July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

[gsc] Cash "smuggling" seizures grow quickly
by DGCMP 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/08/16/Cash-smuggling-seizures-grow-quickly… BOSTON, Aug. 16 (UPI) -- The smuggling of cash into and out of the United States is growing quickly, figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection indicate. Economic hard times are thought to be behind the soaring rates of "hot cash" smuggling, the seizure of which, customs data indicates, rose 50 percent, from about $50 million to $75 million, between 2005 and 2008, The Boston Herald reported Sunday. This summer has been a very active time for cash smuggling in New England, the newspaper said. Thirty-five seizures totaling $856,119 were made in the region between June 1 and Aug. 12, the data shows. "We do not know why there is such a huge increase in the number of seizures this past summer," Ted Woo, spokesman for the Boston Field Office of CBP, told the Herald, saying it may be because of tighter inspections at border crossings or more people trying to sneak money overseas due to the recession. Also, officials say drug dealers and terrorists are turning to cash to make payments because authorities are better able to trace their banking activities, the newspaper said.

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NY Times reports: Documents show link between AT&T and NSA
by Perry E. Metzger 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/13/us/nationalspecial3/13nsa.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 13, 2006 Documents Show Link Between AT&T and Agency in Eavesdropping Case By JOHN MARKOFF and SCOTT SHANE SAN FRANCISCO, April 12 Mark Klein was a veteran AT&T technician in 2002 when he began to see what he thought were suspicious connections between that telecommunications giant and the National Security Agency. But he kept quiet about it until news broke late last year that President Bush had approved an N.S.A. program to eavesdrop without court warrants on Americans suspected of ties to Al Qaeda. Now Mr. Klein and a few company documents he saved have emerged as key elements in a class-action lawsuit filed against AT&T on Jan. 31 by a civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The suit accuses the company of helping the security agency invade its customers' privacy. Mr. Klein's account and the documents provide new details about how the agency works with the private sector in intercepting communications for intelligence purposes. The documents, some of which Mr. Klein had earlier provided to reporters, describe a mysterious room at the AT&T Internet and telephone hub in San Francisco where he worked. The documents, which were examined by four independent telecommunications and computer security experts at the request of The New York Times, describe equipment capable of monitoring a large quantity of e-mail messages, Internet phone calls, and other Internet traffic. The equipment, which Mr. Klein said was installed by AT&T in 2003, was able to select messages that could be identified by keywords, Internet or e-mail addresses or country of origin and divert copies to another location for further analysis. The security agency began eavesdropping without warrants on international phone calls and e-mail messages of people inside the United States suspected of terrorist links soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. After disclosing the program last December, The New York Times also reported that the agency had gathered data from phone and e-mail traffic with the cooperation of several major telecommunications companies. The technical experts all said that the documents showed that AT&T had an agreement with the federal government to systematically gather information flowing on the Internet through the company's network. The gathering of such information, known as data mining, involves the use of sophisticated computer programs to detect patterns or glean useful intelligence from masses of information. "This took expert planning and hundreds of millions of dollars to build," said Brian Reid, director of engineering at the Internet Systems Consortium in Redwood City, Calif. "This is the correct way to do high volume Internet snooping." Another expert, who had designed large federal and commercial data networks, said that the documents were consistent with administration assertions that the N.S.A. monitored only foreign communications and communications between foreign and United States locations, partly because of the location of the monitoring sites. The network designer was granted anonymity because he believed that commenting on the operation could affect his ability to work as a consultant. The documents referred to a second location, in Atlanta, and suggested similar rooms might exist at other AT&T switching sites. Mr. Klein said other AT&T technicians had told him of such installations in San Jose, Calif.; Los Angeles; San Diego; and Seattle. The Internet hubs there carry a significant amount of international traffic. The network designer and other experts said it would be a simple technical matter to reprogram the equipment to intercept purely domestic Internet traffic. The Department of Justice initially asked the Electronic Frontier Foundation not to file Mr. Klein's documents in court, but a review determined that they were not classified and the government dropped its objection. The foundation filed the documents under seal because of concern about releasing proprietary information. On Monday, AT&T filed a motion with a federal judge in San Francisco asking the court to order the foundation to return the documents because they were proprietary. The documents showed that the room in San Francisco, which Mr. Klein says was off-limits to most employees but serviced by a company technician working with the security agency, contained computerized equipment that could sift through immense volumes of traffic as it passed through the cables of AT&T's WorldNet Internet service. According to the documents, e-mail messages and other data carried by 16 other commercial Internet providers reached AT&T customers through the San Francisco hub. One piece of filtering equipment described in the documents was manufactured by Narus, based in Mountain View, Calif. The equipment could be programmed to identify and intercept voice or data conversations between e-mail, telephone or Internet addresses, said Steve Bannerman, the company's vice president for marketing. Buyers included companies trying to comply with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which requires that communications systems have a wiretapping capability built in. Typically, law enforcement interceptions are done on a case by case basis and require warrants. Mr. Bannerman said he could not comment further because Narus had not announced any sales to the federal government. William P. Crowell, a former deputy director of the N.S.A, is on the Narus board. In an interview, Mr. Klein said he did not have a security clearance but had witnessed interactions between colleagues who did have clearances and the highly secretive N.S.A. "It was strange and sort of suspicious," he said. Mr. Klein said he learned of an agency connection to the mysterious room in 2002 when a company manager told him to expect a visit from an N.S.A. official who wanted to speak with another senior company technician about "a special job." That technician later installed the equipment in the room, he said. Based on his observations and technical knowledge, Mr. Klein concluded that the equipment permitted "vacuum-cleaner surveillance" of Internet traffic. Mr. Klein, 60, who retired in 2004 after 23 years with AT&T and lives near Oakland, Calif., said he decided to make his observations known because he believed the government's monitoring was violating Americans' civil liberties. An AT&T spokesman at the company's corporate headquarters in San Antonio declined to comment on Mr. Klein's statements. "AT&T does follow all laws with respect to assistance offered to government agencies," said Walt Sharp, the AT&T spokesman. "However, we are not in a position to comment on matters of national security." Asked to comment, Don Weber, a spokesman for the N.S.A., said, "It would be irresponsible of us to discuss actual or alleged operational issues as it would give those wishing to do harm to the United States the ability to adjust and potentially inflict harm." John Markoff reported from San Francisco for this article, and Scott Shane from Washington. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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[gsc] Cash "smuggling" seizures grow quickly
by DGCMP 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/08/16/Cash-smuggling-seizures-grow-quickly… BOSTON, Aug. 16 (UPI) -- The smuggling of cash into and out of the United States is growing quickly, figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection indicate. Economic hard times are thought to be behind the soaring rates of "hot cash" smuggling, the seizure of which, customs data indicates, rose 50 percent, from about $50 million to $75 million, between 2005 and 2008, The Boston Herald reported Sunday. This summer has been a very active time for cash smuggling in New England, the newspaper said. Thirty-five seizures totaling $856,119 were made in the region between June 1 and Aug. 12, the data shows. "We do not know why there is such a huge increase in the number of seizures this past summer," Ted Woo, spokesman for the Boston Field Office of CBP, told the Herald, saying it may be because of tighter inspections at border crossings or more people trying to sneak money overseas due to the recession. Also, officials say drug dealers and terrorists are turning to cash to make payments because authorities are better able to trace their banking activities, the newspaper said.

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Re: <nettime> A DIY Data Manifesto by Scott Gilbertson
by nettime-l＠kein.org 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

the internet shutdown in egypt prompted similar questions about independent infrastructure and corporate control. see for example http://www.openmeshproject.org/ and the comment thread on https://blog.torproject.org/blog/recent-events-egypt. i know that some people were busy setting up BBS in egypt during the shutdown, which has some interesting echoes of rushkoff's recent piece on the Next Net ('dump internet, go fidonet') http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-next-net dan [@danmcquillan | www.internetartizans.co.uk] On 7 February 2011 21:26, Geert Lovink <geert(a)xs4all.nl> wrote: > > Good you raise this issue, Rory. <...> -- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime(a)kein.org ----- 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: <nettime> A DIY Data Manifesto by Scott Gilbertson
by nettime-l＠kein.org 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

the internet shutdown in egypt prompted similar questions about independent infrastructure and corporate control. see for example http://www.openmeshproject.org/ and the comment thread on https://blog.torproject.org/blog/recent-events-egypt. i know that some people were busy setting up BBS in egypt during the shutdown, which has some interesting echoes of rushkoff's recent piece on the Next Net ('dump internet, go fidonet') http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-next-net dan [@danmcquillan | www.internetartizans.co.uk] On 7 February 2011 21:26, Geert Lovink <geert(a)xs4all.nl> wrote: > > Good you raise this issue, Rory. <...> -- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime(a)kein.org ----- 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: [tor-talk] US Senators Seek to Crackdown on Bitcoin
by Anon Mus 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Pad 0c wrote: > - I bet on the fact that others will came after me. > - I bet that bitcoin will be still used at some later point. > > Only the first describe a ponzi scheme and I think only the second apply for > bitcoins. > > This is very true and is something which differentiates BitCoin from a ponzi scheme. The ponzi scheme is ALWAYS based on nothing right to its bitter end. But BC does have INTRINSIC value, because it... 1. has only a known/set limited availability 2. is provably unforgeable these are the qualities desirable in ANY value based exchange token (barter), whether it be gold bullion, chickens or sheep. This is why England used the "tally stick", for a long time, when England had no Gold etc, it generated a barter system based it. So BC is also a barter substitute (or currency), that is this all the same, its just a token between. At the end of the day, it matters not a single jot what its current comparative value is, as long a people are trading it. For day to day transactions, it is ALL that is needed. But for horders, banksters and other similar blood sucking manipulators, they cannot predict its value in the long term, and this they hate, as there is no "promise to pay the bearer" anything. So they will slander it. As more people trade in it, then the more stable it becomes, as people get frightened a government will collapse (not just outlaw) it, then its use will fall and so too will its price. I have had my own reservations about BitCoin, that is, that its designers did not anonymize BitCoins rendezvous and had non-anonymously centralized itself so it could be attacked by a hostile government, like it is being attacked now by the US. I think it is highly likely that the drug supplier "Silk Road" is a protected CIA black op. to attack BC and to destroy it. This was an obvious draw-back right from the start and was the reason I stopped generating BC's a long while back. Governments and other evil people do not play fairly, so never assume they will. The designers of BC did assume just that, and that was there error. To design adn test it was one thing but the implementation had to be completely anonymous. What needs to be done is that a NewBitCoin (NBC) system needs to be started up behind hidden services and for them to offer a swap with the existing BC. Perhaps there should even be "official" completely anonymous NBC consortium with several NBC servers each doing multiple NBC i.e. NBC1, NBC2, NBC3 etc (all interchangeable currencies - at least at the start), so as to be locationally robust. Joe _______________________________________________ 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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NY Times reports: Documents show link between AT&T and NSA
by Perry E. Metzger 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/13/us/nationalspecial3/13nsa.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 13, 2006 Documents Show Link Between AT&T and Agency in Eavesdropping Case By JOHN MARKOFF and SCOTT SHANE SAN FRANCISCO, April 12 Mark Klein was a veteran AT&T technician in 2002 when he began to see what he thought were suspicious connections between that telecommunications giant and the National Security Agency. But he kept quiet about it until news broke late last year that President Bush had approved an N.S.A. program to eavesdrop without court warrants on Americans suspected of ties to Al Qaeda. Now Mr. Klein and a few company documents he saved have emerged as key elements in a class-action lawsuit filed against AT&T on Jan. 31 by a civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The suit accuses the company of helping the security agency invade its customers' privacy. Mr. Klein's account and the documents provide new details about how the agency works with the private sector in intercepting communications for intelligence purposes. The documents, some of which Mr. Klein had earlier provided to reporters, describe a mysterious room at the AT&T Internet and telephone hub in San Francisco where he worked. The documents, which were examined by four independent telecommunications and computer security experts at the request of The New York Times, describe equipment capable of monitoring a large quantity of e-mail messages, Internet phone calls, and other Internet traffic. The equipment, which Mr. Klein said was installed by AT&T in 2003, was able to select messages that could be identified by keywords, Internet or e-mail addresses or country of origin and divert copies to another location for further analysis. The security agency began eavesdropping without warrants on international phone calls and e-mail messages of people inside the United States suspected of terrorist links soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. After disclosing the program last December, The New York Times also reported that the agency had gathered data from phone and e-mail traffic with the cooperation of several major telecommunications companies. The technical experts all said that the documents showed that AT&T had an agreement with the federal government to systematically gather information flowing on the Internet through the company's network. The gathering of such information, known as data mining, involves the use of sophisticated computer programs to detect patterns or glean useful intelligence from masses of information. "This took expert planning and hundreds of millions of dollars to build," said Brian Reid, director of engineering at the Internet Systems Consortium in Redwood City, Calif. "This is the correct way to do high volume Internet snooping." Another expert, who had designed large federal and commercial data networks, said that the documents were consistent with administration assertions that the N.S.A. monitored only foreign communications and communications between foreign and United States locations, partly because of the location of the monitoring sites. The network designer was granted anonymity because he believed that commenting on the operation could affect his ability to work as a consultant. The documents referred to a second location, in Atlanta, and suggested similar rooms might exist at other AT&T switching sites. Mr. Klein said other AT&T technicians had told him of such installations in San Jose, Calif.; Los Angeles; San Diego; and Seattle. The Internet hubs there carry a significant amount of international traffic. The network designer and other experts said it would be a simple technical matter to reprogram the equipment to intercept purely domestic Internet traffic. The Department of Justice initially asked the Electronic Frontier Foundation not to file Mr. Klein's documents in court, but a review determined that they were not classified and the government dropped its objection. The foundation filed the documents under seal because of concern about releasing proprietary information. On Monday, AT&T filed a motion with a federal judge in San Francisco asking the court to order the foundation to return the documents because they were proprietary. The documents showed that the room in San Francisco, which Mr. Klein says was off-limits to most employees but serviced by a company technician working with the security agency, contained computerized equipment that could sift through immense volumes of traffic as it passed through the cables of AT&T's WorldNet Internet service. According to the documents, e-mail messages and other data carried by 16 other commercial Internet providers reached AT&T customers through the San Francisco hub. One piece of filtering equipment described in the documents was manufactured by Narus, based in Mountain View, Calif. The equipment could be programmed to identify and intercept voice or data conversations between e-mail, telephone or Internet addresses, said Steve Bannerman, the company's vice president for marketing. Buyers included companies trying to comply with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which requires that communications systems have a wiretapping capability built in. Typically, law enforcement interceptions are done on a case by case basis and require warrants. Mr. Bannerman said he could not comment further because Narus had not announced any sales to the federal government. William P. Crowell, a former deputy director of the N.S.A, is on the Narus board. In an interview, Mr. Klein said he did not have a security clearance but had witnessed interactions between colleagues who did have clearances and the highly secretive N.S.A. "It was strange and sort of suspicious," he said. Mr. Klein said he learned of an agency connection to the mysterious room in 2002 when a company manager told him to expect a visit from an N.S.A. official who wanted to speak with another senior company technician about "a special job." That technician later installed the equipment in the room, he said. Based on his observations and technical knowledge, Mr. Klein concluded that the equipment permitted "vacuum-cleaner surveillance" of Internet traffic. Mr. Klein, 60, who retired in 2004 after 23 years with AT&T and lives near Oakland, Calif., said he decided to make his observations known because he believed the government's monitoring was violating Americans' civil liberties. An AT&T spokesman at the company's corporate headquarters in San Antonio declined to comment on Mr. Klein's statements. "AT&T does follow all laws with respect to assistance offered to government agencies," said Walt Sharp, the AT&T spokesman. "However, we are not in a position to comment on matters of national security." Asked to comment, Don Weber, a spokesman for the N.S.A., said, "It would be irresponsible of us to discuss actual or alleged operational issues as it would give those wishing to do harm to the United States the ability to adjust and potentially inflict harm." John Markoff reported from San Francisco for this article, and Scott Shane from Washington. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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] US Senators Seek to Crackdown on Bitcoin
by Anon Mus 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Pad 0c wrote: > - I bet on the fact that others will came after me. > - I bet that bitcoin will be still used at some later point. > > Only the first describe a ponzi scheme and I think only the second apply for > bitcoins. > > This is very true and is something which differentiates BitCoin from a ponzi scheme. The ponzi scheme is ALWAYS based on nothing right to its bitter end. But BC does have INTRINSIC value, because it... 1. has only a known/set limited availability 2. is provably unforgeable these are the qualities desirable in ANY value based exchange token (barter), whether it be gold bullion, chickens or sheep. This is why England used the "tally stick", for a long time, when England had no Gold etc, it generated a barter system based it. So BC is also a barter substitute (or currency), that is this all the same, its just a token between. At the end of the day, it matters not a single jot what its current comparative value is, as long a people are trading it. For day to day transactions, it is ALL that is needed. But for horders, banksters and other similar blood sucking manipulators, they cannot predict its value in the long term, and this they hate, as there is no "promise to pay the bearer" anything. So they will slander it. As more people trade in it, then the more stable it becomes, as people get frightened a government will collapse (not just outlaw) it, then its use will fall and so too will its price. I have had my own reservations about BitCoin, that is, that its designers did not anonymize BitCoins rendezvous and had non-anonymously centralized itself so it could be attacked by a hostile government, like it is being attacked now by the US. I think it is highly likely that the drug supplier "Silk Road" is a protected CIA black op. to attack BC and to destroy it. This was an obvious draw-back right from the start and was the reason I stopped generating BC's a long while back. Governments and other evil people do not play fairly, so never assume they will. The designers of BC did assume just that, and that was there error. To design adn test it was one thing but the implementation had to be completely anonymous. What needs to be done is that a NewBitCoin (NBC) system needs to be started up behind hidden services and for them to offer a swap with the existing BC. Perhaps there should even be "official" completely anonymous NBC consortium with several NBC servers each doing multiple NBC i.e. NBC1, NBC2, NBC3 etc (all interchangeable currencies - at least at the start), so as to be locationally robust. Joe _______________________________________________ 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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Re: [p2p-hackers] Bitcoin incentive on Kademlia networks
by Changaco 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 09:46:40 +1100 ianG wrote: > These sound rather like political statements, not economic statements. How money works is a political matter. If one can get a bigger share of monetary creation than other people, one gets power. It's also an "economic" matter, because badly designed systems cause crises. > It's fine to have these opinions such as X is fair and Y is unfair, but > it's not a particularly good basis for building a money system. People eventually figure out when a system isn't fair, and it falls, because money is nothing without a community to use it. So yes, being fair is an important quality for the long term. > Sure it can! Don't get swayed by central bankers who prefer inflation > over deflation, and scare the bejeezus out of the population with > stories of economic collapse in order to keep their little money machine > ticking over. Sure, anybody who doesn't agree with you has to be influenced by the evil central bankers, rightb/? > Whenever we build a new money system, typically we have to seed the base > in some sense or other - what you might refer to as unfair. > > E.g, The temporal asymmetry for Bitcoin certainly worked in its favour. > IOW, because it was to be worth more in the future, early people did > invest in it, on that risky expectation. And got rewarded. Which > created the virtuous circle of bringing new investors/money users in. > > I wonder if there is a 'law' here? Someone or some many have to make > out like bandits to bootstrap a new money? > > So, if it isn't an effect of appreciation, making early holders the > winners, what is it? As the name suggests, temporal symmetry is about the long term. Of course asymmetry gives a short term boost, the first users are getting money almost for free and can use it later to gain wealth. In addition, Bitcoin benefits from the fact that making a symmetrical currency is much harder and therefore hasn't been done yet. Spatial symmetry requires a Web of Trust while anyone can start using Bitcoin immediately. _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers(a)lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers ----- 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: [tor-talk] William was raided for running a Tor exit node. Please help if you can.
by Joe Btfsplk 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I forgot - did someone say they keep cash & extra phone in a safe deposit box (pre paid or contract? Contract phone is no use in a police crack down)? If a deposit box, judge could freeze that too, so better hide it in someone else's house. And what are they gonna say about that? "I need to hide a phone, money, gun, etc. in your basement." Even though I might think some of it's vaguely similar to preparing for a hurricane, most of my family would have me committed. Though I empathize w/ him (read below), if William hasn't been charged w/ ANY thing, there's not much need for a full legal team - just yet. Sure, he's sweating bullets - innocent or not. But that doesn't translate into spending huge $ right now. An attorney can't do anything (if he's truly innocent) unless there are at least some charges to start thinking about a defense; they arrest him, etc. Unless William's goal is to get his equip back quickly. A lawyer could file motions, but probably wouldn't do much good - at least for now. It does appear that one in his situation would be building a defense fund before there is anything to defend against. Now, if he could promise to pay everyone back, proportionally, for what wasn't used for defense... but how could one do that? How would we make them, if they decided not to? What if the defense fund is needed because he actually did something illegal (not necessarily porn)? I agree, that in these VERY beginning stages, a guy w/ the credentials he's presented, should have the means to pay an attorney for an hr or 2, to tell him what to do / not to do, until such time that he's arrested, charges are filed, etc., (if ever). Right now, that's all he needs. *How do I know?* Cause I was put in a similar situation - of the *possibility* I might have to defend myself against false charges - unrelated to issues in this case. I got basic advice on what to do / not do for now; have cash for bail bond, in unlikely event I was arrested. (Believe me, they could've arrested me & asked questions later). Then, nothing to do but wait... and wait. Nerve racking. Lost bunch of weight when needed to gain some. But, didn't need bunch of money. I didn't have equipment or belongings seized, but police never "told" me anything later on, like, "We're not filing charges;" "the DA isn't referring this to a Grand Jury." Nothing, nada. No, "Sorry we came to your house w/ no justification & threatened you." No arresting the other person that made false accusations, even though there were witnesses. Even then, I only needed a lawyer to advise me of basic rights, of prudent behavior till something did / did not develop, etc. No giant defense fund needed. The whole thing just... disappeared. How much is 10,000 EU anyway - $100 USD? There's a reason I'd never run a Tor exit or probably relay. I'd like to. If raided, I could never take the stress. Too old now, w/ chronic health issues. Plus I wouldn't want to spend my retirement savings hiring lawyers, if things got really ugly. And people call me paranoid... I should get started on my dooms day supplies & cash. I don't know where to keep it. We live in hurricane territory & you have to prepare way in advance of knowing whether the storm will hit nearby, or it's too late. _______________________________________________ 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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