July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

Rand urges face-scanning of the masses
by Thomas C. Greene 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/20966.html Think tank urges face-scanning of the masses The famous Rand Organization http://www.rand.org, a putatively non-partisan think tank, has come out in favor of using face-scanning technology to violate the privacy of the innocent masses in search of -- you guessed it -- terrorists and pedophiles, the two most detested fringe-groups on the planet. Following the regrettable inclinations of all modern governments, a recent Rand report http://www.rand.org/publications/IP/IP209/IP209.pdf reckons that the natural rights of the majority of ordinary, law-abiding citizens should be sacrificed for the sacred mission of identifying and prosecuting a mere handful of sexually perverted or homicidal lunatics. "Biometric facial recognition can provide significant benefits to society," Rand says, and adds that "we should not let the fear of potential but inchoate threats to privacy, such as super surveillance, deter us from using facial recognition where it can produce positive benefits." Chief among these are the detection of terrorists and pedophiles, as we said. No matter that these sick individuals comprise a mere fraction of a fraction of normal human beings. No matter that detecting them requires the most outrageous government intrusions into the natural comings and goings of millions of innocent people. Rand's answer to serious questions of personal liberty is a few easily-skirted regulations which ought to allay all of our concerns. "By implementing reasonable safeguards [for government use of biometric face scanning], we can harness its power to maximize its benefits while minimizing the intrusion on individual privacy," the report chirps optimistically. Rand returns repeatedly to the controversial, and prosecutorially worthless, use of biometric face scanning at the 2001 Super Bowl http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/16561.html. "While facial recognition did not lead to any arrests at the Super Bowl, there is evidence that using such a system can help deter crime. In Newham, England, the crime rate fell after police installed 300 surveillance cameras and incorporated facial recognition technology. While it is possible that the criminals only shifted their efforts to other locales, crime in Newham at least was deterred." That's rich. So it's 'possible' that local criminals moved elsewhere, is it? Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows it's certain that they did, which implies that no one will ever be safe until every dark corner of the planet is blanketed by high-tech cameras performing a sort of criminal triage on all of us. And after all, things could be worse. "The facial recognition system used at the Super Bowl was not physically invasive or intrusive for spectators. In fact, it was much less invasive than a metal detector at a public building or an inauguration parade checkpoint. In this sense, facial recognition helped to protect the privacy of individuals, who otherwise might have to endure more individualized police attention," Rand points out. Of course, no appeal to Fascism and Kafkaesque control would be complete without reference to the safety of innocent children. Rand does not let us down: "many parents would most likely feel safer knowing their children's elementary school had a facial recognition system to ensure that convicted child molesters were not granted access to school grounds." It's all very popular, but immensely dangerous, thinking. Preserving personal liberty requires that we all accept a bit of chaos, a bit of hooliganism, a bit of risk. Yes, you or I might possibly get our heads bashed in by brain-dead hooligans, or get blown up by terrorist bombers, and our little lambs might get exploited by sexual sickos if we don't keep a close eye on them. But probably not. Surely, the suffocating, risk-free environments our governments are trying so desperately to sell us to extend their powers of observation and control are far more grotesque and soul-destroying than anything a terrorist or a pedophile might ever hope to produce. . ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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FC: Rand report: Facecams can thwart terrorism, install them now!
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

[I've copied the author of the paper, a Rand analyst named John Woodward. He is an attorney who lives in Virginia and was most recently a CIA operations officer for 12 years, according to his bio, in addition to being the CIA Staff Assistant to the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon. --Declan] ********

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Please post this on the USENET : alt.politics.org.ciaforme .... somebody tries t
by Mark Saarelainen 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

They stopped my USENET communication after I had told that my thesis on the business consolidation of a foreign corporation in the North America was 100 % correct. I had told in 1991 that the consolidation of Ahlstrom Machinery, Inc. (AMI) was a failure and unsuccessful. During the 1990s many Ahsltrom Machinery's businesses were sold and the remaining parts were or are to be sold to Andritz from Graz, Austria in 2003. I had told them the truth in 1991 and I was punished by the executive management of AMI and people spread bad stories about me and my thesis in 1991 although it was graded as very good by one Professor. The Business Development Director of Ahsltrom Machinery, Inc. even forced me to change my thesis tosome extent by threatening to prevent me from graduating as the Masters of Science in Industrial Engineering and Management in April/May, 1991. His name is Markku Perkola. Itwas just my academic work.They had even told to my so called birthmother that my thesis was! no t good, although it was graded as very good and as it is now concluded I was 100 % correct and right. So my thesis was right and these people of Ahsltrom Machinery and many people of Varkaus, Finland, just wanted to hurt me and destroyed my careerat my age of 24 (12 years ago), when I had told them the truth about the failing business operations of Ahsltrom Machinery in the North America in 1991. So as the conclusion I was punished by people of Finland after I had told them the truth,which was my job in the first place. I was hired to write my thesis on their business consolidation and I told the truth. As we know now today Ahlstrom Machinery does not exist any longer. Markku J. Saarelainen Varkaus, Finland ---- 5/31/2003 Andritz acquires 50% of Ahlstrom Machinery Group - extension to 100% possible Increase of sales by 50% to 1,000 million Euros Graz (Austria) based Andritz AG initially buys 50 per cent of the Finnish Ahlstrom Machinery Group. The acquisition became effective as of May 31, 2000, after obtaining the required permissions under anti-trust laws. Ahlstrom Machinery Group's future company name will be Andritz- Ahlstrom Corporation. Both Andritz and the Seller have options whose exercise would make Andritz the sole owner of Ahlstrom Machinery Group. Need a new email address that people can remember Check out the new EudoraMail at http://www.eudoramail.com ------------------------------- END TRANSMISSION -------------------------------

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Re: [tahoe-dev] Proposed short description of tahoe-LAFS for personal backup
by Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 7:44 PM, Saint Germain <saintger(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > tahoe-LAFS is not really a backup software but rather a storage solution. How about: """ Tahoe-LAFS is not just a backup tool, but rather a distributed file system. It also comes with an integrated backup tool. """ > The primary objective is to secure your data, either for > privacy or for safety (against damage). To do so, it stores your > encrypted data (encrypted at the source) on several machines organized > in a network with a configurable policy (specifying K=2 and N=5 for > instance, will spread your data on 5 machines, 2 of which need at least > to be available to access your data). Nicely written. > A few remarkable points: > - I like its "paranoid" approach. The idea is to trust no one (and especially not your online storage provider) This is fine and I don't think you need to change it, but for your information whenever I see the word "trust" a little warning flag goes up in my brain, and I go back and mentally rewrite the sentence without the word "trust". This is because that word combines two things: 1. Whether you think a person or tool is going to fail or betray you, and 2. Whether your system relies on that person or tool operating correctly and loyally. A lot of the architecture of Tahoe-LAFS is focused on question 2 and the interference of question 1 just confuses everyone. If you think about question 1 then you'll sometimes end up choosing the wrong answer for question 2. For example: think of Least Authority Enterprises. As a company, we don't want our users to think that we are weak or malicious -- that we are likely to fail or to betray our customers to someone else. But, we very much want our customers to be *invulnerable* to us, so that *if* we were to fail or to betray our customers to someone else, there would be very little damage that we would be able to do. If you use the word "trust", then it is hard to explain why you don't want to give LAE your encryption keys. Does that mean you think we are dishonest? Don't you trust us? If you force yourself not to use the word trust, then you can usually rewrite the sentences to be in terms of "reliance" or "vulnerability" instead of trust, and suddenly the confusion about question 1 vs. question 2 disappears. Why do you withhold your capabilities from LAE? Because you don't wish to be vulnerable to a failure or betrayal at LAE. Because you don't want the safety of your backups to *rely on* the continued security of LAE's servers and the continued loyalty of its employees. Doing that transformation on your sentence above would give something like: """ I like its "paranoid" approach. The idea is that no one (not even your online storage provider) should have read or write access to your backups. """ > - Don't need any redundant PAR2 checksum, given that the data are By the way, zfec is an alternative to PAR2. https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/zfec/browser/zfec/README.rst zfec is much more efficient than PAR2 for some settings. (See the benchmarks in the README.rst.) I don't know of anyone who is actively using zfec's command-line tool in the way that one uses PAR2's command-line tool, though. There are lots of people using zfec as a library inside other tools. Looking forward to reading your article! Maybe I'll painfully struggle through the first 10 words in French and then get my Francophone wife to read it to me. :-) Regards, Zooko _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list tahoe-dev(a)tahoe-lafs.org https://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev ----- 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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Rand urges face-scanning of the masses
by Thomas C. Greene 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/20966.html Think tank urges face-scanning of the masses The famous Rand Organization http://www.rand.org, a putatively non-partisan think tank, has come out in favor of using face-scanning technology to violate the privacy of the innocent masses in search of -- you guessed it -- terrorists and pedophiles, the two most detested fringe-groups on the planet. Following the regrettable inclinations of all modern governments, a recent Rand report http://www.rand.org/publications/IP/IP209/IP209.pdf reckons that the natural rights of the majority of ordinary, law-abiding citizens should be sacrificed for the sacred mission of identifying and prosecuting a mere handful of sexually perverted or homicidal lunatics. "Biometric facial recognition can provide significant benefits to society," Rand says, and adds that "we should not let the fear of potential but inchoate threats to privacy, such as super surveillance, deter us from using facial recognition where it can produce positive benefits." Chief among these are the detection of terrorists and pedophiles, as we said. No matter that these sick individuals comprise a mere fraction of a fraction of normal human beings. No matter that detecting them requires the most outrageous government intrusions into the natural comings and goings of millions of innocent people. Rand's answer to serious questions of personal liberty is a few easily-skirted regulations which ought to allay all of our concerns. "By implementing reasonable safeguards [for government use of biometric face scanning], we can harness its power to maximize its benefits while minimizing the intrusion on individual privacy," the report chirps optimistically. Rand returns repeatedly to the controversial, and prosecutorially worthless, use of biometric face scanning at the 2001 Super Bowl http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/16561.html. "While facial recognition did not lead to any arrests at the Super Bowl, there is evidence that using such a system can help deter crime. In Newham, England, the crime rate fell after police installed 300 surveillance cameras and incorporated facial recognition technology. While it is possible that the criminals only shifted their efforts to other locales, crime in Newham at least was deterred." That's rich. So it's 'possible' that local criminals moved elsewhere, is it? Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows it's certain that they did, which implies that no one will ever be safe until every dark corner of the planet is blanketed by high-tech cameras performing a sort of criminal triage on all of us. And after all, things could be worse. "The facial recognition system used at the Super Bowl was not physically invasive or intrusive for spectators. In fact, it was much less invasive than a metal detector at a public building or an inauguration parade checkpoint. In this sense, facial recognition helped to protect the privacy of individuals, who otherwise might have to endure more individualized police attention," Rand points out. Of course, no appeal to Fascism and Kafkaesque control would be complete without reference to the safety of innocent children. Rand does not let us down: "many parents would most likely feel safer knowing their children's elementary school had a facial recognition system to ensure that convicted child molesters were not granted access to school grounds." It's all very popular, but immensely dangerous, thinking. Preserving personal liberty requires that we all accept a bit of chaos, a bit of hooliganism, a bit of risk. Yes, you or I might possibly get our heads bashed in by brain-dead hooligans, or get blown up by terrorist bombers, and our little lambs might get exploited by sexual sickos if we don't keep a close eye on them. But probably not. Surely, the suffocating, risk-free environments our governments are trying so desperately to sell us to extend their powers of observation and control are far more grotesque and soul-destroying than anything a terrorist or a pedophile might ever hope to produce. . ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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FC: Rand report: Facecams can thwart terrorism, install them now!
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

[I've copied the author of the paper, a Rand analyst named John Woodward. He is an attorney who lives in Virginia and was most recently a CIA operations officer for 12 years, according to his bio, in addition to being the CIA Staff Assistant to the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon. --Declan] ********

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Please post this on the USENET : alt.politics.org.ciaforme .... somebody tries t
by Mark Saarelainen 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

They stopped my USENET communication after I had told that my thesis on the business consolidation of a foreign corporation in the North America was 100 % correct. I had told in 1991 that the consolidation of Ahlstrom Machinery, Inc. (AMI) was a failure and unsuccessful. During the 1990s many Ahsltrom Machinery's businesses were sold and the remaining parts were or are to be sold to Andritz from Graz, Austria in 2003. I had told them the truth in 1991 and I was punished by the executive management of AMI and people spread bad stories about me and my thesis in 1991 although it was graded as very good by one Professor. The Business Development Director of Ahsltrom Machinery, Inc. even forced me to change my thesis tosome extent by threatening to prevent me from graduating as the Masters of Science in Industrial Engineering and Management in April/May, 1991. His name is Markku Perkola. Itwas just my academic work.They had even told to my so called birthmother that my thesis was! no t good, although it was graded as very good and as it is now concluded I was 100 % correct and right. So my thesis was right and these people of Ahsltrom Machinery and many people of Varkaus, Finland, just wanted to hurt me and destroyed my careerat my age of 24 (12 years ago), when I had told them the truth about the failing business operations of Ahsltrom Machinery in the North America in 1991. So as the conclusion I was punished by people of Finland after I had told them the truth,which was my job in the first place. I was hired to write my thesis on their business consolidation and I told the truth. As we know now today Ahlstrom Machinery does not exist any longer. Markku J. Saarelainen Varkaus, Finland ---- 5/31/2003 Andritz acquires 50% of Ahlstrom Machinery Group - extension to 100% possible Increase of sales by 50% to 1,000 million Euros Graz (Austria) based Andritz AG initially buys 50 per cent of the Finnish Ahlstrom Machinery Group. The acquisition became effective as of May 31, 2000, after obtaining the required permissions under anti-trust laws. Ahlstrom Machinery Group's future company name will be Andritz- Ahlstrom Corporation. Both Andritz and the Seller have options whose exercise would make Andritz the sole owner of Ahlstrom Machinery Group. Need a new email address that people can remember Check out the new EudoraMail at http://www.eudoramail.com ------------------------------- END TRANSMISSION -------------------------------

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Re: [tahoe-dev] notes from the Tahoe-LAFS Weekly Dev Call, 2012-09-11
by Brian Warner 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On 9/11/12 9:59 AM, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn wrote: > b" topic: The compression attack on HTTPS. > The drewp defense -- the Added Convergence Secret -- is exactly the > thing that creates independent compression contexts in order to limit > the scope for attack. Nope. Drewp's defense increases the total entropy of the input to the convergence function, but that only helps if you're limited to guessing that input all-at-once. The compression attack lets you guess the secret input incrementally (just like a padding-oracle attack), so the attacker's job is linear, not exponential. Adding 256 bits of unguessable secret merely adds about 256 extra guesses to their workload. The defense is either to prevent the mixing of secret and adaptive attacker-supplied data in the same compression context (i.e. the same file), or to prevent the attacker from measuring the length of the resulting compressed data. > Zooko and (perhaps to a lesser degree) Brian are uncomfortable with > the fact that LAFS currently exposes the length of your plaintext, to > the byte level of precision. Zooko wants to add padding. I'm vaguely uncomfortable with it, but I'm more uncomfortable with some of the alternatives. Exposing the exact byte-length of the plaintext is easy to implement (the alternatives are harder to implement) and easy to explain to users ("we expose the exact byte-length of your plaintext, and if you append N bytes of attacker-supplied data, we'll expose length+N"). Compressing the data first might have value (for large fluffy data, but we think most large data is already mp3/jpg compressed), but is harder to explain: "we'll leak the length of a gzipped form of your data, which exposes some obscured combination of the actual length of your file and the fluffiness of its contents, which will vary in hard-to-predict way if you append attacker-supplied data to it". Padding isn't too hard to explain ("we expose 8*ceil(len/8)"), but the privacy value it provides is dubious: an active attacker can still detect single-byte variations if they can get you to start close to an edge of the block size, and 8 bytes may not be enough to thwart the would-be file-correlator (who's just on the lookout for a file exactly 4834263 bytes long, but knows there aren't any other files close to that length, so the rounded-up 4834264-byte file is probably the same). For larger files, even 4096-byte chunks might not be enough. So the benefit depends upon the block size you pick, versus the distribution of file sizes, meaning we'd have to pick a block size out of a hat, and unjustified ad-hoc constants always make me think we're doing something wrong. (it might end up being a good idea, but it makes me nervous). You could add random padding (in a convergent fashion, e.g. append H(file)%8 bytes of zeros, record the original length in the encrypted data somewhere). But as we've learned from anonymous remailers, random padding merely lowers the signal-to-noise ratio, and only increases the cost of statistical correlation by a linear factor. So you'd have to be clear on what sort of protection you were earning before taking the complexity hit of random padding. cheers, -Brian _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list tahoe-dev(a)tahoe-lafs.org https://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev ----- 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: U.K. may order firms to record Net-traffic, ban anon remaiers?
by Alan Docherty 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Declan, The Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Bill was introduced to Parliament on Monday and the legislation will go before the House of Commons next week for its second reading and committee stages. The Bill is expected to become law before Christmas. Alan Docherty Editor Internet Freedom News http://www.netfreedom.org ---

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FC: U.K. proposal would let government ban anonymous remailers
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Previous message: "U.K. may order firms to record Net-traffic, ban anon remaiers?" http://www.politechbot.com/p-02798.html ---

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