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Re: White House appointment: Officer of Cyber-security
by auto301094＠hushmail.com 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Declan posted a politech link to a piece by Wayne Madsen: >The cyber-security perception management machinery was also put into high >gear in the August 1 edtion of The Washington Times. A story by Ben Barber >hyped the threat posed by Palestinian computer users who have launched a >so-called "cyber-Jihad" against Israeli government and corporate computers. >The article states that the U.S. government-funded firms RAND and iDefense >are urging the United States to adopt the same cyber defenses as those used >in Israel NOT TRUE. This is abysmally shitty journalism. Here's what the article actually states: "Israel has warded off dozens of cyber-attacks on its government and corporations since the Palestinian uprising began last year, blazing a trail that could help the United States develop defenses for future electronic conflicts, terrorism experts and Israeli officials say." ... Terrorism experts from RAND and from iDefense, an Alexandria firm advising the U.S. government and industry, say Israel's experience in beating off cyber-attacks will likely serve to protect American government and industry against similar attacks. ... "If the United States came to become involved in activity in the region which generates a significant level of outrage in the Muslim community, there is a distinct possibility that U.S. government and commercial organizations will face cyber attacks much like those hitting Israel today," said the iDefense report. In other words, we can learn something from what's happening in Israel and apply it to our own context and subsequent analysis. "RAND urging to adopt the same defenses" my ASS. Which defenses, when? Under what circumstances? Which specific RAND study, which researcher? How do you derive this so-called RAND position from a few unrelated sentences by Bruce Hoffman? Did he even read the iDefense report, or is he just content to misrepresent the Washington Times piece? One wonders. In sum, where's the proof? Looks like he made it up wholesale because it suited his point to say so. But then, smug fifth-rate hacks who lack basic reading comprehension skills are prone to these sort of overblown whiny smears to score easy brownie points with the peanut gallery. Talk about not caring about the truth! Disingenuous scaremongering. Either that, or he's absolutely rock-bottom fucking retarded. Zero respect. ~F. *** Say what you know, do what you must, come what may. - --[Sofia Kovalevskaya, motto on her paper "On the Problem of the Rotation of a Solid Body about a Fixed Point."] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: Hush 2.0 wl8EARECAB8FAjvDaw4YHGF1dG8zMDEwOTRAaHVzaG1haWwuY29tAAoJEKadvsVlUK4P hm4An3lKj7Pgrs/T7OkK279LZbll4njqAJ9WVekquo39SUn1WeLQ/kDDNzrJTA== =oJ4s -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Anthrax Case Number Three
by Eric Cordian 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/31567.htm The New York Post is reporting that a female librarian at American Media has pneumonia, and has tested positive for anthrax. There's still no evidence, according to the FBI, that this anthrax outbreak was the result of criminal activity. Legionaire's Disease first appeared to be a terror weapon when significant numbers of cases appeared at a convention center. Later we learned that it was simply a virulent form of pneumonia that liked to live in standing water in building air conditioning systems. Time will tell whether this anthrax outbreak is something similar. Clearly the timing is suspicious. One would think that a competent biological warfare attack against an office building with 300 people in it would kill more than one person. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

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Re: Anthrax Case Number Three
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

Eric Cordian <emc(a)artifact.psychedelic.net> wrote : >http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/31567.htm > >The New York Post is reporting that a female librarian at American Media >has pneumonia, and has tested positive for anthrax. > >There's still no evidence, according to the FBI, that this anthrax >outbreak was the result of criminal activity. > >Legionaire's Disease first appeared to be a terror weapon when significant >numbers of cases appeared at a convention center. Later we learned that >it was simply a virulent form of pneumonia that liked to live in standing >water in building air conditioning systems. > >Time will tell whether this anthrax outbreak is something similar. >Clearly the timing is suspicious. > >One would think that a competent biological warfare attack against an >office building with 300 people in it would kill more than one person. > >-- >Eric Michael Cordian 0+ > Maybe this was an improvised attack made necessary after access to crop dusters became more difficult. I hope this represents the limit of their skills.

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White House appointment: Officer of Cyber-security
by Xeni Jardin 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

White House press spokesman Ari Fleischer just announced pending appointment of the "Officer of Cyber-Security" to the Homeland Defense Team. I believe the appointee name was Roger Clarke, I may have the first name wrong. They're going to brief more on this in about 30 minutes, and I'm sure more details will be evident by day's end.

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Re: AGAINST ID CARDS
by Bill Stewart 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

At 06:41 PM 10/04/2001 -0400, Arnold G. Reinhold wrote: >I too am very nervous about the prospect of national ID cards. >I have an idea for a possible compromise, but I have not made up my mind >on it. >I'm interested in hearing other people's opinions. > >The idea is a federal standard for secure drivers' licenses. These would >be cards containing a chip that stores an electronically signed and time >stamped data file consisting of the driver's name, date of birth, height, >address, photo, and scanned signature, as well as endorsements such as >truck, school bus, motorcycle and hazmat operator licenses. All this >information is contained in existing drivers' licenses, but in a way that >is too easy to forge. It's a really, *really* bad idea. It's politically much easier to successfully oppose an obviously bad thing, like National ID cards and other internal pass laws, than to successfully oppose incremental changes in existing systems. And forcing states to use uniform practices means that you can't find a place to have a driver's license merely indicate your driving skills, as opposed to hundreds of other uses. For instance, collecting SSNs for driver's licenses, which makes it possible to correlate drivers databases with most other databases in the country, was done back in the 80s, and in many states the SSN is printed on the DL or IS the DL number. (The Federal Privacy Act had little effect on this process - it's just a law, so future laws can easily change it, and did so.) Another big change in DL policies was the requirement for citizenship papers to get permission to drive. Here in California that was largely done to prevent the clear and present danger of people speaking Spanish while driving, and many other states have jumped on the harassing-immigrants bandwagon. Since many jobs need driver's licences (or at least transportation), immigrants now have a major financial incentive to get them, so the price and supply of corruption in motor vehicle departments has gone up substantially. Before this, the main people who needed high-quality driver's licenses were convicted bad drivers who were trying to dodge the system, and that was easier to stop. (There was also a demand for fake ID for underage drinkers, but low-quality fakes are fine for that, and they don't need to be databased.) Driver's licenses have increasingly become tools of social control - the common excuse is "deadbeat dads", and in many states conviction for drug possession offenses also gets them suspended. Until 9/11, you could still routinely travel without government ID, though many airlines have a policy of training their people to lie about "no, that's always been the policy". ACLU Cards with pictures would have helped that - don't leave home without one - but I doubt we'll have that freedom again for a while. New Jersey, BTW, encodes lots of information in the DL number - the S8235 at the beginning of mine was a Soundex for "Stewart", the 5 digits at the end encoded birthdate and I think race or eye color, and some of the middle six digits may have also encoded that, though some were just serial numbers. It provides some security against licenses forged by people who don't know the rules. [They're also listed in plaintext. The forms let you update your address, but not most of the personal data, so my weight still shows what I weighed when I was 22.] As long as there's a driver's license number printed on the card, it's a unique ID for database lookups attached to your name. If the other certifications are encrypted, that means that *you* don't know what they say, but cops who run the card through a computer lookup will - and cops will *have* to run the card through a computer lookup to use them, whereas now they can just look at them if they want. If you could get a card that just had your picture and the certifications, and not your name or address, that might be an improvement, but it ain't gonna happen. And meanwhile, in many states you've got some flexibility about whether the license lists the address where you get snailmail or the address where you sleep or the address where you own land. Expect any uniform standards to erase that. What can the ability to do database lookups do? Well, if the signatures indicate that you're black, or a Registered Republican Voter, or a Welfare Recipient, or a Registered Drug Offender, it's much easier for anybody who wants to target you do do so. If the databases are only accessible to authorized users, that increases the demand for bribable authorized users, especially if the expanded set of uses expands the set of authorized users. It's possible to keep the different sets of information separate, if there's the technical skill and political will to do so, but there's little enough of the former and none of the latter among the kinds of people who'd make the requirements for that kind of system. Bill Stewart --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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Swatch@giganetstore.com
by info＠giganetstore.com 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

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America need therapy
by mattd 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

End of the hydrocarbon age?I wonder how the simulations of nuclear strikes on saudi oil fields are going in the new airy pentagon.(bring the outdoors in!) Also massoud,reagan and some others would surely agree with chairman tim on talking(or waving)to the press being harmful. The press inc CIA elements seem keen to revive the clipper.It should be our duty to remind them they may be the ones who are clipped.

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Google and the Net
by Tim May 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

On Tuesday, October 9, 2001, at 10:40 AM, Trei, Peter wrote: >> Steve Mynott[SMTP:steve@tightrope.demon.co.uk] wrote: >> Every thought how bad the net would be if google went away? >> > Actually, us old timers remember what it was like before google, > or even altavista (the first real search engine). Heck, some of us > remember what it was like before Usenet... > > In the early days of the web, you would start from some site which > was vaguely associated with your topic, and follow links using a > hill-climbing search pattern. It was slow, and kind of hit-or-miss. > However, unlike today, many site maintainers really tried to maintain > up-to-date, useful, and annotated lists of links to related sites. Yahoo > started as just such a site, aglommerating link lists for many topics. > (The web was a lot smaller in those days). > > Google is much goodness... Hypertext in general is doubleplus good. I remember Gopher, Archie, and all of those crufty tools. I never much used them. A friend did, and he would show me stacks of printouts from obscure sites he'd found and ftp'ed. I had a _very_ primitive access to the ARPANet in 1972-3, using a weird storage tube display in the Chemistry building at UCSB. (One of the first four nodes, courtesy of folks like Glenn Culler, who did a lot of engineering work on the node processors. He had a company called "Culler-Fried" and also "Culler-Harrison." Early floating-point processors. One of his companies evolved into Floating Point Systems, in Beaverton, OR, and then this was eventually merged into Cray Research, and thence into Sun or SGI (I forget who got which pieces). I know that Sun's very successful multi-CPU offerings are largely based on the SPARC arrays done at FPS. So, from Culler to AP-120B to Cray to Sun in a mere 30 years!) Upon entering Intel, we had a lot of internal computer resources, but little or no access to ARPANet and then Internet. This changed around 1980 for some groups, with strict controls, and changed again in the mid-80s. But even now there are obvious firewalls, formal and informal. My first real Usenet account was gotten in 1988, through Portal Communications. One of the first to offer accounts to "civilians." (Part of the reworking/renaming/refocussing of the Net, but even then there was yammering that mentioning a product name violated the "no commercial use" rules.) A major inflection point came in 1994-95, with the wide availability of browsers. Then Alta Vista and DejaNews. Now Google reigns supreme. It'll be interesting to see how long Google survives. --Tim May, Occupied America "They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759.

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Detroit Free Press
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

http://www.detroitfreepress.com/news/nw/terror2001/safe9_20011009.htm >SECURITY INCREASES: U.S. on guard at home > >Safety now measured by the things you see, and things you don't > >October 9, 2001 > >BY DAVID ZEMAN, JIM SCHAEFER AND TAMARA AUDI > This shithead collective makes some very casual statements : > Say good-bye to the relative anonymity of e-mail. > > Say hello to government "filtering" of suspicious messages. > > Say good-bye to the traditional photo identification at work. > > Say hello to fingerprint IDs. > > Government officials and civil libertarians are also > debating the merits of new computer software that is > being marketed for terrorist profiling. The software, > by Narus Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., would allow the > government to monitor patterns of e-mail, Web site > usage and Internet-based telephone calls to flush out > potential evildoers. > It's just amazing how quickly people embrace this sheiss without questioning it. Nobody wants to think about what will make us safer, they just leap blindly towards technology and government. It's a sort of long lost father figure problem - save me daddy. It's a sign of how weak our society really is. Maybe the bad guys are not so far off the mark. I'm ashamed by the weakness of our politicians, our journalists and all too many of my "fellow" citizens. Mike

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RE: al Qaeda website?
by Trei, Peter 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

> Steve Mynott[SMTP:steve@tightrope.demon.co.uk] wrote: > Every thought how bad the net would be if google went away? > Actually, us old timers remember what it was like before google, or even altavista (the first real search engine). Heck, some of us remember what it was like before Usenet... In the early days of the web, you would start from some site which was vaguely associated with your topic, and follow links using a hill-climbing search pattern. It was slow, and kind of hit-or-miss. However, unlike today, many site maintainers really tried to maintain up-to-date, useful, and annotated lists of links to related sites. Yahoo started as just such a site, aglommerating link lists for many topics. (The web was a lot smaller in those days). Google is much goodness... Peter Trei

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