July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

<nettime> Anonymous Surpasses Wikileaks
by John Young 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

The exploits of Anonymous to hack the systems of firms providing spying services to governments and corporations suggest that the WikiLeaks mini-era has been surpassed. Much of WikiLeaks promise to protect sources is useless if the sources are not whistleblowers needing a forum for publication. Instead publishers of secret information grab it directly for posting to Torrent for anybody to access without mediation and mark-up by self-esteemed peddlers of protection, interpretationa and authentication, including media cum scholars. Arstechnica descriptions of the how the Anonymous hack are the best reading of Internet derring-do yet and far exceeds the much simpler version of WikiLeaks carefully bruited as if precious but is not according to Daniel Domscheit-Berg's revelations. AnonLeaks.ru is a remarkable advance of WikiLeaks. And promises much more by the same means and methods most associated with official spies -- NSA and CIA run the Special Collections Service to do exactly that kind of criminal aggression, along with black bag burglaries, surveillance and bugging. Contractors hiring ex-spies do much of this highly classified work as well and invent and supply the gadgets and front organizations required. Not least of importance of the Anonymous hack and the many preceding it is the revelation of how commercial firms have been exploiting public ignorance of their spying capacity. That they are themselves vulnerable is a surprise to them, as it must be to those who hire them and, in the case of governments, provide legal cover for criminal actions. This is not news, to be sure, for it has been alleged and reported on for decades but mostly in technical journals and conferences where offerers strut their malwares to buyers of perfidium. Imagine that instead of the many iterations of Wikileaks now appearing to receive and publish documents, that more of the Anonymous-type hacks simply steal the family jewels of the spies, officials, lobbyists and corporations believing they own the territory in order to show the extent of their secret predations on the public. The digitization of vast archives of government, commercial and non-governmental organizations to facilitate their hegemony provides a bounty to be hacked repeatedly despite attempts to prevent it by vainly inept cybersecurity agencies and firms. The cyber officials yell, hit the Internet Switch. Too late, too late. Anonymous controls the switch. Sure, Anonymous can be compromised with sufficient hostile and friendly inducements, but so can the predators, perhaps moreso the latter. I like that venerable Anonymous and the promise it offers as the Nymous authoritatives of secrecy frantically attempt to ban its privilege. For the WL era dutifully enshrine Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, give them Medals of Freedom as icons of what led to the rise of Unnamables worldwide. I commend Ketih for that unbreakable domain name. # 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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[Freedombox-discuss] CeroWRT (OpenWRT with DNSSEC, mesh routing, etc) RC5 is out
by John Gilmore 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I just noticed: http://www.bufferbloat.net/news/18 CeroWrt is a project to resolve endemic problems in home networking today, and to push the state of the art of edge networks and routers forward. Projects include tighter integration with DNSSEC, wireless mesh networking (Wisp6), measurements of networking and censorship issues (BISMark), among others, notably reducing bufferbloat in both the wired and wireless components of the stack. These folks are targeting much smaller hardware than FreedomBox (Netgear wifi routers with >8MB of flash memory), but they are actively making a plug-and-play-rather-than-administer router that includes the basics of what FBX wants, like mesh routing, ipv6, dnssec. We can learn from them. Their main research goal is to reduce "bufferbloat", which is the tendency of network hardware and software (in the modern days of cheap RAM) to queue packets rather than dropping them. This confuses classic TCP, which depends on packet loss to signal congestion. When TCP never hears back about congestion, it starts filling up the buffers somewhere deep in the net, which seriously sideswipes the latency experienced by all competing traffic. Even one massive TCP connection, in the presence of bufferbloat, can make dozens of other nearby TCP connections take SECONDS to get through. Unfortunately, bufferbloat is everywhere in modern network hardware and software, so removing it is a long-term project. The CeroWRT folks are part of the vanguard of fixing it. John _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list Freedombox-discuss(a)lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss ----- 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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[cryptography] Last call: DIAC: Directions in Authenticated Ciphers
by D. J. Bernstein 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

For people interested in the future of secret-key cryptography, the list of talks for next month's ECRYPT DIAC workshop has now been posted: http://hyperelliptic.org/DIAC Registration is still open today: http://hyperelliptic.org/DIAC/registration.html Here's the list of invited speakers and refereed papers: * Invited: Joan Daemen, STMicroelectronics * Invited: David McGrew, Cisco * Invited: Phillip Rogaway, University of California at Davis * Invited: Palash Sarkar, ISI Kolkata * Refereed papers: - A Do-It-All-Cipher for RFID: design requirements (extended abstract) (Saarinen, Engels) - AEGIS: a fast authenticated encryption algorithm (Wu, Preneel) - An improved hardware implementation of the Grain-128a stream cipher (Mansouri, Dubrova) - Authenticated encryption in civilian space missions: context and requirements (Sanchez, Fischer) - Cryptanalysis of EAXprime (Minematsu, Lucks, Morita, Iwata) - Hash-CFB (Forler, McGrew, Lucks, Wenzel) - Heavy Quark for secure AEAD (Aumasson, Knellwolf, Meier) - How fast can a two-pass mode go? A parallel deterministic authenticated encryption mode for AES-NI (Aoki, Iwata, Yasuda) - Lightweight AES-based authenticated encryption (Bogdanov, Mendel, Regazzoni, Rijmen) - Permutation-based encryption, authentication and authenticated encryption (Bertoni, Daemen, Peeters, Van Assche) - SipHash: a fast short-input PRF (Aumasson, Bernstein) - Stronger security guarantees for authenticated encryption (Boldyreva, Paterson, Stam) - Suggestions for hardware evaluation of cryptographic algorithms (Gurkaynak) See you in Stockholm! ---D. J. Bernstein Research Professor, Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- 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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None
by Jim Choate 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

> It causes the photons emitted at the same time from the source to be > received at different time, this interupts the ability of the receiver to > correlate (i.e. verify coherence) them into a recognizable picture. Huh? The photons from my TV screen arrive all at different times, and yet the picture is pretty good :) Mark

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[Clips] U.S. voting-machine shocker: Does Hugo Chavez own 'em?
by R.A. Hettinga 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I love election time... Cheers, RAH ------ <http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/printer-friendly.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52668> WorldNetDaily Saturday, October 28, 2006 U.S. voting-machine shocker: Does Hugo Chavez own 'em? Feds probe money trail behind company for ties to Castroite Venezuelan president Posted: October 28, 2006 9:30 p.m. Eastern WASHINGTON - Just 10 days before Americans vote in midterm congressional elections that could result in a historic shift of power, the federal government is investigating whether anti-American Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez may control the company that operates electronic voting machines in 17 states. Many questions have been raised about the reliability of the new machines, which leave no paper trails for the purposes of recounts. But now federal officials are investigating whether Smartmatic, owner of Sequoia Voting Systems, is secretly controlled by the Castroite revolutionary leader of Venezuela who denounced President Bush as Satan in his most recent United Nations address, the Miami Herald reports. An informal investigation of Smartmatic's ownership begun last summer has, the paper reveals, become a formal probe. One of the other major concerns raised about the electronic voting systems is that they could, under the right circumstances, be tampered with to deliver fraudulent results. The investigation stems from a May 4 inquiry to the Treasury Department by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., raising concerns about Smartmatic's purchase of Sequoia last year. Maloney said she was disturbed by a 2004 article in the Miami Herald revealing that the Venezuelan government owned 28 percent of Bizta - a company operated by two of the same people who own Smartmatic. In a deal with twists and turns even federal investigators are having trouble following, Bizta bought back those shares after the article appeared, and Smartmatic now characterizes the deal as a loan. Bizta and Smartmatic had partnered with the Venezuelan telephone company CANTV to win a $91 million contract to supply electronic voting machines for Venezuelan elections, including the controversial 2004 referendum Chavez won in a vote in which he was widely accused of fraud. Despite the probe, Smartmatic categorically denies any link to the Chavez regime. "Smartmatic is a privately held corporation, and no foreign government or entity - including Venezuela - has ever held an ownership stake in the company," Mitch Stoller, a company spokesman, said in an e-mail to the Miami Herald. "The government of Venezuela doesn't have anything to do with the company aside from contracting it for our electoral process," the Venezuelan ambassador in Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, told the New York Times tonight. But the Venezuelan connections have haunted the company whose machines have been plagued with problems in U.S. elections. When the Chicago City Council asked Sequoia executive Jack Blaine in April about problems in that city's voting, he said some Venezuelans had provided technical support during the election and that some of the glitches could be traced to a component developed in Venezuela to print and transmit results to a central tabulation computer. The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners is withholding further payment to Sequoia until after the Nov. 7 election. The Smartmatic investigation is being conducted by the Treasury-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, CFIUS - which determines whether deals involving foreign investors compromise national security. Determining whether there really is a hidden connection to Chavez or anyone in his government is difficult because of Smartmatic's complex, though legal, corporate structure, reports the Miami Herald. Stoller admitted the company is 97 percent owned by the four Venezuelan founders - two of them dual citizens: Mugica (Spanish and Venezuelan), Anzola, Roger Piqate and Jorge Massa (French and Venezuelan). The remainder of the company, Stoller told the paper, is owned "by employees of Smartmatic (past and present) and family and acquaintances of the founders." The four top owners have not said whether they support or oppose Chavez. "The government should know who owns our voting machines - that is a national-security concern," said Maloney, who started the investigation with her letter last May. "There seems to have been an obvious effort to obscure the ownership of the company." Chavez has made it clear his goal in life is to bring the U.S. to its knees. He has stood with Iran against the U.S. and, as WND reported Thursday, he is providing documents that could help terrorists infiltrate the U.S.-Mexico, according to a new congressional report on homeland security. "Venezuela is providing support - including identity documents - that could prove useful to radical Islamic groups," says the report of the subcommittee on investigations of the House Homeland Security Committee. "The Venezuelan government has issued thousands of cidulas, the equivalent of Social Security cards, to people from places such as Cuba, Colombia and Middle Eastern nations that host foreign terrorist organizations." The documents can be used to obtain Venezuelan passports and American visas, which in turn allow the holder to elude immigration checks and enter the United States. As WorldNetDaily reported, a Venezuelan military defector claims Chavez developed ties to terrorist groups such as al-Qaida - even providing the group with $1 million in cash after Sept. 11, 2001. Air Force Maj. Juan Diaz Castillo, who was Chavez's pilot, told WorldNetDaily through an interpreter that "the American people should awaken and be aware of the enemy they have just three hours' flight from the United States." Diaz said he was part of an operation in which Chavez gave $1 million to al-Qaida for relocation costs, shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Every election is a sort of advance auction of stolen goods." -- H.L. Mencken _______________________________________________ Clips mailing list Clips(a)philodox.com http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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[Freedombox-discuss] CeroWRT (OpenWRT with DNSSEC, mesh routing, etc) RC5 is out
by John Gilmore 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I just noticed: http://www.bufferbloat.net/news/18 CeroWrt is a project to resolve endemic problems in home networking today, and to push the state of the art of edge networks and routers forward. Projects include tighter integration with DNSSEC, wireless mesh networking (Wisp6), measurements of networking and censorship issues (BISMark), among others, notably reducing bufferbloat in both the wired and wireless components of the stack. These folks are targeting much smaller hardware than FreedomBox (Netgear wifi routers with >8MB of flash memory), but they are actively making a plug-and-play-rather-than-administer router that includes the basics of what FBX wants, like mesh routing, ipv6, dnssec. We can learn from them. Their main research goal is to reduce "bufferbloat", which is the tendency of network hardware and software (in the modern days of cheap RAM) to queue packets rather than dropping them. This confuses classic TCP, which depends on packet loss to signal congestion. When TCP never hears back about congestion, it starts filling up the buffers somewhere deep in the net, which seriously sideswipes the latency experienced by all competing traffic. Even one massive TCP connection, in the presence of bufferbloat, can make dozens of other nearby TCP connections take SECONDS to get through. Unfortunately, bufferbloat is everywhere in modern network hardware and software, so removing it is a long-term project. The CeroWRT folks are part of the vanguard of fixing it. John _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list Freedombox-discuss(a)lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss ----- 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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[cryptography] Last call: DIAC: Directions in Authenticated Ciphers
by D. J. Bernstein 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

For people interested in the future of secret-key cryptography, the list of talks for next month's ECRYPT DIAC workshop has now been posted: http://hyperelliptic.org/DIAC Registration is still open today: http://hyperelliptic.org/DIAC/registration.html Here's the list of invited speakers and refereed papers: * Invited: Joan Daemen, STMicroelectronics * Invited: David McGrew, Cisco * Invited: Phillip Rogaway, University of California at Davis * Invited: Palash Sarkar, ISI Kolkata * Refereed papers: - A Do-It-All-Cipher for RFID: design requirements (extended abstract) (Saarinen, Engels) - AEGIS: a fast authenticated encryption algorithm (Wu, Preneel) - An improved hardware implementation of the Grain-128a stream cipher (Mansouri, Dubrova) - Authenticated encryption in civilian space missions: context and requirements (Sanchez, Fischer) - Cryptanalysis of EAXprime (Minematsu, Lucks, Morita, Iwata) - Hash-CFB (Forler, McGrew, Lucks, Wenzel) - Heavy Quark for secure AEAD (Aumasson, Knellwolf, Meier) - How fast can a two-pass mode go? A parallel deterministic authenticated encryption mode for AES-NI (Aoki, Iwata, Yasuda) - Lightweight AES-based authenticated encryption (Bogdanov, Mendel, Regazzoni, Rijmen) - Permutation-based encryption, authentication and authenticated encryption (Bertoni, Daemen, Peeters, Van Assche) - SipHash: a fast short-input PRF (Aumasson, Bernstein) - Stronger security guarantees for authenticated encryption (Boldyreva, Paterson, Stam) - Suggestions for hardware evaluation of cryptographic algorithms (Gurkaynak) See you in Stockholm! ---D. J. Bernstein Research Professor, Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- 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: [ZS] Re: On the question of coercion (was: Commentary on the Consensus International Principles)
by Lodewijk andri de la porte 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

2012/9/18 Spencer Campbell <lacertilian(a)gmail.com> > > >> It might be of interest to take a person's life and present it, The >> Truman Show like it's creator had never imagined. I'd suggest producing >> such content to be banned. >> > > I don't think that's a tenable idea, either practically or > philosophically. Nothing short of a 1984 regime would be enough to enforce > the ban, and Truman Shows have considerable value from several different > dimensions -- entertainment, artistic, historic, even self-analytical. > You forget this, in some senses, IS a 1984 regime. These shows can still be made after someone dies, retaining most of the value without the devestating effects it has on the subject. It's a means to preserve a new shape of privacy. A form of security through obscurity, the only form of security I usually find exists in real life situations. > 2012/9/18 R|diger Koch Fine, as long as webcams are in the board rooms of the world, including the > oval office. As long as black Mercs come only with clear windows and > particularly, and most importantly as long as it is not a criminal offense > to do complete life logging, including the police officer beating you to > pulp for not quick enough jumping out of his way. > > As long as surveillance only means that any attempt of yours to watch the > watchers is being watched and sanctioned, this has to be a red line. A twofold of laws will make this happen as much as it can. 1) Never may the recording of an event be illegal in and of itself. This is a "self governance" law. Limiting the governement and police's own power. It mustn't be too powerfull as to prevent people claiming access 2) Any person, legal or otherwise, must make available it's survailance records, freely, in accordance with common conventions. Meaning that if I do record something I must make it publicly available on, say, a distributed open file network. Usenet would be the inadequate present day example. In whatever format and form is common at the time. Freely effectively bans propriatary formats and prevents copyright-ish laws from securing it. Untarget recordings mean survailance style always-on recording. This law would allow one to keep his/her home video's private but requires sharing of the always-on webcam in front of the house. An underlying assumption is that we'll have widespectrum radio-camera's that see everything the birds do now, and a lot that they don't, even through the walls of buildings. Never, I repeat, NEVER, will board rooms of the importants Anu wishes to be public become public. Worst case scenario Space-One will offer "private conversation" trips that pass by the dark side of the moon for the rough talks. Worst because that gives an unfair advantage to those most motivated to have privacy, privacy isn't worth as much to the Green Energy Consurtum as it'll be to Mean Oil Corp. But it's likely nearly as usefull. -- -- 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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[tor-talk] Tor in Google Summer of Code 2013
by Damian Johnson 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Interested in coding on Tor and getting paid for it by Google? If you are a student, we have good news for you: We have been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2013! https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2013 https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2013/tor Here are the facts: The summer of code gives you the opportunity to work on your own Tor-related coding project with one of the Tor developers as your mentor. You can apply for a coding project related to Tor itself or to one of its many supplemental projects... https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#Projects Your mentor will help you when you're stuck with your project and guide you in becoming part of the Tor community. Google pays you 5,000 USD for the three months of your project, so that you can focus on coding and don't have to worry about how to pay your bills. Did we catch your attention? These are your next steps: Go look at the Google Summer of Code FAQ [1] to make sure you are eligible to participate. Have a look at our ideas list [2] to see if one of those projects matches your interests. If there is no project on that list that you'd want to work on, read the documentation on our website [3] and make up your own project idea! Come to #tor-dev on OFTC [4] and let us know about your project idea. Communication is essential to success in the summer of code, and we're unlikely to accept students we haven't heard from before reading their application. So really, come to the IRC channel and talk to us! Finally, write down your project idea using our template [5] and submit your application to Google until May 3, 2013 [6]. We are looking forward to discussing your project idea with you! [1] https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2… [2] https://www.torproject.org/about/gsoc.html.en#Ideas [3] https://www.torproject.org/docs/documentation.html.en#UpToSpeed [4] https://www.torproject.org/about/contact.html.en#irc [5] https://www.torproject.org/about/gsoc.html.en#Template [6] https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2… _______________________________________________ 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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[silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
by Gautam John 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Do stories such as this affect your thinking or actual living/working/studying in the US? ___________________ IN a recent morning interview in a Midtown Manhattan office Ramak Fazel came across as the quintessential world citizen: tall, slim and elegant, his English tinged with an untraceable accent and peppered here and there with an Italian phrase. He also exuded the weariness of a frequent flier, having arrived the afternoon before at Newark Liberty Airport, where he was delayed for nearly three hours while United States Customs and Border Protection agents questioned him about the purpose of his trip, searched his baggage and photocopied the pages of his personal agenda. That routine is something that Mr. Fazel, a 42-year-old freelance photographer who lives in Milan, Italy, has come to know well, and he takes pains to come across as favorably as possible. For starters, he makes sure his face is always immaculately cleanshaven. "I have become the poster boy for Gillette," he said, somewhat ruefully. Shaving was one of the last things on Mr. Fazel's mind when, on Aug. 7, 2006, he set out on a photographic and philatelic odyssey from his mother's home in Fort Wayne, Ind. His mission was to photograph each of the nation's 50 state capitol buildings and dispatch a postcard from each city, using postage stamps from a childhood collection. Each postcard would be mailed to the next state on his journey, where he would pick it up, continuing until he had gone full circle back to Indiana. But there was a problem. On a flight from Sacramento, Calif., to Honolulu, Mr. Fazel described his project to a fellow passenger. He later discovered that she had reported him as suspicious b perhaps to the pilot or the Transportation Security Administration b and taken a picture of him as he slept. Maybe it was because he was vaguely foreign looking, he reasoned, and his photographic endeavor seemed menacing in a post-9/11 landscape. He also had a three-day growth of beard, he recalled. And, although Mr. Fazel grew up mostly in the United States and is an American citizen, there was his Iranian name. In his view that woman's report began a chain reaction, turning him into a person of interest for officials from local law enforcement agencies on up to the F.B.I. On a stop in Annapolis, Md., for example, he was interrogated about his activities and read his Miranda rights. Today, he said, his name lingers on what he thinks of simply as the "the list." (He doesn't know where it originated or who controls it.) He believes it has prevented him from receiving a visa to India and caused him be questioned at the border of Poland, both of which he had visited in the past. He said he has been interrogated the last four times he has entered the United States. That sense of stigmatization b and the pursuit of life, liberty and art b is a steady undercurrent in "49 State Capitols," an exhibition of postcards, photographs and ephemera from Mr. Fazel's 2006 trip that is to open on Wednesday at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in SoHo. (He ran out of money before he made it to Alaska.) "I wanted to learn about America," Mr. Fazel said. "Visiting the capitols b I don't want to say it's a dream, but we're led as children to believe that it's kind of an obligation, that you need to see up close the country you call home. "I may live abroad, but my sense of being an American, of loving my country, has never changed." Mr. Fazel, who moved to Italy in 1994, conceived of the trip in 2006 while visiting his mother in Fort Wayne, where she called his attention to his stamp collection in the attic. "Do something with these,' " he remembered her saying. He went to a collector who offered him less than he believed his stamps were worth. "I thought, what a shame to just sell these for $1,000," Mr. Fazel said. "I felt they needed to be released from that static state, needed to be released for their original purpose to be postage." What specifically inspired his trip was a page of stamps of the flags of the 50 states, in the order of their admission to the union, issued for the nation's bicentennial in 1976. That was the year he began collecting, shortly after moving to Fort Wayne, where the Fazels were the only Iranian family. Mr. Fazel was born in Iran but moved to the United States when he was 2 months old. His father, who was then working on his doctorate in psychology, and his mother, who eventually became a potter, settled in Logan, Utah, and then in Fort Wayne. In 1970 the family briefly moved back to Iran, where his father taught in a satellite campus of Harvard Business School in Tehran; in 1976 they returned to Fort Wayne. Mr. Fazel, feeling something of an outsider in a community divided into white and black, athletically gifted and not, turned to stamp collecting at his father's urging. "Through stamps I had the chance to learn about America and American culture," he said. He collected enthusiastically, using money he earned from mowing lawns and shoveling snow. But with a driver's license came adult freedom, and Mr. Fazel tucked his collection away. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering at Purdue University, then went to New York to study graphic design and photography. In 1994 he moved to Milan b "to enrich myself, invest in myself," he said b and to overcome a sense of his cultural limitations. He feels that he succeeded, he said, yet he never stopped pondering what it meant for him to be American. So in the spring of 2006, stamps in hand, he began to plot his road trip, researching the shortest distances from state capital to state capital and the locations of post offices and Y.M.C.A.'s (where he could shower and swim). He spent $1,500 on a used Chevy van in which he would live and another $2,000 to refurbish it. At night he would often seek out Wal-Mart parking lots, where security was tight, to park his van and sleep. In each capital Mr. Fazel would research the state's history in a library and then design a 10-by-14-inch postcard on white stock, adorned with mosaics he concocted from stamps related to the state. The postcard he sent from Florida to Georgia honors space flight; the one from Hawaii to Arizona pays tribute to Pearl Harbor. The postcard sent from New York to Pennsylvania bears 11-cent stamps from 1965 that Mr. Fazel arranged in the shape of the twin towers b one toppling over, the other being pierced by a commercial aviation stamp b and with fire truck and ambulance stamps and a commemorative stamp of St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan. Mr. Fazel drove 17,345 miles in 78 days, mailing a postcard from each city and picking it up in the next one, with the speed of the mail dictating the pace of his trip. "It was such a nice surprise to discover how reliable the postal system was," he said, adding that some of the cards arrived within 12 hours. But in Jackson, Miss., his journey took its bizarre twist. One night, as he sat in his van, a beam of light pierced his reverie. He heard his name over a loudspeaker and a command to step out of the vehicle with his hands held high. Suddenly, Mr. Fazel said, he was forced to the ground, face to the concrete, and handcuffed by a city police officer. His vehicle was searched, and when the officers determined that nothing was amiss, Mr. Fazel was ordered to leave the parking lot and continue down the road. He said the officers told him that they had received a report that he was aiming an automatic weapon at passing traffic. Lee D. Vance, assistant chief of the Jackson city police, said he could not confirm the incident because it had not resulted in an arrest and because Mr. Fazel has not filed a complaint. As Mr. Fazel continued his travels, he slowly began to perceive that he was on some kind of watch list. In Atlanta he was prohibited from entering the Capitol, he said, even as others did. In Columbia, S.C., he was questioned on the grounds of the Capitol by a police officer who mentioned that he knew Mr. Fazel lived in Italy. On the morning of Oct. 3, he entered the Maryland Capitol in Annapolis, where he presented identification and signed his name on a visitors' sheet. A guard asked him to wait. Suddenly, Mr. Fazel said, he was handcuffed and rushed through corridors into a police station, where a man he later learned was a member of the Maryland Joint Terrorism Task Force with the F.B.I. started speaking to him in Farsi. As Mr. Fazel related it, the experience went as follows: "I'm American," Mr. Fazel said. "I speak English." Another officer asked, "Where are you really from?" Mr. Fazel produced his Indiana driver's license. "I can tell by looking at you that you're not from Fort Wayne," the officer replied. After a four-hour encounter in which he was asked about a recent trip to Iran for an Italian design magazine and about who was financing his trip to state capitols, he was released without being charged. But he was also warned by an F.B.I. official that he was now in the system and would have troubles if he continued his trip. Richard Wolf, a media coordinator with the F.B.I. in Baltimore, said he had no knowledge of the incident. He added, "We don't normally respond or comment on any sort of leads we've conducted with the Joint Terrorism Task Force." Asked whether Mr. Fazel was on the government's terrorist watch list, Bill Carter, an F.B.I. spokesman in Washington, said that as a matter of policy, "we can't verify whether an individual is on a watch list or not." After the incident in Maryland Mr. Fazel called Brett R. Fleitz, a lawyer in Indianapolis and a childhood friend. Mr. Fleitz said he immediately sought to reassure him. "I implored him to continue because he was very, very doubtful about the prospects for going on and the dangers that might lie ahead," Mr. Fleitz said. "I said, 'Dude, you're an American.' And Ramak said, 'No, I'm a naturalized American.' And I said: 'It doesn't matter. There aren't two tiers of citizenship here. You have nothing to hide.' " He advised Mr. Fazel to greet law enforcement officers cheerfully and "lay it all out," as well as to ask for and photocopy the business cards of the authorities he encountered. Mr. Fazel forged toward the last half of his destinations with his camera, a 1964 Rolleiflex. Despite being questioned at or denied entrance to the remaining capitols, he got every one of his pictures: sometimes an image of gilded rotundas or historic murals, other times pictures of the everyday, the mundane. He photographed visitors in House chambers; a funeral procession for Ann Richards, a onetime Texas governor; a portrait of Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, in the waiting room of the California governor's office. And as the mood of his trip changed from joy to disquiet, he photographed police officers at one capitol, and, at another, a "caution" tape blocking an entrance. In Albany, Mr. Fazel was asked to wait at the entrance of the Capitol until investigators talked with him. One gave him a big slap on the back, Mr. Fazel recalled, and said, "I know everything about you, and I know you've been getting a lot of attention." Thomas M. Peters, a senior investigator with the New York State Police, confirmed that Mr. Fazel's journey from capitol to capitol had raised suspicion. "We were notified in advance that he was making his way up the East Coast from his stops at other capitols, where he was challenged by law enforcement agents," he said. "They indicated that at some times he seemed agitated and seemed to be giving evasive answers to their questions, but we don't know for sure because we were basically getting this information thirdhand." Mr. Peters added: "He was fine with us. And if he was agitated, it was probably because he got tired of being questioned." Looking back on his travels, Mr. Fazel said: "Notwithstanding the intense scrutiny, the trip was a positive experience. I'm neither rancorous, nor do I feel offended." Still, he said, he would like to see his name removed from "the list," or whatever it is that caused him to be repeatedly stopped and questioned. The journey ultimately left him wondering what it means to be American b and, more fundamentally, who he really was. "What I thought would be an exercise in self-betterment turned out to be something a little bigger," he said dryly. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/arts/design/20shat.html?_r=1%26sq=photogr… ----- 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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