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Jay Leno comment
by Steve Schear 11 Aug '03

11 Aug '03

TV comedian Jay Leno made this comment August 4, regarding the effort now underway to write a constitution for Iraq: "Hey, why don't we send them ours? It worked well for us for over two hundred years . . . and we're not using it anymore . . " A foolish Constitutional inconsistency is the hobgoblin of freedom, adored by judges and demagogue statesmen. - Steve Schear

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Idea: Homemade Passive Radar System (GNU/Radar)
by Thomas Shaddack 11 Aug '03

11 Aug '03

The current developments in international politics, mainly the advent of rogue states attacking sovereign countries from air, causes a necessity of proliferation of cheap air defense solutions. Key part of air defense is the awareness, usually maintained by a network of ground radar stations. In the end of 50's, Czech Republic developed a passive radar system called PRP-1/Kopac (Korelacni Patrac, Correlation Seeker), which was later replaced by more advanced system Ramona and even more advanced Tamara. Then the Revolution came, bringing the inevitable international pressures that led to the bankrupcy of the Tamara developer company, following false indictments of its top managements which lead to revocation of the company's arms sale licence. Shortly after this, articles in the world press appeared about "groundbreaking" passive radar system being developed by - guess who? Lockheed. (After "15 years of research", good part of which consisted from reverse-engineering of seized shipment of I am not sure if Ramonas or Tamaras.) See also http://www.techtydenik.cz/tt1998/tt10/panoram5.htm The system allows locating and identification of aerial, ground, and (when installed on the shore) sea-based EM sources. The passive radar system consists from four main parts. Three are wideband receivers, listening for any characteristical transmitting activity. They talk to the fourth one, where a correlator is located - an electronic system calculating the position of the signal sources from the differences of times when the listening posts received their signals. The civilian sector electronics is developing fast; component prices fall down, computing power goes up, anybody can buy a machine that just few decades ago would make everyone in Pentagon salivating. Naturally, this opens interesting possibilities. The threat rogue states with overwhelming air force pose to other countries makes it a necessity to develop a cheap, open passive radar system, effectively bringing a key part of air defense down to easy affordability on a municipiality level. Let's call it GNU/Radar. We need the four stations: three listening ones, and the correlating one. The correlating station (CS) may be built as a MOSIX or Beowulf cluster. Its job is to handle signals from LPs, identifying the targets, and tracking their position. The listening posts (LPs) need a receiver - a suitably wideband one, a digitizer (a fast ADC card), optionally a DSP board to take some calculations off the shoulders of the CPU, a source of precise timebase for synchronizations (may be a GPS, which also provides information about the location of the listening post which is what the CS needs to know, or may be a receiver of a time synchronization signal broadcasted from somewhere if we want a backup for case of GPS being shut down. The receiver may be possibly adapted from the GNU/Radio project. The timing pulses can be also delivered optically, eg. by a modification in the Ronja unit mentioned later. The LPs crunch the received signals, isolate the interesting-looking ones, mark the precise moments of their reception, and send their arrival times and key characteristics to CS. The transmission channel may be anything with sufficient bandwidth - from an Internet leased line to Ronja-based 10Mbps optical links in case of direct visibility between LPs and CS. As an active twist, we can also use a separate unit, Illuminating Transceiver (IT), periodically broadcasting a pulse of known characteristics, easy to recognize by the LPs when it bounces from an aerial target. This unit has to be cheap and expendable - it's easy to locate and to destroy by a HARM missile. As a bonus, forcing the adversary to waste a $250,000+ AGM-88 missile on a sub-$100 transmitter may be quite demoralizing. There can be a whole hierarchy of ITs; when one of them transmits, the other ones sleep - when the transmitting one is destroyed, one of the sleeping units wakes up and continues in illuminating the airspace. This is within reach of capabilities of a simple microcontroller. Even other sources can serve as involuntary ITs. The landscape is littered with cellular base stations and civilian TV and radio transmitters. Just pick the suitable frequency and listen on. Remember that Kopac was built about 50 years ago, on vacuum tubes. It should be far from impossible to replicate it with contemporary COTS electronics. Using lower frequencies than the gigahertz band usual for modern military radars reduces accuracy, but also dramatically reduces the effectivity of aircraft stealth features. There are already prototype results in this field: http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,16762,00.html Some other sources: http://ronja.twibright.com/ http://slashdot.org/articles/01/06/11/1617239.shtml Opinions, comments, ideas?

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Re: Idea: Homemade Passive Radar System (GNU/Radar)
by Major Variola (ret) 11 Aug '03

11 Aug '03

At 05:04 PM 8/11/03 +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote: > This unit has to be cheap and expendable - it's easy to >locate and to destroy by a HARM missile. As a bonus, forcing the adversary >to waste a $250,000+ AGM-88 missile on a sub-$100 transmitter may be quite >demoralizing. Microwave ovens were used in the Yugo war for this. The invading air power can't ignore the ISM band because then you could use it for real missile trackers. Someone who can do vacuum and welding work could change the output freq of an oven magnetron, by changing the shorting-strap connections.

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Re: The Register - NSA proposes backdoor detection center (fwd)
by Major Variola (ret) 11 Aug '03

11 Aug '03

At 06:36 AM 8/11/03 -0500, Jim Choate wrote: >http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/32265.html >>Wolf also said that untrustworthy hardware poses a similar threat. "Most microelectronics fabrication in the USA is rapidly moving offshore," said Wolf. "NSA is working on a Trusted Microelectronics Capability to ensure that state-of-the-art hardware devices will always be available for our most critical systems.<< Only way they can do that is to build it themselves, from HDL to GDSII and make their own masks. You can't prove a function doesn't exist in some box otherwise, if you don't know the trigger. Kinda like a PRNG and its key.

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Re: [eff-austin] Antispam Bills: Worse Than Spam?
by Peter Fairbrother 11 Aug '03

11 Aug '03

Peter Harkins wrote: > On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 07:06:46PM -0700, mindfuq(a)comcast.net wrote: >> The state must protect my freedom of speech. So when I make a claim >> against AOL for conducting a DoS attack against me, the state must >> rule in my favor, or else they are failing to protect my free speech >> rights. > > OK, for anyone who wasn't sure, it's time to stop feeding the trolls. > Troll or not, if AOL censored email in the UK* it would be illegal interception. 2 years for every interception. IMO, that's the only good thing to come from the RIP Act (the one with not-(yet)-implemented GAK). Freedom to do your own thing is great, but what if the baby bells refused to connect you to another baby bell? The benefits of a unified 'phone service are such that legislation prevents baby bells doing that, and most of us would agree with that legislation. IMO, email should be similar. But it don't solve the spam problem :-( -- Peter Fairbrother *They do censor UK email, but they do it in the US. The relevant legal phrase is "public telecommunications service provider", not "common carrier". If you offer a telecomms service (eg email) to the public in the UK then you are a PTSP, and RIPA applies to you. No choice.

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The Register - NSA proposes backdoor detection center (fwd)
by Jim Choate 11 Aug '03

11 Aug '03

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/32265.html -- ____________________________________________________________________ We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space" ravage(a)ssz.com jchoate(a)open-forge.org www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org --------------------------------------------------------------------

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RE: [eff-austin] Antispam Bills: Worse Than Spam?
by Vincent Penquerc'h 11 Aug '03

11 Aug '03

> Nice! I've been thinking I should move there for a while. I also > heard that by 2006 London and all the major cities will have seemless > wifi coverage. The reason Europe is on the ball with this is the EU We're on the way. We already have seemless camera surveillance coverage. -- Vincent Penquerc'h

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Cypherpunks List Info
by cpunk＠lne.com 11 Aug '03

11 Aug '03

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Re: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
by Tim May 10 Aug '03

10 Aug '03

On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 11:49 AM, Trei, Peter wrote: >> Tim May[SMTP:timcmay@got.net] >> >> >> On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 09:26 AM, Bill Stewart wrote: >> >>> Also, NYT Article was >>> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29TERR.html?th >>> >>> But it sounds like they've chickened out, because various people >>> freaked >>> about the implications. (And they only got as far as it being >>> "an incentive to commit terrorism", without getting to >>> "a funding method for terrorism" or to "Assassination Politics".) >>> >>> >> >> Not to mention the obvious problems with letting government agents bid >> on things like when various unwanted foreign leaders would be >> assassinated. >> > Over on Dave Farber's IP list, it's been pointed out that there > is a pre-existing, live, real-money market in futures on these > types of events. Go over to www.tradesports.com, and click on > 'Current Events' under 'Trading Catagories' on the left. Drill down > and you'll find things like 'WMDs will be found in Iraq on or before > Sept 31', the value of which has dropped from 80 to 25 over the > last few months. Yes, a bunch of "ideas futures" markets have existed for nearly a decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect several efforts with varying degrees of success). And several years ago some companies actually tried to built real markets around these kinds of predictions. Maybe one of them is the "contract company" (pun intended) on this latest DARPA fantasy. The problem is not with the idea of using markets and bets and Bayesian logic to help do "price discovery" on things like when the Athlon-64 will actually reach consumers, or when the new King of Jordan will be whacked, and so on. The problem is, rather, with _government_ establishing a monopoly on such things while putting suckers like Jim Bell in jail basically for espousing such ideas. And, as I noted, there are significant problems with government employees in a betting pool (gee, aren't even office baseball pools technically illegal? Haven't they prosecuted some people for this? Yep, they have) where they also have control over the outcome. Jim Bell used this as a payoff mechanism for assassinations ("Alice bets $1000 that Paul Wolfowitz will be murdered with his family on August 10, 2003")...the same logic applies to the government's dead pool. --Tim May "That government is best which governs not at all." --Henry David Thoreau

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Re: How can you tell if your alarm company's...
by Major Variola (ret) 10 Aug '03

10 Aug '03

Spooks & Physical IDS: If you are specifying a "roll your own security system", you probably want to make a distinction between building an "alarm company" and a "physical intrusion detection and logging" system. With the former you're hoping to keep your items; with the latter you're trying to keep your infosec pristine, and the State Burglars will not take anything. That would look bad for the Alarm Company they work for (that you pay to keep your items). Car Alarms: If you have neighbors who can see your house, your homebrew security system can use either strobes to annoy or fake-flame-lighting to alarm them. Anon CopCalls: You could make an anon 911 call using an old unused cellphone ---the base stations will take a 911 without subscribing. You could use a dish to hit a distant cell. Though these are jammable. Best solution is personal IDS that stays quiet. Of course if you do log an intrusion you have to sanitize or leave the space. Keep the housecat away from the battery-powered ultrasound that cuts power to the red computer. ------- Talk softly and carry a big lawyer. ---Hunter S Roosevelt

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