July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

[Clips] Flame First, Think Later: New Clues to E-Mail Misbehavior
by R.A. Hettinga 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/health/psychology/20essa.html?th=&emc=th&…> The New York Times February 20, 2007 ESSAY Flame First, Think Later: New Clues to E-Mail Misbehavior By DANIEL GOLEMAN Jett Lucas, a 14-year-old friend, tells me the kids in his middle school send one other a steady stream of instant messages through the day. But there's a problem. "Kids will say things to each other in their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person," Jett tells me. "Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up what they said in the message. It makes things tense." Jett's complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude. The hallmark of the flame is precisely what Jett lamented: thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard would be put more diplomatically - or go unmentioned - face to face. Flaming has a technical name, the "online disinhibition effect," which psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace. In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e-mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign - when a shy person feels free to open up online - or toxic, as in flaming. The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming. This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain's social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track. Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the other person or otherwise throw the interaction off. Neurological patients with a damaged orbitofrontal cortex lose the ability to modulate the amygdala, a source of unruly impulses; like small children, they commit mortifying social gaffes like kissing a complete stranger, blithely unaware that they are doing anything untoward. Socially artful responses emerge largely in the neural chatter between the orbitofrontal cortex and emotional centers like the amygdala that generate impulsivity. But the cortex needs social information - a change in tone of voice, say - to know how to select and channel our impulses. And in e-mail there are no channels for voice, facial expression or other cues from the person who will receive what we say. True, there are those cute, if somewhat lame, emoticons that cleverly arrange punctuation marks to signify an emotion. The e-mail equivalent of a mood ring, they surely lack the neural impact of an actual smile or frown. Without the raised eyebrow that signals irony, say, or the tone of voice that signals delight, the orbitofrontal cortex has little to go on. Lacking real-time cues, we can easily misread the printed words in an e-mail message, taking them the wrong way. And if we are typing while agitated, the absence of information on how the other person is responding makes the prefrontal circuitry for discretion more likely to fail. Our emotional impulses disinhibited, we type some infelicitous message and hit "send" before a more sober second thought leads us to hit "discard." We flame. Flaming can be induced in some people with alarming ease. Consider an experiment, reported in 2002 in The Journal of Language and Social Psychology, in which pairs of college students - strangers - were put in separate booths to get to know each other better by exchanging messages in a simulated online chat room. While coming and going into the lab, the students were well behaved. But the experimenter was stunned to see the messages many of the students sent. About 20 percent of the e-mail conversations immediately became outrageously lewd or simply rude. And now, the online equivalent of road rage has joined the list of Internet dangers. Last October, in what The Times of London described as "Britain's first 'Web rage' attack," a 47-year-old Londoner was convicted of assault on a man with whom he had traded insults in a chat room. He and a friend tracked down the man and attacked him with a pickax handle and a knife. One proposed solution to flaming is replacing typed messages with video. The assumption is that getting a message along with its emotional nuances might help us dampen the impulse to flame. All this reminds me of a poster on the wall of classrooms I once visited in New Haven public schools. The poster, part of a program in social development that has lowered rates of violence in schools there, shows a stoplight. It says that when students feel upset, they should remember that the red light means to stop, calm down and think before they act. The yellow light prompts them to weigh a range of responses, and their consequences. The green light urges them to try the best response. Not a bad idea. Until the day e-mail comes in video form, I may just paste one of those stoplights next to my monitor. Daniel Goleman is the author of "Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships." -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' _______________________________________________ Clips mailing list Clips(a)philodox.com http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- 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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Sampled Traffic Analysis by Internet-Exchange-Level Adversaries
by Steven Murdoch 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Some of you might remember my email to this list in February, where I asked for help from operators of Tor nodes in the UK [1]. This was for an experiment to establish how diverse the topology of the Tor network is -- an important component of how secure it is against traffic analysis. Thanks to all those who responded to my request; I had a great response and very interesting results. I've now finished the draft version of the resulting paper, which is to be presented at the PET Workshop (Ottawa, Canada, June 20--22 2007) [2]. The latest version of the paper can be found at this URL: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/pet07ixanalysis.pdf There is also an introduction to the area, and a summary of the paper on my research group's blog "Light Blue Touchpaper": http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/?p=212 My paper, co-authored with Piotr Zielinksi, is a follow-up to Nick Feamster and Roger Dingledine's paper, "Location Diversity in Anonymity Networks" [3]. In it, they point out that bouncing anonymity network traffic around lots of countries might not be as good as it seems because there are a small number of ISPs which show up on many of the links to, from and between Tor nodes. What our paper explores is that even if you deal with this problem, and choose paths with a diverse collection of ISPs, there are still Internet exchanges on many of the paths. These do not appear in the BGP data that Feamster and Dingledine use, which is why I had to resort to a more limited-scale traceroute-based study. So not only are Internet Exchanges good places to put traffic analysis equipment, but some (including LINX [4] and AMS-IX [5]) collect the necessary data anyway, for performance measurement purposes. They only record the headers of one in every few thousand packets, but our paper also shows that, even with such low-quality data, traffic analysis still works. There's certainly no reason to panic about these results, as there is still much more work to be done in this area. For example, the picture in the US, where Internet exchanges are less popular, will likely be different. I do hope that the paper will encourage future work on both establishing more accurate estimates of attack costs and developing defences. Thanks, Steven. [1] http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Feb-2007/msg00138.html [2] http://petworkshop.org/2007/ [3] http://freehaven.net/doc/routing-zones/routing-zones.ps [4] http://www.linx.net/ [5] http://www.ams-ix.net/ -- w: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/ ----- 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] Bitcoin and The Public Function of Money
by StealthMonger 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Gregory Maxwell <greg(a)xiph.org> writes: > On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 9:51 PM, StealthMonger > <StealthMonger(a)nym.mixmin.net> wrote: >> Yes, Bitcoin liberates trade from "public" extortion ("taxation"). > It does no such thing. Not true. Look at the sources: ... Bitcoin can be considered to be another variety of cash, i.e. digital cash. ... and cash can also be used for tax evasion purposes. [1] [2] Bitcoin prevents inflation and helps tax evation [sic] (the system itself is hard to regulate) [3] > Under US law, for example, Barter in Bitcoins is just as taxable as ... States describe their pronouncements as "law" in an effort make them respectable. > Many Bitcoin users I know are kind and thoughtful people and all of > the developers I know are. Are you suggesting that there is something unkind or thoughtless about promoting a free market? > Tying it back to the list topic. Seems to be on-topic. From the liberationtech Info Page: The Program on Liberation Technology "Liberationtech" seeks to understand how information technology can be used to defend human rights, improve governance, empower the poor, promote economic development, and pursue a variety of other social goods. [4] By these criteria, Bitcoin discussion qualifies. > There are some interesting challenges in the context of anonymity > systems (in particular) which I think that Bitcoin, and technologies > from its ecosystem, can contribute to improving. Generally > preventing denial of service from resource starvation or spam is > frustrated when participants are anonymous. Resource starvation? Anonymous markets have thrived throughout history, and probably before. [1] http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf [2] "tax evasion" is their euphemism for successful defense against their extortion. [3] http://shadowlife.cc/files/btcotc.pdf [4] https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech - -- -- StealthMonger <StealthMonger(a)nym.mixmin.net> Key: mailto:stealthsuite@nym.mixmin.net?subject=send%20stealthmonger-key -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.5.9 <http://mailcrypt.sourceforge.net/> iEYEARECAAYFAlCVhlAACgkQDkU5rhlDCl5vDgCgn+gT6aD2zNiqKQpT42EMpikJ LkEAmwQVUnNuxZbv46xBibwwblDdWbXB =TgK+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- 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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Re: [IP] FCC order on VOIP snooping
by John Morris 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Lee (and Dave), The good news is that the recent FCC orders (last fall and last Wednesday) only extended CALEA (wiretapping design mandates) to reach broadband service providers and "interconnected" VoIP providers (i.e., VoIP providers that offer a service that can both connect calls out to the PSTN, the regular phone network, and receive calls from the PSTN). So in its current form (as you describe it) the peer- to-peer audio system would not be covered by CALEA. The bad news is that if the FCC's extension of CALEA is upheld in the face of legal challenges, it is certainly possible that the FCC would eventually try to extend CALEA to all voice-capable technologies on the Internet. But the good news is that this past Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Washington heard oral argument in four consolidated challenges to the extension of CALEA (including one brought by CDT), and two of the three judges were very skeptical of the theory on which the FCC extended CALEA to broadband. Indeed, Judge Edwards called the FCC's reasoning "gobbledygook" and "totally ridiculous." See, e.g., http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2006/05/05/AR2006050501032.html. One certainly cannot be sure how the court will come out based on an oral argument, and the court was less strong on the VoIP side of the challenge, but overall the argument was a very good sign. John Morris Center for Democracy & Technology At 2:40 PM -0400 5/6/06, David Farber wrote: >Begin forwarded message: > >From: Lee Revell <rlrevell(a)joe-job.com> >Date: May 6, 2006 11:40:09 AM EDT >To: David Farber <dave(a)farber.net> >Subject: FCC order on VOIP snooping > >http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-265221A1.pdf > >I have a question for the lawyers on IP (not looking for free legal >advice, just your thoughts ;-). > >I just returned from presenting a paper at the 4th Linux Audio >Conference in Karlsruhe, Germany and there's currently a lot of >work on >low latency, high quality realtime audio over IP - the point of >which is >to allow musicians to collaborate (or "jam") live over the net. The >upper latency limit between musicians for playing "live" is about >20-30ms so the speed of light prevents this from ever working beyond a >few hundred miles, but it still should be quite useful. > >Has there been any discussion of whether this kind of peer to peer >audio >system, which is not designed for VOIP but could obviously be used for >that, would be affected? AFAICT having to implement CALEA would be >the >death of any such system, as it's simply a musician's peer to peer >tool >not a centralized operation, plus I can't imagine how you would >implement CALEA without killing the latency. > >Lee ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen(a)leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[IP] more on FCC order on VOIP snooping
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Begin forwarded message:

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When suburban moms embrace the surveillance society
by Greg Brooks 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Dave, for IP if you wish. There's an interesting piece in the Riverside (CA) Press-Enterprise [1] about a woman who got her house toilet papered and decided to hunt down the culprits. She didn't want to involve the police, reasoning that they had better things to do, so she took the following steps: * She canvassed local stores to see which one had a run on toilet paper. * She then got the manager of the store to show her surveillance videos, allowing her to see the personalized letterman's jacket of one of the purchasers, as well as the license plate of the vehicle they got into. * Finally, she used a high school yearbook (matched to the school based on the letterman's jacket) and online databases to get the names, phone numbers and addresses of all the teens spotted in the store tapes. To me, this is a bit more than a "talker" feature. One takeaway, IMHO, is that we're pretty far down the road to sheepdom when average citizens start thinking "well, everything's monitored all the time anyway - let's see if I can make use of that." Warm Regards, Greg Brooks West Third Group [1] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/toilet_paper_caper ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen(a)leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[IP] When suburban moms embrace the surveillance society
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Begin forwarded message:

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[Freedombox-discuss] Serval BatPhone Developer Release 0.07 is out
by Paul Gardner-Stephen 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Hi all, Just a heads up that the next developer release of the Serval BatPhone software is out! Head to the Software Page http://developer.servalproject.org/site/?page_id=644 for downloading, or search for Serval on the Android Marketplace. The following features have been added since Release 0.06: b" Automatic Wi-Fi chipset detection process that tries to guess how to put you phone into adhoc mode. This should now work with most rooted handsets. b" New screen for displaying the progress of tasks we have to do on install. The following bugs have been fixed since Release 0.06: b" 0000002: Handset auto-detection needs fixing b" 0000029: Wifi clients may drop broadcast packets b" 0000098: Preparing information sent back to project for display b" 0000127: java.lang.NullPointerException : SetupActivity.setAvailableWifiModes() b" 0000131: When operating in AP-Client modes, AP cannot be called b" 0000141: Experimental scripts may be run and crash the software (or phone) on install b" 0000145: Call to node A fails second time after call to node B on three node network b" 0000147: Adhoc edify interpreter needs rebuilding so that we can use "generic" wifi driver loading b" Stopped DNA from corrupting its data file and crashing which would leave the phone unreachable (General root cause of several other bugs). Bugs can be viewed in more detail via our bug tracker at http://developer.servalproject.org/mantis/. Registration is required to access the bug tracker. Any questions or issues can be posted to us here, or bugs entered into the bug tracker. As always, we are incredibly grateful for the support of the Serval developer community! Paul & The Serval Project Team. _______________________________________________ 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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[liberationtech] Atlantic: How Western Tech Firms Are Helping Arab Dictators
by Kevin Hsu 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Article of interest from *The Atlantic Monthly* http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/how-western-tech-f… Surveillance Inc: How Western Tech Firms Are Helping Arab Dictators By Trevor Timm & Jillian C. York Mar 6 2012, 7:01 AM ET *As democratic movements spread in the Middle East, governments are cracking down, and that means big business for the companies who help them do it.* [image: tunis march5 p.jpg] A computer systems coordinator at Tunisia Television in Tunis / Reuters Reliance means vulnerability, and the activists and citizen journalists of the Arab uprisings rely heavily on the Internet and mobile technology. They use text messaging to coordinate protests, for example, or social media sites to upload the photos and videos that then make it into mainstream global media. In the first protests in Tunisia, because traditional journalists could not get access, citizen journalists filled in, using YouTube and the live-streaming platform UStream to give the world -- including, for example, the Egyptians and Syrians who later began revolts of their own -- a window into the events there. For all of the good this technology has done, activists are also beginning to understand the harm it can do. As Evgeny Morozov wrote in *The Net Delusion<http://www.amazon.com/The-Net-Delusion-Internet-Freedom/dp/1610391063/ref=s…> *, his book on the Internet's darker sides, "Denying that greater information flows, combined with advanced technologies ... can result in the overall strengthening of authoritarian regimes is a dangerous path to take, if only because it numbs us to potential regulatory interventions and the need to rein in our own Western corporate excesses." The communications devices activists use are not as safe as they might believe, and dozens of companies -- many of them based in North America and Europe -- are selling technology to authoritarian governments that can be used against democratic movements. Such tools can exploit security flaws in the activists' technology, intercept a user's communications, or even pinpoint their location. In many cases, this technology has led to the arrest, torture, and even death of individuals whose only "crime" was exercising their universal right to free speech. And, in most of these cases, the public knew nothing about it. Recent investigations by the *Wall<http://online.wsj.com/public/page/censorship-investigation.html> <http://online.wsj.com/public/page/censorship-investigation.html>Street<http://online.wsj.com/public/page/censorship-investigation.html> <http://online.wsj.com/public/page/censorship-investigation.html>Journal<http://online.wsj.com/public/page/censorship-investigation.html> * and *Bloomberg <http://topics.bloomberg.com/wired-for-repression/> <http://topics.bloomberg.com/wired-for-repression/>News<http://topics.bloomberg.com/wired-for-repression/> * have revealed just how expansively these technologies are already being used. Intelligence agencies throughout the Middle East can today scan, catalogue, and read virtually every email in their country. The technology even allows them to change emails while en route to their recipient<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-12/tunisia-after-revolt-can-alter-e-m…>, as Tunisian authorities sometimes did before the revolution. These technologies turn activists' phones against them, allowing governments to listen in on phone calls, read text messages, even scan cell networks and pinpoint callers with voice recognition. They allow intelligence agents to monitor movements of activists via a GPS locator updated every fifteen seconds. And by tricking users into installing malware on their devices -- as is currently<http://articles.cnn.com/2012-02-17/tech/tech_web_computer-virus-syria_1_opp…> <http://articles.cnn.com/2012-02-17/tech/tech_web_computer-virus-syria_1_opp…> happening<http://articles.cnn.com/2012-02-17/tech/tech_web_computer-virus-syria_1_opp…>in Syria - government agents can remotely turn on a laptop webcam or a cell phone microphone without its user knowing. In Syria recently, American journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Rimi Ochlik were killed by a mortar attack that may have been targeted to the locations of their satellite phones<http://www.rferl.org/content/marie_colvin_death_concerns_about_safe_use_sat…>. We don't know for sure how the Syrian army tracked them, but Lebanese intelligence had recorded Syrian officials as planning to target<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9099325/Marie-Colvin-Syria-regime-accused-o…>Western journalists, and following satellite phone signals is just one of the tech-aided ways they could have done it. Syria and other abusive Middle Eastern regimes rely on technology companies such as Area SpA, the Italian firm that contracted with the regime there to build a surveillance center, and that pulled out only after exposure by Bloomberg News prompted protests at their Italian headquarters. There's also the American company Bluecoat Systems. When it was reported that their Internet-monitoring equipment had been re-sold to the Syrian government, a senior VP told<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203687504577001911398596328.h…>the *Wall Street Journal*, "We don't want our products to be used by the government of Syria or any other country embargoed by the United States." For all the evil of Syria's regime, it's hard to ignore the role and often the complicity of Western technology companies that can sometimes act as dictator's little helper. While Syria's use of surveillance has been particularly egregious and well-documented, this problem goes far beyond just one country. For years, Western firms have been selling surveillance equipment to the most brutal regimes. And while sales to Syria often violate sanctions policy, such companies can sell to many other authoritarian countries -- many of them U.S. and E.U. allies -- without repercussions. In pre-revolutionary Tunisia, surveillance firms gave<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-22/torture-in-bahrain-becomes-routine…> <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-22/torture-in-bahrain-becomes-routine…> discounts<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-22/torture-in-bahrain-becomes-routine…>to a government agency because the firms wanted to use the country for testing and bug-tracking. The technology was so advanced that it prompted the post-revolutionary head of the Tunisian government's Internet agency to <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704438104576219190417124226.h…> remark<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001…>, "I had a group of international experts from a group here lately, who looked at the equipment and said: 'The Chinese could come here and learn from you.'" In Bahrain, dozens of political activists have testified<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-12/tunisia-after-revolt-can-alter-e-m…>that the security officers who detained and beat them also read transcripts of their text messages and emails likely gathered from technology purchased from Germany-based Trovicor <http://trovicor.com/>, a former Nokia Siemens subsidiary. According to *Bloomberg* *News*, a spokesman for the latter confirmed<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-12/tunisia-after-revolt-can-alter-e-m…>the sale and maintenance of this equipment to the Bahraini government. "The bulk of this digital arms trade happens under the radar. Qaddafi's regime was later found to have spied on *Al Jazeera* journalist Khaled Mehiri by monitoring his emails and Facebook messages using<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203764804577056230832805896.h…> <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203764804577056230832805896.h…> technology<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203764804577056230832805896.h…>made by French company Amesys. Mehiri was later interrogated and threatened by the head of Libya's intelligence service. The reporters who found Mehiri's surveillance file in Tripoli's abandoned Internet monitoring center discovered similar files on many other journalists, human rights advocates, and democratic activists. The mass surveillance industry is a large one -- estimates now put<http://owni.eu/2011/12/01/spyfiles-wikileaks-revelations-of-mass-internet-s…>the global market at $5 billion per year. The businesspeople getting rich from the crackdown industry don't often talk to the media, but some of the few who do can seem less than concerned about their potential role in their clients' violence. Jerry Lucas is the president of Telestragies Inc, the company that runs ISS World, the trade show circuit (also known as the "Wiretapper's Ball") that brings these companies and their clients together. Asked by the *Guardian*<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/nov/01/governments-hacking-techni…>in November if he would be comfortable knowing that regimes in Zimbabwe and North Korea were purchasing the technology from his trade shows, he responded, "That's just not my job to determine who's a bad country and who's a good country." He added, "That's not our business, we're not politicians ... we're a for-profit company. Our business is bringing governments together who want to buy this technology." <http://www.theatlantic.com/special-report/democracy>This is the crux of the problem: These companies seem fully aware of what they're doing - after all, the better they understand how to help secret police find and terrorize dissidents, the better their products will do on the market -- but far less concerned about the implications. As Dutch member of the E.U. Parliament Marietje Schaake told us last week, "The bulk of this digital arms trade happens under the radar; through spin-offs of well-known companies, but mostly by players without a reputation to lose with consumers." Schaake, who has been leading an effort in Europe to halt the sale of surveillance technologies to repressive regimes, helped pass E.U. export restrictions to some government actors in Syria. In the U.S., Rep. Chris Smith introduced<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-09/house-bill-would-ban-surveillance-…>a bill in the House that would require American companies listed on the stock exchange to report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on how they conduct due diligence on human rights issues. Unfortunately, apart from the work of a few individuals, this problem has gone mostly ignored by Western governments, and the digital surveillance trade still seems to be flourishing. Congress, the E.U., and the U.N. all have the ability act -- by requiring the relevant companies to at least transparently evaluate whether or not their technology is aiding in human rights abuses, if not banning those sales outright -- but so far, even as dozens of Syrians die every day, they haven't. _______________________________________________ liberationtech mailing list liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?" You will need the user name and password you receive from the list moderator in monthly reminders. You may ask for a reminder here: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/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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Re: [IP] FCC order on VOIP snooping
by John Morris 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Lee (and Dave), The good news is that the recent FCC orders (last fall and last Wednesday) only extended CALEA (wiretapping design mandates) to reach broadband service providers and "interconnected" VoIP providers (i.e., VoIP providers that offer a service that can both connect calls out to the PSTN, the regular phone network, and receive calls from the PSTN). So in its current form (as you describe it) the peer- to-peer audio system would not be covered by CALEA. The bad news is that if the FCC's extension of CALEA is upheld in the face of legal challenges, it is certainly possible that the FCC would eventually try to extend CALEA to all voice-capable technologies on the Internet. But the good news is that this past Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Washington heard oral argument in four consolidated challenges to the extension of CALEA (including one brought by CDT), and two of the three judges were very skeptical of the theory on which the FCC extended CALEA to broadband. Indeed, Judge Edwards called the FCC's reasoning "gobbledygook" and "totally ridiculous." See, e.g., http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2006/05/05/AR2006050501032.html. One certainly cannot be sure how the court will come out based on an oral argument, and the court was less strong on the VoIP side of the challenge, but overall the argument was a very good sign. John Morris Center for Democracy & Technology At 2:40 PM -0400 5/6/06, David Farber wrote: >Begin forwarded message: > >From: Lee Revell <rlrevell(a)joe-job.com> >Date: May 6, 2006 11:40:09 AM EDT >To: David Farber <dave(a)farber.net> >Subject: FCC order on VOIP snooping > >http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-265221A1.pdf > >I have a question for the lawyers on IP (not looking for free legal >advice, just your thoughts ;-). > >I just returned from presenting a paper at the 4th Linux Audio >Conference in Karlsruhe, Germany and there's currently a lot of >work on >low latency, high quality realtime audio over IP - the point of >which is >to allow musicians to collaborate (or "jam") live over the net. The >upper latency limit between musicians for playing "live" is about >20-30ms so the speed of light prevents this from ever working beyond a >few hundred miles, but it still should be quite useful. > >Has there been any discussion of whether this kind of peer to peer >audio >system, which is not designed for VOIP but could obviously be used for >that, would be affected? AFAICT having to implement CALEA would be >the >death of any such system, as it's simply a musician's peer to peer >tool >not a centralized operation, plus I can't imagine how you would >implement CALEA without killing the latency. > >Lee ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen(a)leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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