflict with the Constitution as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court? A: Although I have not studied this issue closely, any resolution of it must involve a delicate balancing of the needs to protect intellectual property with the constitutional mandate of federalism. I look forward to working with the Committee to assist in ensuring that intellectual property is fully protected in the modern age, in a manner consistent with the U.S. Constitution. Q. You are a strong advocate of the Tenth Amendment as protecting liberty by preserving States' rights against the Federal Government. The Ninth Amendment also protects liberty, by preserving individual rights against the Government. What is your understanding of the Ninth Amendment? A: There have been few opinions of the Supreme Court interpreting the Ninth Amendment, but its plain text adverts to the "rights . . . retained by the people." I believe it is incumbent upon the Department of Justice to enforce the law and protect the constitutional rights of all Americans. Q. The Justice Department provides agency-wide guidance on implementing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Janet Reno made significant reforms in implementing this Act by calling upon agencies to exercise discretion where possible and to grant requests unless disclosure would cause actual harm and by making FOIA implementation part of every employee's job performance evaluation. Would you (a) consider FOIA enforcement an important part of an Attorney General's responsibilities; (b) ensure that FOIA activities get adequate budget allocation at Justice and encourage adequate funds for enforcement of FOIA at other agencies; (c) support and personally endorse government-wide training in FOIA responsibilities; and (d) advocate sanctions against government employees who deliberately withhold records from FOIA processing? A: Appropriate public access to governmental records is an important check on arbitrary government action. If I am fortunate enough to be confirmed as Attorney General, I will fully and faithfully enforce the Freedom of Information Act and ensure that the Department of Justice does the same. Q. In September 1998, when you chaired a subcommittee hearing on the intent of the Second Amendment, you stated: "I believe it is time that we once again recognize the Second Amendment for what it is. It is a protection of individual liberty." Given your view of the Second Amendment, do you believe that all gun control laws are unconstitutional? As Attorney General, would you urge the Supreme Court to accept your interpretation of the Second Amendment? A: I do not believe that the Second Amendment prohibits common-sense gun control measures, and if confirmed, as Attorney General I will vigorously defend federal gun control statutes passed by Congress whenever there is a good-faith and conscientious basis for doing so. QUESTIONS FROM SENATOR KOHL ANTITRUST - MCI WORLDCOM/SPRINT Q. A little more than a year ago, the Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the competitive implications of the then-pending merger between MCI WorldCom and Sprint, a merger which was ultimately abandoned when the Justice Department opposed it. The merger would have combined the second and third largest long distance phone companies and would have resulted in two companies capturing nearly 80 percent of the long distance market. Despite these large market shares, you said that "I am strongly inclined to support the proposed merger." While you acknowledged that the competitive implications of the merger needed to be examined, they were secondary to "my largest concern" - "the jobs of the hard working and talented people of the State of Missouri." Finally, you argued that in examining this merger, "the current landscape is not the landscape to be considered - instead it should be analyzed based on the possible future of the marketplace." Are your statements at the MCI WorldCom/Sprint merger hearings indicative of the approach you believe the Justice Department's Antitrust Division should take when reviewing mergers? Under the Department's Merger Guidelines, the competitive implications of the proposed merger are paramount and the merger is analyzed with regard to the current state of the marketplace. Would you make any changes to the Antitrust Division's standards for reviewing mergers such as paying more attention to factors other than the merger's likely effects on competition? Do you think the Justice Department was mistaken to oppose the now abandoned MCI WorldCom/Sprint merger? If yes, why? Should we be worried when a merger leads to such high concentration as this one - which would have resulted in two companies controlling nearly 80% of the market - could lead to higher prices for consumers? A: In the area of antitrust enforcement, the competitive implications of any proposed merger are of paramount importance. Thus, I would approach any proposed merger with an eye towards ensuring open competition in the marketplace. I would be open to considering modifications to the Antitrust Division's standards for reviewing mergers, but would do so in consultation with the antitrust experts in the Department of Justice. With respect to the MCI WorldCom/Sprint merger in particular, I believe it would be imprudent to comment on the specifics of this transaction, or any transaction, without the benefit of the full knowledge of the Antitrust Division. ANTITRUST - SHERMAN ACT Q. The fundamental antitrust law - the Sherman Act - was enacted more than a hundred years ago. For more than a century, it has protected the principles we hold most important - competition, consumer choice, fairness, and equality. The antitrust laws are significant because they ensure that competition among businesses of any size will be fair and that consumers will pay low prices for all sorts of goods and services. And these laws have a proud tradition of being supported in a non-partisan manner - they've been vigorously enforced over the years by both Republicans and Democrats. What role do you think antitrust laws have had in shaping our economy and preserving competition? How should we use antitrust laws to protect against consolidation of economic power - to make sure that consumers aren't charged high prices by large companies that have swallowed up their competition? A: The antitrust laws have been a vital part of ensuring a free and open marketplace in this country and, in my view, should continue to serve this role. By ensuring that any proposed merger promotes competition, and that an undue consolidation of monopolistic power does not accrue in the hands of a single business entity, I would help ensure the existence of free and open markets. This, in turn, would help ensure that consumers are not charged prices above free market levels. ANTITRUST - ENFORCEMENT Q. In the last few years, the Antitrust Division has been very active in antitrust enforcement, bringing prominent cases, such as the Microsoft case, and challenging many large mergers, such as MCI WorldCom/Sprint and Lockheed Martin/Northrup Grumman, to name a few. How would you evaluate the performance of the Justice Department in dealing with the MCI WorldCom/Sprint merger and the Lockheed Martin/Northrup Grumman merger? Do you believe that the Antitrust Division has been appropriately enforcing our nation's antitrust laws? Is there any change in approach or philosophy of antitrust enforcement we can expect should you be confirmed as Attorney General? A: I believe that it would be imprudent to comment on how the Justice Department has dealt with the MCI WorldCom/Sprint and the Lockheed Martin/Northrup mergers in particular, as I have not had the benefit of the Antitrust Division's full learning on these matters. For the same reason, it would be imprudent for me to comment upon the Antitrust Division's enforcement of the antitrust laws in any particular cases. With respect to the philosophy of antitrust enforcement that I would follow should I be confirmed as Attorney General, I can assure you that I will fully enforce the antitrust laws to help ensure free and open competition in the marketplace. ANTITRUST - FUTURE OF THE ANTITRUST LAWS Q. Some have argued that our nation's antitrust laws, many written over a hundred years ago, are outmoded and need to be updated before they can be applied to today's high-tech industries. Others believe that the antitrust laws apply equally well to modern economic problems and high-tech industries as they did to problems of economic concentration in the railroad, oil and other industries when they were first written. What is your view? Do you think our antitrust laws are outmoded and in need of revision? A: The antitrust laws have proven to be flexible enough to adopt to many new situations. That being said, one should always be open to the possibility that improvements could be made, particularly where fundamental economic shifts have occurred. If confirmed as Attorney General, I will seek the advice of experts in this field, including those in the Antitrust Division, before making any determination as to whether are antitrust laws are in need of any revision. ANTITRUST - EUROPEAN REVIEW PRIVACY Q. Last year on the Judiciary Committee, we explored the FBI's "Carnivore" system - an e-mail surveillance program designed to track and monitor a suspect's online communications. This is a powerful law enforcement tool - perhaps too powerful - and we must be sure that it is not misused. If, as we are now learning, "Carnivore" is able to capture all e-mail traffic channeled through an Internet Service Provider (ISP), then the fear of innocent civilians being subject to search without cause is justified. Such a "fishing expedition" wouldn't be right. How important do you think it is that we protect the privacy rights of civilians, and how serious a threat to privacy would "Carnivore" be if it's misused or inadvertently "captures" information other than the suspect's? A: The Internet has obviously grown to be a vibrant part of our modern economy. It is the Justice Department's responsibility to ensure that those who conduct research or business on line can do so in a safe, secure environment. At the same time, however, we must take care that the government does not become too heavy handed in its online law enforcement activities in order to protect the privacy rights of law-abiding citizens. As you know, when I was in the Senate, I convened hearings on the importance of respecting privacy rights in the digital age. If confirmed, I will conduct a thorough review of Carnivore and its technical capabilities, and work closely with law enforcement to ensure that adequate measures are taken to secure personal privacy before the program is deployed. I would look forward to working with you to ensure that a proper balance is struck in this respect. QUESTIONS FROM SENATOR FEINGOLD Q. The FBI, in increasing isolation from the rest of the nation's law enforcement agencies, refuses to make electronic recordings of interrogations that produce confessions. Do you agree that this practice makes subsequent scrutiny of the legality and reliability of such interrogations more difficult? I have not reviewed the details of this specific FBI policy, and would need to consult with the professionals at the FBI before making an assessment. I assure you that I will take all reasonable steps to help ensure that all criminal defendants receive the full protection of Due Process. Q. Do you have any objection to changing this practice? I have an open mind on this issue. Not yet having had the opportunity to conduct a full and fair review of the policy, I cannot currently make a reasonable assessment. Complete Q&A at: http://www.politechbot.com/docs/ashcroft.012701.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if it remains intact. To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- End forwarded message -----

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[tt] Drone Race to a Known Future
by Arlind Boshnjaku 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175137/droning_on Drone Race to a Known Future Why Military Dreams Fail -- and Why It Doesn't Matter By Tom Engelhardt For drone freaks (and these days Washington seems full of them), here's the good news: Drones are hot! Not long ago -- 2006 to be exact -- the Air Force could barely get a few armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air at once; now, the number is 38; by 2011, it will reputedly be 50, and beyond that, in every sense, the sky's the limit. Better yet, for the latest generation of armed surveillance drones -- the ones with the chill-you-to-your-bones sci-fi names of Predators and Reapers (as in Grim) -- whole new surveillance capabilities will soon be available. Their newest video system, due to be deployed next year, has been dubbed Gorgon Stare after the creature in Greek mythology whose gaze turned its victims to stone. According to Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times, Gorgon Stare will offer a "pilot" back in good ol' Langley, VA, headquarters of the CIA, the ability to "stare" via 12 video feeds (where only one now exists) at a 1.5 mile square area, and then, with Hellfire missiles and bombs, assumedly turn any part of it into rubble. Within the year, that viewing capacity is expected to double to three square miles. What we're talking about here is the gaze of the gods, updated in corporate labs for the modern American war-fighter -- a gaze that can be focused on whatever runs, walks, crawls, or creeps just about anywhere on the planet 24/7, with an instant ability to blow it away. And what's true of video capacity will be no less true of the next generation of drone sensors -- and, of course, of drone weaponry like that "5-pound missile the size of a loaf of French bread" meant in some near-robotic future to replace the present 100-pound Hellfire missile, possibly on the Avenger or Predator C, the next generation drone under development at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. Everything, in fact, will be almost infinitely upgradeable, since we're still in the robotics equivalent of the age of the "horseless carriage," as Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution assures us. (Just hold your hats, for instance, when the first nano-drones make it onto the scene! They will, according to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, be able to "fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window.") And here's another flash from the drone development front: the Navy wants in. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead, reports Jason Paur of Wired's Danger Room blog, is looking for "a robotic attack aircraft that can land and take off from a carrier." Fortunately, according to Paur, the X-47B, which theoretically should be able to do just that, is to make its first test flight before year's end. It could be checking out those carrier decks by 2011, and fully operational by 2025. Not only that, but drones are leaving the air for the high seas where they are called unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). In fact, Israel -- along with the U.S. leading the way on drones -- will reportedly soon launch the first of its USVs off the coast of Hamas-controlled Gaza. The U.S. can't be far behind and it seems that, like their airborne cousins, these ships, too, will be weaponized. Taking the Measure of a Slam-Dunk Weapons System Robot war. It just couldn't be cooler, could it? Especially if the only blood you spill is the other guy's, since our "pilots" are flying those planes from thousands of miles away. Soon, it seems, the world will be a drone fest. In his first nine months, President Obama has authorized more drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal borderlands than the Bush administration did in its last three years in office and is now considering upping their use in areas of rural Afghanistan where U.S. troops will be scarce. In Washington, drones are even considered the "de-escalatory" option for the Afghan War by some critics, while CIA Director Leon Panetta, whose agency runs our drone war in Pakistan, has hailed them as "the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al-Qaeda leadership." Among the few people who don't adore them here are hard-core war-fighters who don't want an armada of robot planes standing in the way of sending in oodles more troops. The vice president, however, is a drone-atic. He loves 'em to death and reportedly wants to up their missions, especially in Pakistan, rather than go the oodles route. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates jumped onto the drone bandwagon early. He has long been pressing the Air Force to invest ever less in expensive manned aircraft -- he's called the F-35, still in development, the last manned fighter aircraft -- and ever more in the robotic kind. After all, they're so lean, mean, and high-tech sexy -- for Newsweek, they fall into the category of "weapons porn" -- that what's not to like? Okay, maybe there's the odd scrooge around like Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, who recently complained to the press that the U.S. program might involve war crimes under international law: "We need the United States to be more up front and say, 'OK, we're willing to discuss some aspects of this program,' otherwise you have the really problematic bottom line that the CIA is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws." But as Christmas approaches, somebody's always going to say, "Bah, humbug!" And let's face it, just about everyone who matters to the mainstream media swears that the drones are just so much more "precise" in their "extrajudicial executions" than traditional air methods, which can be so messy. Better yet, when nothing in Afghanistan or Pakistan seems to be working out, the drones are actually doing the job. They're reportedly knocking off the bad guys right and left. At least 13 senior al-Qaeda leaders and one senior Taliban leader (aka "high-value targets") have been killed by the drones, according to the Long War Journal, and many more foot soldiers have been taken out as well. And they're not just the obvious slam-dunk weapons system for our present problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they're potentially the royal path to the future when it comes to war-fighting, which is surely something else to be excited about. The Wonder Weapons Succeed -- at Home So why am I not excited -- other than the fact that the drones are also killing civilians in disputed but significant numbers in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, creating enemies and animosity wherever they strike, and turning us into a nation of 24/7 assassins beyond the law or accountability of any sort? Thought of another way, the drones put wings on the original Bush-era Guantanamo principle -- that Americans have the inalienable right to act as global judge, jury, and executioner, and in doing so are beyond the reach of any court or law. And here's another factor that dulls my excitement just a tad -- if the history of air warfare has shown one thing, it's this: it never breaks populations. Rather, it only increases their sense of unity, as in London during the Blitz under Winston Churchill, in Germany under Adolf Hitler, Imperial Japan under Emperor Hirohito, North Korea under Kim Il Sung, North Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, and of course (though we never put ourselves in such company, being the exceptions to all history), the United States after 9/11 under George W. Bush. Why should the peoples of rural Afghanistan and the Pakistani borderlands be any different? Oh, and there's just one more reason that comes to mind: it so happens that I can see the future when it comes to drones, and it's dismal. I'm no prophet -- it's only that I've already lived through so much of that future. In fact, we all have. Militarily speaking, we might as well be in the film Groundhog Day in which Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell are forced to live out the same 24 hours again and again -- with all the grimness of that idea and none of the charm of those actors. In my lifetime, I've repeatedly seen advanced weapons systems or mind-boggling technologies of war hailed as near-utopian paths to victory and future peace (just as the atomic bomb was soon after my birth). In the Vietnam War, the glories of "the electronic battlefield" were limned as an antidote to brute and ineffective American air power. That high-tech, advanced battlefield of invisible sensors was to bring an end to the impunity of guerrillas and infiltrating enemy armies. No longer capable of going anywhere undetected, they would have nowhere to hide. In the 1980s, it was President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, quickly dubbed "Star Wars" by its critics, a label that he accepted with amusement. ("If you will pardon my stealing a film line -- the Force is with us," he said in his usual genial way.) His dream, as he told the American people, was to create an "impermeable" anti-missile shield over the United States -- "like a roof protects a family from rain" -- that would end the possibility of nuclear attack from the Soviet Union and so create peace in our time (or, if you were of a more cynical turn of mind, the possibility of a freebie nuclear assault on the Soviets). In the Gulf War, "smart bombs" and smart missiles were praised as the military saviors of the moment. They were to give war the kind of precision that would lower civilian deaths to the vanishing point and, as the neocons of the Bush administration would claim in the next decade, free the U.S. military to "decapitate" any regime we loathed. All this would be possible without so much as touching the civilian population (which would, of course, then welcome us as liberators). And later, there was "netcentric warfare," that Rumsfeldian high-tech favorite. Its promise was that advanced information-sharing technology would turn a Military Lite into an uplinked force so savvy about changing battlefield realities and so crushing that a mere demo or two would cow any "rogue" nation or insurgency into submission. Of course, you know the results of this sort of magical thinking about wonder weapons (or technologies) and their properties just as well as I do. The atomic bomb ended nothing, but led to an almost half-century-long nuclear superpower standoff/nightmare, to nuclear proliferation, and so to the possibility that, someday, even terrorists might possess such weapons. The electronic battlefield was incapable of staving off defeat in Vietnam. That impermeable anti-missile shield never came even faintly close to making it into our skies. Those "smart bombs" of the Gulf War proved remarkably dumb, while the 50 "decapitation" strikes the Bush administration launched against Saddam Hussein's regime on the first day of the 2003 invasion of Iraq took out not a single Iraqi leader, but "dozens" of civilians. And the history of the netcentric military in Iraq is well known. Its "success" sent Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld into retirement and ignominy. In the same way, robot drones as assassination weapons will prove to be just another weapons system rather than a panacea for American warriors. To date, in fact, there is at least as much evidence in Pakistan and Afghanistan that the drones are helping to spread war as that they are staunching it. Yet, the above summary is, at best, only half the story. None of these wonder weapons or technologies succeeded in their moment, or as advertised, but that fact stopped none of them from embedding themselves in our American world. From the atomic bomb came a whole nuclear landscape that included the Strategic Air Command, weapons labs, production plants, missile silos, corporate interests, and an enormous world-destroying arsenal (as well as proliferating versions of the same, large and small, across the planet). Nor did the electronic battlefield go away. Quite the opposite -- it came home and entered our everyday world in the form of sensors, cameras, surveillance equipment and the like, now implanted from our borders to our cities. True, Reagan's impermeable shield was the purest of nuclear fantasies, but the "high frontiersmen" gathered and, taking a sizeable bite of the military budget, went on a decades-long binge of way-out research, space warfare plans and commands, and boondoggles of all sorts, including the staggeringly expensive, still not operational anti-missile system that the Bush and now Obama administrations have struggled to emplace somewhere in Europe. Similarly, ever newer generations of smart bombs and ever brighter missiles have been, and are being, developed ad infinitum. Rarely do wonder weapons or wonder technologies disappoint enough to disappear. Each of these is, in fact, now surrounded by its own mini-version of the military-industrial complex, with its own set of corporate players, special lobbyists in Washington, specific interests, and congressional boosters. Each has installed a typical revolving door that the relevant Pentagon officials and officers can spin through once their military careers are in order. This is no less true for that wonder weapon of our moment, the robot drone. In fact, you can already see the military-industrial-drone-robotics complex in formation. Take just one figure, Tony Tether, who for seven years was the head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which did its share of advanced robotics research. When he left the Pentagon in September, it was, according to Noah Shachtman, who runs Wired's Danger Room blog, to join "an advisory panel of Scientific Systems Company, Inc., which works on robotics projects for the Pentagon. In June, he joined the board of Aurora Flight Sciences, Inc., developers of military unmanned aircraft." He has also become "a part-time technical consultant and 'strategic advisor' for the influencers at The Livingston Group" which represents some large defense contractors like Northrup Grumman and Raytheon. The drone industry, too, already has its own congressional representatives. Republican Congressman and former House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, for instance, is a major drone booster. In April 2009, he insisted that "we must also press forward with the development of the next generation of UAVs, including the Predator C. During my service in the Marine Corps, I engaged targets with the Predator A and B Series, and I recognize the advantages offered by Predator C." In 2008, General Atomics, whose "affiliate" makes the Predator drone, gave $6,000 to Hunter's election campaign committee, making it his 13th largest contributor. That company was also the number two contributor to his Peace Through Strength political action committee. In the American Grain This, then, is the future that you can see just as well as I can. When the Obama administration decides to up the ante on drone use in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as it's soon likely to do, it will be ensuring not the end of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but the long life of robot war within our ever more militarized society. And by the time this set of robotic dreams fails to pan out, it won't matter. Yet another mini-sector of the military-industrial complex will be etched into the American grain. Whatever the short-term gains from introducing drone warfare in these last years, we are now locked into the 24/7 assassination trade -- with our own set of non-suicide bombers on the job into eternity. This may pass for sanity in Washington, but it's surely helping to pave the road to hell. Haven't any of these folks ever seen a sci-fi film? Are none of them Terminator fans? Are they sure they want to open the way to unlimited robot war, keeping in mind that, if this is the latest game in town, it won't remain mainly an American one for long. And just wait until the first Iranian drone takes out the first Baluchi guerrilla supported by American funds somewhere in Pakistan. Then let's see just what we think about the right of any nation to summarily execute its enemies -- and anyone else in the vicinity -- by drone. Is this actually what we Americans want to be known for? And if we let this happen, and General Atomics is working double or triple shifts to turn out ever more, ever newer generations of robot warriors, while the nation suffers 10.2% unemployment, who exactly will think about shutting them down? _______________________________________________ tt mailing list tt(a)postbiota.org http://postbiota.org/mailman/listinfo/tt ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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