- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Purshottam
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>----- Forwarded message (Andrew Purshottam <andy(a)eon.netcom.com>) -----< Dear Mr. Purshottam, Mail to <andy(a)eon.netcom.com> boings.

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Re: IRS to keep unreviewable secret dossiers on US citizens
by pstemari＠erinet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:44 PM 1/20/95 CST, xpat(a)vm1.spcs.umn.edu wrote: >Excerpts from : St Paul Pioneer Press, Jan 29, 1995 > >"IRS plans to collect more data on individuals to nab tax cheats" [...] Here's the text from the recent EPIC annoucement on this--it covers the exemption the IRS is claiming from the FOIA in a bit more detail (sorry if people have already seen this): ======================================================================= [6] IRS Initiates Massive New Database ======================================================================= On December 20, the Internal Revenue Service announced in the Federal Register that it was planning a new database to monitor compliance of taxpayers in a project entitled Compliance 2000. The database would contain information on all individuals in the U.S. who conduct certain financial transactions and would be segmented by different criteria: Any individual who has business and/or financial activities. These may be grouped by industry, occupation, or financial transactions, included in commercial databases, or in information provided by state and local licensing agencies. The new database will combine private and public sector databases in a single searchable entity. A number of federal financial databases from the IRS will be enhanced with state, local and commercial sources. The Federal Register notice describes the non-tax databases: Examples of other information would include data from commercial databases, any state's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), credit bureaus, state and local real estate records, commercial publications, newspapers, airplane and pilot information, U.S. Coast Guard vessel registration information, any state's Department of Natural Resources information, as well as other state and local records. In addition, Federal government databases may also be accessed, such as, federal employment files, federal licensing data, etc. Finally, even though the proposed system would use frequently inaccurate "commercial databases" such as direct marketing records, taxpayers would not be able to review their records to ensure that they are accurate and up to date: "This system is exempt from the access and contest provisions of the Privacy Act." EPIC is filing comments asking the IRS to reconsider its use of commercial databases and to ensure that there are greater safeguards on the collection and use of personal information. A copy of the Federal Register notice is available at cpsr.org /cpsr/privacy/epic/IRS_compliance_2000_notice_txt Comments on the proposed system must be received by January 19, 1995, and sent to Office of Disclosure, Internal Revenue Service, 1111 Conn. Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20224. EPIC's Comments are available at cpsr.org /cpsr/privacy/epic/epic_irs_compliance_2000_comments.txt --Paul J. Ste. Marie pstemari(a)well.sf.ca.us, pstemari(a)erinet.com

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Re: Why emoney? Why not a web of debt?
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:54 PM 01/20/95, anonymous-remailer(a)shell.portal.com wrote: > But electronic computers are good at checking out these kinds of >chains automatically. Suppose there were a web of debt-trust. Each >person would indicate the other people who's iou's they will accept >(and the amount they would be willing to take). Thus I might take (up >to $10 of) Jo's, who might take Carol's who might take Terry's, etc. > > To buy something from me online, you will need to produce an IOU >from Jo, Carol or Terry. I would hand it to Jo for verification. Jo >would accept it or reject it (perhaps after talking to some other >folks online). If it were a CarolIOU, or a TerryIOU I would insist Jo >trade it for a JoIOU. All the details could be hidden behind a nice >little GUI. Certainly, that's what money is after all. Pretty much. But how are you going to transfer these IOUs electronically in a way that is relatively fraud-proof? Digital money. Ecash. When we say "ecash", we're talking about what Chaum was writing about in whatever paper, what Schneier describes protocols for in AC. Maybe the ecash is redeemable in US dollars, or maybe it's redeemable for 10 units of service from Jon Smith, but an ecash protocol is what you are going to use to transfer and issue those digital certificates of value, whatever the value represents. And of course, if you want to use these certificates of value anonymously, which is what is required to pay for an anon remailer, there are some slightly more stringent requirements. The right kind of ecash protocol can still handle it. But Carol probably shouldn't be paying for a remailer in CarolBucks (or CarolIOUs, whatever), at least not unless Carol is such a big spender that CarolBucks are in wide circulation and used by lots of people other then Carol. Which I guess is possible in your system. A pseudo-anarchist non-state-supported debt system would work fine, but you still need a mechanism to transfer your certificates of value, whether they stand for ten U.S. dollars, or 10 hours that Jon Smith will work mowing your lawn. And another way to look at it is that you are just proposing an ecash system where every person issues their own ecash, instead of just a few central banks doing it. There are advantages and disadvantages to that sort of thing, and it might be something interesting to think about, but you ultimately aren't going to be able to do it over a computer network without ecash. Ecash is the way you represent value certificates in digital form, pretty much.

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Re: Why emoney? Why not a web of debt?
by davidm＠iconz.co.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>At 6:54 PM 01/20/95, anonymous-remailer(a)shell.portal.com wrote: >> But electronic computers are good at checking out these kinds of >>chains automatically. Suppose there were a web of debt-trust. Each >>person would indicate the other people who's iou's they will accept >>(and the amount they would be willing to take). > >Certainly, that's what money is after all. Pretty much. But how are you >going to transfer these IOUs electronically in a way that is relatively >fraud-proof? Digital money. Ecash. [...] > And another way to look at it is that you are just proposing an >ecash system where every person issues their own ecash, instead of just a >few central banks doing it. The question of how to value ecash issued by different entities of varied credit-worthiness is an interesting one. I had been thinking along the lines of one or more centralised (but independent) credit rating agencies (a la Standard and Poors or Moodys) that one would subscribe to. Then you would value the various edollars in terms of their credit rating -- so you might sell something for $4 of CyberCash (NA) BV ecash, or $5 of FliBiNite NL ecash and so on. But of course, since ecash is worth only what you can get for it, the web of trust model, since it reflects what people will give for it, seems to reflect that underlying value much better. The best way to underpin the value of ecash is for the issuer to (credibly) undertake to convert it into real money. This gets around the problem of no one on the net making enough things you want: the old 'you can't eat cyberspace' saw. McDonalds may not accept ecash, but if a simple trip to the relevant ebank's Web page can put the price of a Big Mac in your real-money account, that is only a timing problem. [Of course, you have to come out from behind the anonymous ecash shield to do that, but that is a problem of being a real person. If you want to keep your wealth anonymous, don't buy a flash car and the latest Monet to go on sale -- invest it in an anonymous corporation.] An ebank along these lines could be set up reasonably cheaply (apart from the technical hurdles ;-), and could easily scale up as needed, and migrate to safer (taxhaven/banking secrecy) jurisdictions when turnover etc warranted it. David

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Remailers-in-a-box
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Tim May wrote: > I am waiting for such services to be actually, formally, solidly > announced, not just casual remarks that it might be possible. And of > course the software should be "ready to wear," port-a-potty, so that > the remailer account owner does nothing more than pay for the account. In this model, who deals with mailbombs/spams/requests for address blocks? It is this sort of administrivia (plus the threat of liability) that makes running a remailer troublesome, not a lack of someone's $20/month. I think it's disingenuous to say that "X pays the bills for the network link; X purchased the hardware and keeps it running; the box is in X's house/office; X is the person who reads complaint mail and responds (or fails to); but because Y sends X $20/month, the remailer (and attendant liability for its mis/use) belongs to Y." I realize that there's a certain formal logic to it, but I don't think that anyone - not courts, and not the world-in-general - is going to pay attention to that formalism when it's clear that a machine essentially under the control of X is being used for 'antisocial' means. I'm seriously considering offering this sort of remailer-in-a-box thing, but there's a certain amount of hassle associated with running a remailer. It can be shifted to different parties, but it must be paid for one way or another. I guess it'd be possible to treat remailers as disposable - when one had pissed off enough people, it could be abandoned - but this lack of long-term reliability seems poor. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLyBjVX3YhjZY3fMNAQEI3QP/YdqBbhn5k4Q+NtD3zoJCG7qIfGaQqogH AFFmItuU46rFQHHSxPl+p4fNmX+32yEva04ORq28NWPKggXiXhwN+LQDshWomSU8 gXkysIPdGeogSDxP6+JxXatE81TpuCjOtbGH3KlmCNaRbB0685zBVB7Oj1O/D5it zqM9JuV8yAE= =EQY5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Remailer In a Box available for beta testing
by sameer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I finally got annoyed with Tim clamoring for a Remailer in a Box, so I set it up just now... I just wrote it so there may be some problems I haven't gotten rid of yet. If you want to run a remailer on c2.org: 1) Sign up for a shell account on http://www.c2.org/services/signup.html 2) Log into your account (via dialup [510-549-1383] or telnet [c2.org] once it has been created. (within a day.. I'll automate account creation so it gets made within an hour soon, but right now I am doing it manually.) 3) If you wish, you can setup a .forward file to point to mailfilters or to another account. 4) Run the program /usr/local/lib/boxed-remailer/install_remail. The remailer will be installed, and non-remailed mail will be acted upon according to how the account was setup before you ran the program. 5) Answer the questions, they should be pretty simple. Once an account is created there is a one week free grace period. If you'd like to continue the account you can pay for it. If you have problems and suggestions, make sure you mail me, and I'll fix it. This is still in beta testing, so if you have problems I won't disable the account waiting for payment until the problems are fixed. $10 for one month, $27 for 3 months, $45 for 6 months. -- sameer Voice: 510-841-2014 Network Administrator Pager: 510-321-1014 Community ConneXion: The NEXUS-Berkeley Dialin: 510-549-1383 http://www.c2.org (or login as "guest") sameer(a)c2.org

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Hakim Bey URL, etc.
by dmandl＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The URL for the Hakim Bey web site (someone might have already posted this) is: http://www.uio.no:80/~mwatz/bey/ Except from the Hakim Bey interview in "Axcess" magazine (conducted last summer): "I have to admit I felt a certain intense interest, perhaps even amounting to a potential enthusiasm, when this tech was first being discussed," Bey told me. I'd read William Gibson like the rest of us, and I certainly understood his dystopian point, but nevertheless, when Tim Leary and people like that began to get enthusiastic, I had to investigate on that level. I haven't seen much evidence that what Uncle Tim thought was going to happen is really happening. Once again, any technology could be democratic if it were distributed, you know what I mean? It's a simple Marxist thing about means of production. There's nothing inherently authoritarian--at least at first glance--to any technology, although one could argue about how technology then shapes the society that has already shaped the technology in a kind of feedback loop that can move towards greater and greater authoritarianism or lack of autonomy. The potential for what, back in the 50's and 60's, people were calling electronic democracy, is obviously still there as a potential structure. You can see certain elements of it in the Net, but when you're talking about the high tech involved in virtual reality you're really talking about something that is not accesible to most people. And I think it probably never will be. There's never going to be any cheap VR kit that's going to allow a dock worker in Manila to get on some kind of cyberspace Internet, much less a dock worker in Atlanta--or me, for example." Bey was equally gloomy about the future of the Internet. "My impression is that 90 per cent of what goes out over it is completely unrelated to any kind of freedom interests, autonomy proposals or projects, or struggles for genuine non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian group dynamic. Most of it is just chit-chat--banal chit-chat that could just as easily be carried out over an old-fashioned party line phone." Unabashed in my online addiction, I couldn't help but ask if he saw _any_ way to realize the internet as a T.A.Z. "I'm led to believe, through conversations with people who are much more techie and active than I am, that cypher--unbreakable code--is the key. So the cypherpunks are the people to keep an eye on at this moment. They tend to be the ones who are most active around freedom of speech issues...whether legal or extra-legal. Even so, Bey felt that the powers that be will never allow the "Information Superhighway" to develop unchecked. "I think Clipper was a declaration of war on the Net. The fact that the egg is on their face, because within ten minutes some hacker figured out how to beat the Clipper, is an indication of--oh, let's call it an area of chaos. Within areas of chaos, either horrible destruction and disease and death occur. Or, if you're flowing the right way, and if all hearts are beating in unison to a certain degree, then that area of chaos can become the T.A.Z. Now I've said over and over again that there's no such thing as a T.A.Z. that's only on the Net, and I maintain that that's true. In order to have autonomy, you have to have physicality. Autonomy is not something that can only exist in the imagination or in the world of images. I think that it involves the entirety, the whole axial being, and that is rooted in the earth and concerns physicality, materiality, the body--mortality, if you like--as contrasted to the spurious immortality of cyberspace. But I still maintain that, at least in theory, the Net could be an adjunct to the T.A.Z., could be a tool or a weapon, even, if you want to look at it that way, for the construction of the T.A.Z." -- Dave Mandl dmandl(a)panix.com

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Re: Remailers-in-a-box
by Alex de Joode 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

: I guess it'd be possible to treat remailers as disposable - when one : had pissed off enough people, it could be abandoned - but this lack : of long-term reliability seems poor. The enrty point of a remailer could be "fixed", the exit point is where the heat is on. - The entry point of a remailer is entry(a)remail.org, - entry(a)remail.org has a forward file to: batch(a)remail.org - batch(a)remail.org does the actual remailing, since remail.org has installed some sort of MX'ing all messages that leave batch(a)remail.org will advertise themself as nobody(a)expendable.org . - If you "loose" expendable.org, you simple set up a new account with MX'ing, the remailer-users will only notice the change in exit-header, the enrty-point of that remailer is still entry(a)remail.org Ofcource you can make this as complicated as you like. :) Regards, -- Alex de Joode usura(a)replay.com Hate mail appreciated, http://www.xs4all.nl/~usura weekly contest for best death threat.

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Send Me The Stuff
by Master-X 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Please e-mail me with the stuff.

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Re: The Remailer Crisis
by Jaeson.M.Engle＠josaiah.sewanee.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>But is your Mac on the Internet on a more or less continuous basis? A >remailer that only works when the owner happens to log on to collect >his mail is not terribly useful (though not useless, as others have >also noted....just a "very unpredictable lag time" remailer, sort of >the "surface mail" of e-mail). Yes, my machine has a 56k direct line in, 24 hrs. a day, 7 days a week (during school months!;-)) The server you just mailed to is on this machine. >It happens that the Net is mainly built up of Unix boxes, hence the >focus here on Unix. OS/2, Windows, and Mac boxes will be used >increasinly for constant connection applications, so the idea has >merit, long term. I understand this, and am trying my best to cope. I am currently in the process of developing a name server for the Mac, because the Mac has alot against it when it comes to being a real eintity on the 'Net. >(Another nit: the Mac, which is what I also use, currently lacks >preemptive multitasking. Thus, if one's Mac is playing a multimedia >CD-ROM when new mail comes in, it likely won't get remailed until the >first app quits or is manually switched out. (Yeah, a few things like >print drivers can run in background, and maybe the new TIA emulators >can trick the OS into processing SLIP or PPP mail in the background, >but who knows?) The consensus is that the Mac is powerful, but it >ain't cut out yet to be a Unix box.) I agree that the Mac lacks some of the more powerful Unix features, namely preemtive multitasking, but I also believe that, at least with the newer Macs, CPU time-sharing is more efficient than it used to be. Know of Chuck Shotton's MacHTTP WWW server for the Mac? An excelent piece of software that gives literally on demand, and at least with my copy, it is always in the background. Really about the only thing that cuts out CPU timesharing is multimedia, mostly 3D grahpis games and highly intense graphics software, neither of which I use (much!;-)) >The language is a lesser deal. Remember that Eric Hughes knocked out >the first remailer in Perl in a few days, and MacPerl exists for the >Mac. Going to Pascal would probably be more trouble than it's worth. I thought that it was in Perl. I have tried pulling Unix Perl scripts and running them under MacPerl, but it doesn't quite do it. In fact, it usually doesn't do anything but spew errors back at you. >But the most important feature to have is a solid, reliable connection >to the Net. A computer that gets taken to classes, is not connected to >the Net, etc., is not very useful as a remailer. As I noted, I have a constant 56k line in/ out. And mine never moves... it's a bit large... mine is a Quadra 660av (ugh). >(The key is not that a remailer can sometimes remail, but that it can >be counted on to be part of chain without the mail getting "dropped on >the floor.") > >--Tim May As far as I can tell, and maybe you have other knowedge on this, my situation should work, assuming I can run the software. What do you think? Should the remailer Perl script run under MacPerl? aka: (-: Jaeson M. Engle || jme(a)josaiah.sewanee.edu :-) (-: www server: http://josaiah.sewanee.edu/ :-) (-: It's February 3rd! IT'S TIME!!! Ask me for details!:-) (-: Finger 'jme(a)josaiah.sewanee.edu' for my Public :-) PGP block.

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