July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: [ZS] BitCoin FBI report
by Bryce Lynch 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 10:17 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen(a)leitl.org> wrote: > http://dl.dropbox.com/u/59869575/92797476-FBI-Bitcoin-Report-April-2012.pdf Ruh-roh.. I find it interesting that they consider their intel regarding donations to illicit groups using Bitcoin of low confidence, seeing as how LulzSec practically pioneered doing so. Sabu was so owned by the FBI a lot of people in the whitehat court of infosec consider them a false flag. Botnets are already being used to mine bitcoins. Not commonly due to how detectible it is, but it's being done. This hasn't caught on yet: http://www.bitcoinplus.com/generate If the FBI consider it easier to track people converting Bitcoins into fiat currencies (their words), the solution is simple: don't convert them. Blackhats are already using Bitcoins to pay for services, including periods of DDoS attack against arbitrary targets and selling weaponized exploits. Judging from the reputation tracking on the Silk Road for such services, somebody's got to be getting their money's worth... We had best tread carefully. Or start working on developing an disseminating a memetic counterattack. -- The Doctor [412/724/301/703] https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ "I am everywhere." -- Zero State mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/DoctrineZero ----- 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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[BI] Goverment asking libraries to destroy government reports
by Jonathan Grobe 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Not only is the government removing much material from its websites it is also asking depository libraries (which are sent government reports free) to remove and destroy many government reports--because of the recent terrorist incidents. Any comments? Any bookdealers destroying books which they think might be useful to terrorists? http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-111801inform.story Here is a discussion about this at Slashdot (a popular discussion forum for computer nerds). http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/18/2258258&mode=thread -- Jonathan Grobe -- Remember September 11, 2001 but don't forget July 4, 1776 Rather than make war on the American people and their liberties, ...Congress should be looking for ways to empower them to protect themselves when warranted. They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin

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FC: Chuck Schumer wants to invade privacy of gun buyers, open NICS database
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Thanks to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), one of our great champions of privacy, private property, and limited government, any American buying a gun from a dealer or other licensed seller may have their name permanently embedded in the FBI's NICS database. Currently federal law (http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/922.html) orders the FBI to "destroy all records" of a gun purchase that is approved as lawful. Naturally those champions of individual liberty at the FBI and Justice Department have creatively interpreted this straightforward requirement -- to mean precisely the opposite of what the law says. Thus records have been kept for a period of 90 to 180 days. Schumer's bill would "allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation to access NICS audit log records for the purpose of responding to an inquiry from any federal, state, or local law enforcement agency in connection with a civil or criminal law enforcement investigation." Seems to me that would let the FBI access and store records of the vast bulk of firearm purchasers from this point on, if this bill were to become law. Here's the text of Schumer's proposal: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:s.01788: Naturally the section reducing the privacy of lawabiding Americans is titled "privacy protection." Glad to know that Schumer hasn't lost his touch. -Declan (Note: Not all U.S. firearm purchases must go through a dealer who checks in with the NICS database. Private sales are still, for now, allowed without federal records kept.) *********** http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=\Nation\archive\200112\NAT200112… Senators Propose 'Gun Owner Registration' By Jeff Johnson CNSNews.com Congressional Bureau Chief December 17, 2001 Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com) - Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) wants the Department of Justice to keep personal data on law-abiding gun buyers from the National Instant Check System (NICS), and to offer the information for unlimited use by state and local agencies. National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre called the move "gun owner registration, plain and simple." Making good on a promise he made during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing December 6, Schumer introduced the "Use NICS in Terrorist Investigations Act" (S. 1788) after Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to allow the FBI access to NICS records of lawful gun purchases. *********** CENTER-RIGHT, a free weeklyish e-newsletter of centrist, conservative, and libertarian ideas Issue 187, Dec 10, 2001 ======================================================== "Terrorism and Guns: Ashcroft's 'coddling' of gun owners," by Dave Kopel (http://www.davekopel.com) Independence Institute, and Prof. Glenn Reynolds (http://www.instapundit.com) Univ. of Tennessee from the National Review Online, Dec. 17, 2001, http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel121701.shtml Attorney General John Ashcroft has come under fire for what Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant calls "coddling" gun owners. Oliphant's attack was the latest round in the concerted assault on Ashcroft's Second Amendment positions, which started this spring when Ashcroft announced his view (since supported by the recent U.S. Court of Appeals decision in United States v. Emerson, http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/99/99-10331-cr0.htm) that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to arms. Ashcroft's stance was consistent with that of the attorneys general for Ronald Reagan, Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson, among others (http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel052901.shtml) It was also consistent with most Supreme Court statements citing the Second Amendment, including everything the Rehnquist Court has ever said (http://www.davekopel.com/2A/LawRev/35FinalPartOne.htm) Ashcroft's view mirrored repeated congressional declarations of the individual right to arms -- including in the Freedmen's Bureau Act of 1866, the Property Requisition Act of 1941, and the Firearms Owners' Protection Act of 1986. It's also compatible with a wide variety of gun controls, as demonstrated by the Court of Appeals decision in Emerson, which ruled that the particular federal gun law at issue did not violate the Second Amendment. Ashcroft was, however, out of step with the antigun groups, who recognize that a meaningful Second Amendment makes it impossible to ban guns across the board. For the same reason, the attorney general was out of step with the position of the Clinton/Gore/Reno administration. Indeed, the difference between the Bush/Ashcroft view of the Second Amendment (http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment050500a.html) and the Clinton/Gore/Reno view was -- as President Clinton admitted -- the reason Gore lost five close states, and thus the election. Still smarting from that humiliation, gun prohibition groups have decided to attack Ashcroft for obeying federal gun statutes and for complying with a regulation created by Attorney General Janet Reno. Last week, on the morning Ashcroft was scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield turned a press release from a gun-prohibition group, the Violence Policy Center (http://www.vpc.org/press/0112ash.htm) into a Times article. Ashcroft's opponents on the Senate Judiciary then used the article to excoriate Ashcroft for obeying the law. Predictably, gun-prohibition sympathizers like Oliphant and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Cynthia Tucker have begun piling on. At issue was Ashcroft's decision to tell the FBI that it couldn't start rummaging though the federal records of *legal* gun buyers as part of its terrorism investigation. Indeed, the law forbids the keeping of such records in the first place. It does, however, authorize the federal government to retain records of people -- such as illegal aliens, or people with temporary visas -- who illegally attempt to buy guns. Those records are available to the FBI for any and every law enforcement purpose. Mr. Butterfield didn't bother to inform his Times readers about what federal law actually says. So let's examine the laws directly. Since 1998, all federally regulated gun purchases require that the buyer obtain approval from the FBI's "National Instant-Check System," which ensures that the buyer is not a "prohibited person." NICS checks the buyer's name against a database of felons and other prohibited people. The NRA had pushed the instant check as an alternative to the Brady Bill's waiting period. As a compromise, Congress made the waiting period effective for five years (1994-98) for handguns only, to be replaced in 1998 by the instant check on all guns. Determined to prevent NICS from being perverted into a gun registration system, Congress -- thanks to votes of many Brady Bill supporters -- specifically forbade the government to compile records of lawful purchasers. As enacted, the national instant check law, 18 U.S. Code 922(t) (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/ts_search.pl?title=18&sec=922) provides that: (2) If receipt of a firearm would not violate subsection (g) or (n) or State law, the [Instant-Check] system shall -- (A) assign a unique identification number to the transfer; (B) provide the licensee with the number; and (C) destroy all records of the system with respect to the call (other than the identifying number and the date the number was assigned) and all records of the system relating to the person or the transfer. (Emphasis added.) This means, of course, that if the feds were following the law, there wouldn't be any records to examine, since they're supposed to be destroyed once a sale is approved. It also means that every congressman who voted for final passage of the Brady Act in 1993 (including Senators Kennedy, Biden, and Leahy, as well as then-Representative Schumer) voted for this explicit ban on keeping the federal records of legal gun buyers. The 1993 prohibition was reinforcing a 1986 Congressional statute, the Firearms Owners' Protection Act (FOPA), which creates a blanket ban on a federal gun registry. The relevant part of FOPA, 18 U.S. Code 926 (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/ts_search.pl?title=18&sec=926) provides: (a) The Secretary may prescribe only such rules and regulations as are necessary to carry out the provisions of this chapter... No such rule or regulation prescribed after the date of the enactment of the Firearms Owners' Protection Act may require that records required to be maintained under this chapter or any portion of the contents of such records, be recorded at or transferred to a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the United States or any State or any political subdivision thereof, nor that any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions be established. Nothing in this section expands or restricts the Secretary's authority to inquire into the disposition of any firearm in the course of a criminal investigation. Of the current members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who were in the Senate in 1986, only Kennedy voted against passage of FOPA. Senators Biden, Leahy, Hatch, Thurmond, Grassely, and Specter all voted for it, and hence for the registration ban. In addition, the annual appropriation for the Department of the Treasury (which controls the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) always contains a ban on spending any funds for creation of a federal gun registry. Quite plainly, all this means that (1) records aren't supposed to be kept on legal purchases of firearms, and (2) it's illegal to establish a national gun registration system. This was underscored in the recent case of RSM v. Buckles, 254 F.3d 61 (4th Cir. 2001) (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=4th&navby=case&no=00…) where the federal Court of Appeals pointed out that the government's power to scrutinize gun records was limited, and that a national gun-registration system -- even one established through "backdoor efforts" -- was illegal. Even so, when preparing to implement the National Instant Check System, then-Attorney General Reno announced that the government would keep records on lawful gun purchasers for 180 days. The stated purpose of these records was to audit NICS, to make sure it wasn't being misused (e.g., to ensure that gun dealers were not requesting instant checks on people who were not their customers -- for example, in case a gun-store owner started requesting background checks on his daughter's boyfriends). The NRA sued, arguing that by saying the records had to be destroyed, Congress did not mean they should be destroyed "eventually, when the Attorney General gets around to it." The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in a 2-1 decision (http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment081000a.shtml) upheld the 180-day record retention. The majority opinion, written by a Clinton appointee, claimed that federal law "does not prohibit all forms of registration." The Clinton majority also asserted that because Congress did not say the records had to be destroyed "immediately," the records could be destroyed sooner -- or later. Dissenting, Judge David B. Sentelle, a Reagan appointee, retorted that Congress had been perfectly clear. "The Attorney General's position," wrote Sentelle, "strikes me as reminiscent of a petulant child pulling her sister's hair. Her mother tells her, 'Don't pull the baby's hair.' The child says, 'All right, Mama,' but again pulls the infant's hair. Her defense is, 'Mama, you didn't say I had to stop right now.'" The Senate responded to Reno's machinations by restating its 1993 intent. In 1998, Senator Bob Smith (R., N.H.) proposed a rider to an appropriations bill to mandate immediate records destruction. The Senate approved the Smith Amendment, 69 to 31, thanks in part to the support of Senators Daschle, Leahy, and Murray. Later, a conference committee stripped the Smith Amendment, as well as some other non-appropriations riders, from the appropriation bill. During the 2000 election, candidate Bush condemned the Clinton/Gore/Reno registry of legal gun buyers, and promised to terminate it. Meanwhile, Reno promulgated a regulation cutting the retention time to 90 days. The Reno regulation forbids the use of the NICS registry for general law enforcement purposes, while allowing registry use for auditing the performance of NICS, as well as for civil or criminal cases arising from the operation of NICS. Thus, it is plainly illegal for the FBI to dig into the NICS registry for general investigations. Had Attorney General Ashcroft allowed such access, he would have violated the law. (This summer, Ashcroft proposed a revised regulation to cut the retention time to 24 hours, but even this shorter time period violates the congressional mandate that records be destroyed, not kept for "a short period of time.") Fox Butterfield neglected to tell his readers about the 1986 law forbidding a federal gun registry. He also didn't tell them about the 1993 law mandating destruction of records on legal buyers. Of the Smith Amendment -- which passed the Senate 69-31 -- Butterfield wrote, "That amendment was defeated." The Senate Democrats had some basis for being angry with Ashcroft after he began the Senate hearing by declaring, "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve." Ashcroft may be correct that his proposals are important for antiterrorism, and do not violate the Constitution. But our system of checks and balances works best when all potential civil-liberties restrictions are subjected to critical public scrutiny. Indeed, the value of the Leahy/ACLU loyal opposition was demonstrated at the Ashcroft hearing, when the attorney general promised the military tribunals would not normally meet in secret, and would be confined exclusively to terrorist offenses. (Both positions are much more rights-protective than the text of President Bush's November 13 executive order authorizing the tribunals.) Ashcroft's harsh words against the skeptics were unfortunately reminiscent of Bill Clinton's denunciation (http://www.davekopel.com/Terror/LawRev/Preventing_a_Reign_of_Terror.htm) of the civil liberties groups that lobbied against his plan to use the Oklahoma City bombing as a pretext for a huge expansion of federal surveillance and wiretapping, and use of the military in domestic law enforcement -- although none of the Clinton proposals would even arguably have prevented the bombing. The Democrats also feel betrayed that the Bush administration announced the military tribunals, the eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations, and similar new measures before the ink was barely dry on the misnamed USA Patriot Act (http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel092101.shtml) in which Senate had caved in to administration pressure for even more government surveillance, and for the power to conduct secret searches of homes and businesses. These new laws do not sunset and are not restricted to terrorism cases; they apply as well to federal enforcement of laws about pornography, drugs, endangered species, child support, and everything else. After the House Judiciary Committee unanimously passed a much better, and properly focused, antiterrorism bill, Tom Daschle pressured Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Pat Leahy to surrender to Ashcroft's demands for a much broader bill. Leahy, did so. Leahy & co. feel double-crossed now that the administration has implemented military tribunals by executive decree, after Congress had already given the administration almost everything it asked for. A proper response would be for the Senate Judiciary to commence hearings on repealing or sun setting the many non-terrorism provisions of the USA Patriot Act, which consist mostly of items that have been on the FBI bureaucracy's wish list for many years, and that had never been able to pass previous Congresses. Instead, we have the absurd spectacle of senators denouncing the attorney general for respecting civil liberties, and for obeying federal statutes and his predecessor's regulation. At Ashcroft's confirmation hearings, Democrats extracted absolute promises that he would obey and enforce all the laws, even ones he disagrees with. Now, he's being skewered for not inventing a loophole in federal laws that allow no room for loopholes. Would it make sense for Congress to change the law to allow registration of legal gun purchasers, to assist terrorism investigations? No one has yet made such a case. The FBI has gone fishing for every possible bit of information on the 600 aliens who have been detained. This doesn't mean that we need to drastically reduce the privacy of half our citizen population (about half of all households own guns) simply for the sake of fishing expeditions. Remember, current law allows record retention for people who illegally attempt to buy guns. It would also allow putting the name of every alien with a temporary visa, and every known illegal alien, into the FBI database of prohibited persons -- since those people cannot buy guns lawfully. [18 USC Sec. 922(d)(5)(B) & (g)(5)(B) (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/ts_search.pl?title=18&sec=922) Yet the St. Petersburg Times, perhaps the most antigun daily newspaper in America, wrongly told its readers last Sunday that Ashcroft had cut off access to records of illegal aliens who had been stopped from buying guns. Current law also allows gun tracing -- the investigation of the sales history of a particular firearm. If the FBI finds a firearm in the home of a detained person, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is allowed to trace the gun (using its serial number) from its manufacturer to the wholesaler to the retail store. From there, the BATF can interview the person who bought the gun, whoever he transferred it to, and so on. As part of the tracing that is already allowed, the BATF compiles lists of guns used in crimes, and can trace ownership records. The BATF has successfully connected some of the guns on its trace list with some of the detained people. We don't know if any of the detained people had permanent resident status (which would allow them to buy guns). It's also possible that an illegal alien or a temporary could obtain a driver's license in his own name, buy a gun, and get approved by NICS. The problem is that, according to the General Accounting Office, some -- but not all -- non-immigrant aliens and known illegal aliens are put on the NICS prohibited list. What we need is better record keeping on aliens, not on law-abiding Americans. Yet -- even for aliens who slipped through the current, incomplete NICS list -- if anyone purchases more than one handgun in a five-day period, his purchases are reported to federal and local law enforcement, and those records are currently available for checking (http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/get-cfr.cgi?TITLE=27&PART=178&SECTI…) It might help the FBI to gather information on detained suspects if every time a person checked into a hotel or motel, a record were kept by the federal government. They could then study the suspect's travel patterns. Yet we don't register all hotel and motel stays for the entire population. The privacy interests of the American people are held to outweigh the possible benefit to law enforcement. Similarly, we could require the registration of everyone who purchases or checks out a book on nuclear physics or biological or chemical warfare. It's hard to deny that it would be helpful for the FBI to be able to check this database against the names of the detainees. But we don't keep lists of people who own books -- even especially dangerous or incriminating books -- because First Amendment and privacy rights are more important. The case against gun registration is stronger still. Even besides the privacy issue, there is the undeniable fact that gun registration lists have been repeatedly used for gun confiscation. This has happened in California, New York City, England, Canada, Australia, and Nazi-occupied Europe, among other places. Before Sarah Brady became head of Handgun Control, Inc. (now renamed "The Brady Campaign"), her predecessor, the late Nelson T. "Pete" Shields, explained the plan to The New Yorker in 1976: The first problem is to slow down the number of handguns being produced and sold in this country. The second problem is to get handguns registered. The final problem is to make possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition -- except for the military, police, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors -- totally illegal. [Richard Harris, "A Reporter at Large: Handguns," New Yorker, July 26, 1976, p. 58.] Gun confiscation is, of course, an indispensable tool for tyranny, as our Founders knew -- and as Mullah Omar proved quite recently. As the Boston Globe reported (http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/343/nation/How_Omar_led_Taliban_to_power_…) Omar guaranteed the residents a peaceful and secure community if they agreed to surrender their arms to him. If the residents were ever threatened by someone from outside, Omar pledged to be responsible for their safety. Within three or four days, everybody in the town surrendered their weapons to Omar... Congress was right to outlaw federal gun registration, and Attorney General Ashcroft is right to obey the law. The media and the Senate -- which behaved with such irresponsible passivity when Ashcroft rammed the so-called "USA Patriot Act" through Congress -- ought to stop demanding infringements of the Second Amendment. Instead, they should start opposing all efforts to further erode the Bill of Rights. Attorney General Ashcroft, meanwhile, needs to stop denouncing those who are defending the Fourth and Fifth Amendments with the same commendable scrupulousness with which he protects the Second. ========= CENTER-RIGHT is edited by Eugene Volokh, who teaches constitutional law, copyright law, and a seminar on firearms regulation at UCLA Law School (http://www.law.ucla.edu/faculty/volokh) and organized with the help of Terry Wynn and the Federalist Society (http://www.fed-soc.org/) Check out (and link to) our Web site, http://www.center-right.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -----

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Pseudonymity for tor: nym-0.1 (fwd)
by Jason Holt 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 01:49:26 +0000 (UTC) From: Jason Holt <jason(a)lunkwill.org> To: or-talk(a)seul.org Subject: Pseudonymity for tor: nym-0.1 Per the recent discussion regarding tor and wikipedia, I've hacked together an implementation of the basic system from Chaum, Fiat and Naor's 1990 "Untraceable Electronic Cash" paper. This system allows CAs to blindly issue tokens (or "coins") which can then be "spent" elsewhere. It runs in perl, and comprises a CA, nym-maker, client application and auth checker (for the server). The tarball is here: http://www.lunkwill.org/src/nym/ Of course, it's useless at the moment since it gives out tokens indiscriminately (and probably has massive bugs), but if anyone actually cares about this idea, it will be (more or less) easy to do the following: * Put up a sample CA and server that people can use (potentially as hidden services). * Make the CA issue only one token per email address, or one token per IP address, one per computational puzzle, one for every $20 mailed in... * Automatically expire CA keys and generate new ones on a regular basis (rather than bothering with CRLs) * Instead of randomly generated tokens, have the CA sign an actual X.509 cert request, which will then become a perfectly valid X.509 cert useful as a client-side cert in unmodified browsers and web servers * Create some sort of aid for maintaining server-side (or CA) blacklists of improperly behaving users * Check to see if the protocol is actually still secure and properly implemented. Comments welcome. -J --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 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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[BI] Goverment asking libraries to destroy government reports
by Jonathan Grobe 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Not only is the government removing much material from its websites it is also asking depository libraries (which are sent government reports free) to remove and destroy many government reports--because of the recent terrorist incidents. Any comments? Any bookdealers destroying books which they think might be useful to terrorists? http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-111801inform.story Here is a discussion about this at Slashdot (a popular discussion forum for computer nerds). http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/18/2258258&mode=thread -- Jonathan Grobe -- Remember September 11, 2001 but don't forget July 4, 1776 Rather than make war on the American people and their liberties, ...Congress should be looking for ways to empower them to protect themselves when warranted. They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin

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FC: Chuck Schumer wants to invade privacy of gun buyers, open NICS database
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Thanks to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), one of our great champions of privacy, private property, and limited government, any American buying a gun from a dealer or other licensed seller may have their name permanently embedded in the FBI's NICS database. Currently federal law (http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/922.html) orders the FBI to "destroy all records" of a gun purchase that is approved as lawful. Naturally those champions of individual liberty at the FBI and Justice Department have creatively interpreted this straightforward requirement -- to mean precisely the opposite of what the law says. Thus records have been kept for a period of 90 to 180 days. Schumer's bill would "allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation to access NICS audit log records for the purpose of responding to an inquiry from any federal, state, or local law enforcement agency in connection with a civil or criminal law enforcement investigation." Seems to me that would let the FBI access and store records of the vast bulk of firearm purchasers from this point on, if this bill were to become law. Here's the text of Schumer's proposal: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:s.01788: Naturally the section reducing the privacy of lawabiding Americans is titled "privacy protection." Glad to know that Schumer hasn't lost his touch. -Declan (Note: Not all U.S. firearm purchases must go through a dealer who checks in with the NICS database. Private sales are still, for now, allowed without federal records kept.) *********** http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=\Nation\archive\200112\NAT200112… Senators Propose 'Gun Owner Registration' By Jeff Johnson CNSNews.com Congressional Bureau Chief December 17, 2001 Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com) - Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) wants the Department of Justice to keep personal data on law-abiding gun buyers from the National Instant Check System (NICS), and to offer the information for unlimited use by state and local agencies. National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre called the move "gun owner registration, plain and simple." Making good on a promise he made during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing December 6, Schumer introduced the "Use NICS in Terrorist Investigations Act" (S. 1788) after Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to allow the FBI access to NICS records of lawful gun purchases. *********** CENTER-RIGHT, a free weeklyish e-newsletter of centrist, conservative, and libertarian ideas Issue 187, Dec 10, 2001 ======================================================== "Terrorism and Guns: Ashcroft's 'coddling' of gun owners," by Dave Kopel (http://www.davekopel.com) Independence Institute, and Prof. Glenn Reynolds (http://www.instapundit.com) Univ. of Tennessee from the National Review Online, Dec. 17, 2001, http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel121701.shtml Attorney General John Ashcroft has come under fire for what Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant calls "coddling" gun owners. Oliphant's attack was the latest round in the concerted assault on Ashcroft's Second Amendment positions, which started this spring when Ashcroft announced his view (since supported by the recent U.S. Court of Appeals decision in United States v. Emerson, http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/99/99-10331-cr0.htm) that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to arms. Ashcroft's stance was consistent with that of the attorneys general for Ronald Reagan, Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson, among others (http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel052901.shtml) It was also consistent with most Supreme Court statements citing the Second Amendment, including everything the Rehnquist Court has ever said (http://www.davekopel.com/2A/LawRev/35FinalPartOne.htm) Ashcroft's view mirrored repeated congressional declarations of the individual right to arms -- including in the Freedmen's Bureau Act of 1866, the Property Requisition Act of 1941, and the Firearms Owners' Protection Act of 1986. It's also compatible with a wide variety of gun controls, as demonstrated by the Court of Appeals decision in Emerson, which ruled that the particular federal gun law at issue did not violate the Second Amendment. Ashcroft was, however, out of step with the antigun groups, who recognize that a meaningful Second Amendment makes it impossible to ban guns across the board. For the same reason, the attorney general was out of step with the position of the Clinton/Gore/Reno administration. Indeed, the difference between the Bush/Ashcroft view of the Second Amendment (http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment050500a.html) and the Clinton/Gore/Reno view was -- as President Clinton admitted -- the reason Gore lost five close states, and thus the election. Still smarting from that humiliation, gun prohibition groups have decided to attack Ashcroft for obeying federal gun statutes and for complying with a regulation created by Attorney General Janet Reno. Last week, on the morning Ashcroft was scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield turned a press release from a gun-prohibition group, the Violence Policy Center (http://www.vpc.org/press/0112ash.htm) into a Times article. Ashcroft's opponents on the Senate Judiciary then used the article to excoriate Ashcroft for obeying the law. Predictably, gun-prohibition sympathizers like Oliphant and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Cynthia Tucker have begun piling on. At issue was Ashcroft's decision to tell the FBI that it couldn't start rummaging though the federal records of *legal* gun buyers as part of its terrorism investigation. Indeed, the law forbids the keeping of such records in the first place. It does, however, authorize the federal government to retain records of people -- such as illegal aliens, or people with temporary visas -- who illegally attempt to buy guns. Those records are available to the FBI for any and every law enforcement purpose. Mr. Butterfield didn't bother to inform his Times readers about what federal law actually says. So let's examine the laws directly. Since 1998, all federally regulated gun purchases require that the buyer obtain approval from the FBI's "National Instant-Check System," which ensures that the buyer is not a "prohibited person." NICS checks the buyer's name against a database of felons and other prohibited people. The NRA had pushed the instant check as an alternative to the Brady Bill's waiting period. As a compromise, Congress made the waiting period effective for five years (1994-98) for handguns only, to be replaced in 1998 by the instant check on all guns. Determined to prevent NICS from being perverted into a gun registration system, Congress -- thanks to votes of many Brady Bill supporters -- specifically forbade the government to compile records of lawful purchasers. As enacted, the national instant check law, 18 U.S. Code 922(t) (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/ts_search.pl?title=18&sec=922) provides that: (2) If receipt of a firearm would not violate subsection (g) or (n) or State law, the [Instant-Check] system shall -- (A) assign a unique identification number to the transfer; (B) provide the licensee with the number; and (C) destroy all records of the system with respect to the call (other than the identifying number and the date the number was assigned) and all records of the system relating to the person or the transfer. (Emphasis added.) This means, of course, that if the feds were following the law, there wouldn't be any records to examine, since they're supposed to be destroyed once a sale is approved. It also means that every congressman who voted for final passage of the Brady Act in 1993 (including Senators Kennedy, Biden, and Leahy, as well as then-Representative Schumer) voted for this explicit ban on keeping the federal records of legal gun buyers. The 1993 prohibition was reinforcing a 1986 Congressional statute, the Firearms Owners' Protection Act (FOPA), which creates a blanket ban on a federal gun registry. The relevant part of FOPA, 18 U.S. Code 926 (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/ts_search.pl?title=18&sec=926) provides: (a) The Secretary may prescribe only such rules and regulations as are necessary to carry out the provisions of this chapter... No such rule or regulation prescribed after the date of the enactment of the Firearms Owners' Protection Act may require that records required to be maintained under this chapter or any portion of the contents of such records, be recorded at or transferred to a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the United States or any State or any political subdivision thereof, nor that any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions be established. Nothing in this section expands or restricts the Secretary's authority to inquire into the disposition of any firearm in the course of a criminal investigation. Of the current members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who were in the Senate in 1986, only Kennedy voted against passage of FOPA. Senators Biden, Leahy, Hatch, Thurmond, Grassely, and Specter all voted for it, and hence for the registration ban. In addition, the annual appropriation for the Department of the Treasury (which controls the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) always contains a ban on spending any funds for creation of a federal gun registry. Quite plainly, all this means that (1) records aren't supposed to be kept on legal purchases of firearms, and (2) it's illegal to establish a national gun registration system. This was underscored in the recent case of RSM v. Buckles, 254 F.3d 61 (4th Cir. 2001) (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=4th&navby=case&no=00…) where the federal Court of Appeals pointed out that the government's power to scrutinize gun records was limited, and that a national gun-registration system -- even one established through "backdoor efforts" -- was illegal. Even so, when preparing to implement the National Instant Check System, then-Attorney General Reno announced that the government would keep records on lawful gun purchasers for 180 days. The stated purpose of these records was to audit NICS, to make sure it wasn't being misused (e.g., to ensure that gun dealers were not requesting instant checks on people who were not their customers -- for example, in case a gun-store owner started requesting background checks on his daughter's boyfriends). The NRA sued, arguing that by saying the records had to be destroyed, Congress did not mean they should be destroyed "eventually, when the Attorney General gets around to it." The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in a 2-1 decision (http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment081000a.shtml) upheld the 180-day record retention. The majority opinion, written by a Clinton appointee, claimed that federal law "does not prohibit all forms of registration." The Clinton majority also asserted that because Congress did not say the records had to be destroyed "immediately," the records could be destroyed sooner -- or later. Dissenting, Judge David B. Sentelle, a Reagan appointee, retorted that Congress had been perfectly clear. "The Attorney General's position," wrote Sentelle, "strikes me as reminiscent of a petulant child pulling her sister's hair. Her mother tells her, 'Don't pull the baby's hair.' The child says, 'All right, Mama,' but again pulls the infant's hair. Her defense is, 'Mama, you didn't say I had to stop right now.'" The Senate responded to Reno's machinations by restating its 1993 intent. In 1998, Senator Bob Smith (R., N.H.) proposed a rider to an appropriations bill to mandate immediate records destruction. The Senate approved the Smith Amendment, 69 to 31, thanks in part to the support of Senators Daschle, Leahy, and Murray. Later, a conference committee stripped the Smith Amendment, as well as some other non-appropriations riders, from the appropriation bill. During the 2000 election, candidate Bush condemned the Clinton/Gore/Reno registry of legal gun buyers, and promised to terminate it. Meanwhile, Reno promulgated a regulation cutting the retention time to 90 days. The Reno regulation forbids the use of the NICS registry for general law enforcement purposes, while allowing registry use for auditing the performance of NICS, as well as for civil or criminal cases arising from the operation of NICS. Thus, it is plainly illegal for the FBI to dig into the NICS registry for general investigations. Had Attorney General Ashcroft allowed such access, he would have violated the law. (This summer, Ashcroft proposed a revised regulation to cut the retention time to 24 hours, but even this shorter time period violates the congressional mandate that records be destroyed, not kept for "a short period of time.") Fox Butterfield neglected to tell his readers about the 1986 law forbidding a federal gun registry. He also didn't tell them about the 1993 law mandating destruction of records on legal buyers. Of the Smith Amendment -- which passed the Senate 69-31 -- Butterfield wrote, "That amendment was defeated." The Senate Democrats had some basis for being angry with Ashcroft after he began the Senate hearing by declaring, "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve." Ashcroft may be correct that his proposals are important for antiterrorism, and do not violate the Constitution. But our system of checks and balances works best when all potential civil-liberties restrictions are subjected to critical public scrutiny. Indeed, the value of the Leahy/ACLU loyal opposition was demonstrated at the Ashcroft hearing, when the attorney general promised the military tribunals would not normally meet in secret, and would be confined exclusively to terrorist offenses. (Both positions are much more rights-protective than the text of President Bush's November 13 executive order authorizing the tribunals.) Ashcroft's harsh words against the skeptics were unfortunately reminiscent of Bill Clinton's denunciation (http://www.davekopel.com/Terror/LawRev/Preventing_a_Reign_of_Terror.htm) of the civil liberties groups that lobbied against his plan to use the Oklahoma City bombing as a pretext for a huge expansion of federal surveillance and wiretapping, and use of the military in domestic law enforcement -- although none of the Clinton proposals would even arguably have prevented the bombing. The Democrats also feel betrayed that the Bush administration announced the military tribunals, the eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations, and similar new measures before the ink was barely dry on the misnamed USA Patriot Act (http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel092101.shtml) in which Senate had caved in to administration pressure for even more government surveillance, and for the power to conduct secret searches of homes and businesses. These new laws do not sunset and are not restricted to terrorism cases; they apply as well to federal enforcement of laws about pornography, drugs, endangered species, child support, and everything else. After the House Judiciary Committee unanimously passed a much better, and properly focused, antiterrorism bill, Tom Daschle pressured Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Pat Leahy to surrender to Ashcroft's demands for a much broader bill. Leahy, did so. Leahy & co. feel double-crossed now that the administration has implemented military tribunals by executive decree, after Congress had already given the administration almost everything it asked for. A proper response would be for the Senate Judiciary to commence hearings on repealing or sun setting the many non-terrorism provisions of the USA Patriot Act, which consist mostly of items that have been on the FBI bureaucracy's wish list for many years, and that had never been able to pass previous Congresses. Instead, we have the absurd spectacle of senators denouncing the attorney general for respecting civil liberties, and for obeying federal statutes and his predecessor's regulation. At Ashcroft's confirmation hearings, Democrats extracted absolute promises that he would obey and enforce all the laws, even ones he disagrees with. Now, he's being skewered for not inventing a loophole in federal laws that allow no room for loopholes. Would it make sense for Congress to change the law to allow registration of legal gun purchasers, to assist terrorism investigations? No one has yet made such a case. The FBI has gone fishing for every possible bit of information on the 600 aliens who have been detained. This doesn't mean that we need to drastically reduce the privacy of half our citizen population (about half of all households own guns) simply for the sake of fishing expeditions. Remember, current law allows record retention for people who illegally attempt to buy guns. It would also allow putting the name of every alien with a temporary visa, and every known illegal alien, into the FBI database of prohibited persons -- since those people cannot buy guns lawfully. [18 USC Sec. 922(d)(5)(B) & (g)(5)(B) (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/ts_search.pl?title=18&sec=922) Yet the St. Petersburg Times, perhaps the most antigun daily newspaper in America, wrongly told its readers last Sunday that Ashcroft had cut off access to records of illegal aliens who had been stopped from buying guns. Current law also allows gun tracing -- the investigation of the sales history of a particular firearm. If the FBI finds a firearm in the home of a detained person, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is allowed to trace the gun (using its serial number) from its manufacturer to the wholesaler to the retail store. From there, the BATF can interview the person who bought the gun, whoever he transferred it to, and so on. As part of the tracing that is already allowed, the BATF compiles lists of guns used in crimes, and can trace ownership records. The BATF has successfully connected some of the guns on its trace list with some of the detained people. We don't know if any of the detained people had permanent resident status (which would allow them to buy guns). It's also possible that an illegal alien or a temporary could obtain a driver's license in his own name, buy a gun, and get approved by NICS. The problem is that, according to the General Accounting Office, some -- but not all -- non-immigrant aliens and known illegal aliens are put on the NICS prohibited list. What we need is better record keeping on aliens, not on law-abiding Americans. Yet -- even for aliens who slipped through the current, incomplete NICS list -- if anyone purchases more than one handgun in a five-day period, his purchases are reported to federal and local law enforcement, and those records are currently available for checking (http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/get-cfr.cgi?TITLE=27&PART=178&SECTI…) It might help the FBI to gather information on detained suspects if every time a person checked into a hotel or motel, a record were kept by the federal government. They could then study the suspect's travel patterns. Yet we don't register all hotel and motel stays for the entire population. The privacy interests of the American people are held to outweigh the possible benefit to law enforcement. Similarly, we could require the registration of everyone who purchases or checks out a book on nuclear physics or biological or chemical warfare. It's hard to deny that it would be helpful for the FBI to be able to check this database against the names of the detainees. But we don't keep lists of people who own books -- even especially dangerous or incriminating books -- because First Amendment and privacy rights are more important. The case against gun registration is stronger still. Even besides the privacy issue, there is the undeniable fact that gun registration lists have been repeatedly used for gun confiscation. This has happened in California, New York City, England, Canada, Australia, and Nazi-occupied Europe, among other places. Before Sarah Brady became head of Handgun Control, Inc. (now renamed "The Brady Campaign"), her predecessor, the late Nelson T. "Pete" Shields, explained the plan to The New Yorker in 1976: The first problem is to slow down the number of handguns being produced and sold in this country. The second problem is to get handguns registered. The final problem is to make possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition -- except for the military, police, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors -- totally illegal. [Richard Harris, "A Reporter at Large: Handguns," New Yorker, July 26, 1976, p. 58.] Gun confiscation is, of course, an indispensable tool for tyranny, as our Founders knew -- and as Mullah Omar proved quite recently. As the Boston Globe reported (http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/343/nation/How_Omar_led_Taliban_to_power_…) Omar guaranteed the residents a peaceful and secure community if they agreed to surrender their arms to him. If the residents were ever threatened by someone from outside, Omar pledged to be responsible for their safety. Within three or four days, everybody in the town surrendered their weapons to Omar... Congress was right to outlaw federal gun registration, and Attorney General Ashcroft is right to obey the law. The media and the Senate -- which behaved with such irresponsible passivity when Ashcroft rammed the so-called "USA Patriot Act" through Congress -- ought to stop demanding infringements of the Second Amendment. Instead, they should start opposing all efforts to further erode the Bill of Rights. Attorney General Ashcroft, meanwhile, needs to stop denouncing those who are defending the Fourth and Fifth Amendments with the same commendable scrupulousness with which he protects the Second. ========= CENTER-RIGHT is edited by Eugene Volokh, who teaches constitutional law, copyright law, and a seminar on firearms regulation at UCLA Law School (http://www.law.ucla.edu/faculty/volokh) and organized with the help of Terry Wynn and the Federalist Society (http://www.fed-soc.org/) Check out (and link to) our Web site, http://www.center-right.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -----

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Pseudonymity for tor: nym-0.1 (fwd)
by Jason Holt 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 01:49:26 +0000 (UTC) From: Jason Holt <jason(a)lunkwill.org> To: or-talk(a)seul.org Subject: Pseudonymity for tor: nym-0.1 Per the recent discussion regarding tor and wikipedia, I've hacked together an implementation of the basic system from Chaum, Fiat and Naor's 1990 "Untraceable Electronic Cash" paper. This system allows CAs to blindly issue tokens (or "coins") which can then be "spent" elsewhere. It runs in perl, and comprises a CA, nym-maker, client application and auth checker (for the server). The tarball is here: http://www.lunkwill.org/src/nym/ Of course, it's useless at the moment since it gives out tokens indiscriminately (and probably has massive bugs), but if anyone actually cares about this idea, it will be (more or less) easy to do the following: * Put up a sample CA and server that people can use (potentially as hidden services). * Make the CA issue only one token per email address, or one token per IP address, one per computational puzzle, one for every $20 mailed in... * Automatically expire CA keys and generate new ones on a regular basis (rather than bothering with CRLs) * Instead of randomly generated tokens, have the CA sign an actual X.509 cert request, which will then become a perfectly valid X.509 cert useful as a client-side cert in unmodified browsers and web servers * Create some sort of aid for maintaining server-side (or CA) blacklists of improperly behaving users * Check to see if the protocol is actually still secure and properly implemented. Comments welcome. -J --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 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] Tor and P2P
by grarpamp 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

> Loads of links here: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_P2P Always a good read :) Part of me wants to see if one giant anonymous general purpose filesystem will ever come about... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_systems#Distributed_file_systems > A very interesting idea is/was the owner free filesystem: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFFSystem I think this required the use of https to be fully secure, just a bit of extra setup for that is all. > Depending on ones individual threat model, I believe i2p could > be sufficiently secure for file sharing purposes: > http://www.i2p2.de/ They use it a lot for that. Admittedly I really should learn more about the full mechanics of this one. > I didn't make an academic comparison, but it looks like retroshare > is quickly gaining more and more users: > http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend-to-friend When I last looked briefly at this one a couple years back, the users were not necessarily anonymous to each other. It seemed to require users to know and/or trust one another. If that was the case, anonymous transport layer would have been required underneath it to match the level of anonymity the three projects I listed. Maybe they solved that since then? _______________________________________________ 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: [liberationtech] Why Skype (real-time) is losing out to WeChat (async)
by Nathan of Guardian 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On 12/26/2012 12:34 PM, Eric S Johnson wrote: > Nathan, you've doubtless seen this article. What do your Tibetan friends say > about this? It is a great article, and such a short, fascinating study into the mindset of an activist under clear, demonstrable state surveillance. I think the point about the greater efficiency these tools (aka moving to IP based comms vs. GSM/Telco) have given the state security/PSB is the most important one. "We don't care if they're monitoring our WeChat use--we're out > of their reach?" This is the mindset of Tibetans in exile, until they understand that every message they send, whether to their friend in India or Europe, or to their friend in Lhasa, is all going through China. Also, once it is made clear how chatting with someone in Tibetan exile community about anything political could be enough to incriminate a Tibetan in China on trumped up charges, they also think twice. Still, the growth in use continues... ... or "what's good enough for Hu Jia is good enough for > us" ... Actually, the inverse here - Hu Jia's post and others within the Tibetan community on this topic (VOA Tibetan had good coverage about mobile security), has actually increased awareness about the problem. At least now, everyone knows the risk, and can perhaps act accordingly. In a recent training to some monks, I said "before you open the app, do a meditation and visualize yourself walking in the central square in Lhasa being observed by surveillance cameras and having your every move and word spoke observed by the PSB." I figured only then would they safely use WeChat, if that is even possible. or "WeChat's convenience advantages outweigh its known security" > (i.e. security isn't a sine qua non for them) . This is the reason that is mostly given. "It's free", or "It's easy". Texting and calling between India and Tibet is much harder and more expensive that it seems, and that is just one-to-one. The group voice and picture message features of WeChat are really a game changer when it comes to (perceived) free flow of information. Almost all videos of protests (including the recent self-immolations) have come via WeChat. >From the users perspective, they feel the risk is no different than if they were using a telephone, so it doesn't feel *worse*. However, they don't understand the subtle difference and again, the increased efficiency, that IP-based surveillance gives to the Chinese authorities vs. GSM/TElco based surveillance. Since WeChat has no encryption at all, they don't even need to request anything of TenCent/QQ - no backdoors are required. As long as they know IP addresses and/or usernames, it is simple to monitor, capture and analyze packets. Best, Nathan -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- 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: Frank Sudia's proposal: Let's revive encryption key escrow
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Frank Sudia's bio says that he is a programmer, a lawyer, a public policy analyst, and a co-founder of the CertCo encryption company, formerly part of Bankers Trust. He is also the creator of the "Bankers Trust Corporate Key Escrow System." His paper (see the link below) is a suggestion for a route for Congress to take if they "decided to require all encryption systems to be readable by authorized legal authorities." -Declan ********** From: "Frank Sudia" <fsudia(a)home.com> Saturday: September 15, 2001 02:14 AM To: <info(a)security-policy.org> <mailbox(a)gregg.senate.gov> "Dorothy Denning" <denning(a)cs.cosc.georgetown.edu> "Stewart Baker" <SBaker(a)steptoe.com> Subject: Encryption and the Restoration of National Sovereignty Dear Policy Professional, In response to the Attack on America, I have drawn upon my extensive work in secure banking systems, key escrow systems, and patent licensing to bring you the following white paper (about 10 pages of text). Frank W. Sudia, JD, "Encryption and the Restoration of National Sovereignty: Proposal for an Escrow Patent Pool Corporation," September 14, 2001. http://www.sudialab.com/sov-eppc.htm. While at Bankers Trust (1991-98) I designed one of the largest encryption systems in the world, the Global Trust Organization. Chartered in 1999 as Identrus LLC (www.identrus.com) it now includes 50 of the world's largest banks. In my view, encryption policy options are poorly understood. The power of government to protect the nation should not be in doubt, yet the debate has been skewed by the claims of opponents that such systems will not or cannot work. In reality, it would be straightforward to build a system that is much more secure than the current banking system. However, this has not been done, and cannot be done, because complex patent problems must be resolved. Before anything serious and believable can ever be built, even on a test basis, we must aggregate the required patents into product pools, using government money and eminent domain powers, if necessary. And we must fund the development of prototypes. Only after viability has been established can the commercial sector move forward with products that are highly secure and credible. For further information, please do not hesitate to contact me. If you are a contact or friend of mine, I would appreciate comments, which will be acknowledged in any future version. Regards, Frank Sudia www.SudiaLab.com 415-648-7415 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -----

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