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RE: Expectation of privacy in public?
by Trei, Peter 24 Sep '01

24 Sep '01

> Anonymous[SMTP:nobody@remailer.privacy.at] > > > For the lawyers and lawyer larvae out there... > > In an article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian this week, there is an > article about MUNI's policy of making audio recordings of passengers. > > <quote> > Nathan Ballard of the City Attorney's Office told the Bay Guardian that > they were well aware of the policy and approved it. "There are no > expectations of privacy in public," he said. Ballard asserted that the > policy was constitutional and did not fall under any wiretapping laws. > When asked if all of the vehicles that employ this surveillance policy > post signs to inform passengers that their conversations are being > recorded, he said, "This policy does not require signs." > </quote> > > Frankly, if I'm sitting in the back of an empty bus, talking to the person > next to me, it's my opinion that there certainly is a reasonable expection > of privacy. Does anyone more qualified than I care to tell me why I'm > right or wrong? > > Legal or not, I'm also curious to see what the EFF has to say about this > wonderful incarnation of Big Brother. > > http://www.sfbg.com/SFLife/35/51/cult.html > MUNI is breaking the law. http://www.rcfp.org/taping/ Peter Trei --------------------------- Cal. Penal Code ' 631, 632 (Deering 1999): It is a crime in California to intercept or eavesdrop upon any confidential communication, including a telephone call or wire communication, without the consent of all parties. It is also a crime to disclose information obtained from such an interception. A first offense is punishable by a fine of up to $2,500 and imprisonment for no more than one year. Subsequent offenses carry a maximum fine of $10,000 and jail sentence of up to one year. Eavesdropping upon or recording a conversation, whether by telephone (including cordless or cellular telephone) or in person, that a person would reasonably expect to be confined to the parties present, carries the same penalty as intercepting telephone or wire communications. Conversations occurring at any public gathering that one should expect to be overheard, including any legislative, judicial or executive proceeding open to the public, are not covered by the law. Anyone injured by a violation of the wiretapping laws can recover civil damages of $5,000 or three times actual damages, whichever is greater. Cal. Penal Code ' 637.2(a) (Deering 1999). An appellate court has ruled that using a hidden video camera violates the statute. California v. Gibbons, 215 Cal. App. 3d 1204 (1989). ------------------------------

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RE: Intercepts foretold of 'big attack' -- The Washington Times
by Trei, Peter 24 Sep '01

24 Sep '01

The Choate wrote: > Subject: Intercepts foretold of 'big attack' -- The Washington Times > > http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200192213012.htm > Now, isn't the washtimes the paper which is owned by the Moonies? This doesn't neccesarily mean it can't be a good paper, but it gives me pause. Maybe my info is out of date Peter Trei

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crypto in Pakistan punishable by execution
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 24 Sep '01

24 Sep '01

baptista(a)pccf.net wrote: >Just picked this up on CNN interview. > >Any use of encryption technology in Pakistan is now punishable by >execution. > That's a relief! You know my hearing isn't everything it used to be - I thought they said Hackensack. >Can someone look into this who may have access to this sort of information >to confirm or deny the report. > >regards >joe baptista > Mike

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Re: anonymous digital cash and other (now) iffy stuff
by Ryan Lackey 24 Sep '01

24 Sep '01

[Moderator's note: This is quite long, and much of it is interesting primarily to those following the Sealand saga. Since many of us _have_, in fact, been following the Sealand saga, I'm forwarding it for that reason. --Perry] Quoting Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam(a)ai.mit.edu>: > I never thought much of the idea at the time. In todays climate I > suspect that E-Gold, ZeroKnowledge and Sealand might as well > start packing up their servers before they get busted. (it's "HavenCo" not "Sealand", just as ZKS is ZKS and not "Canada") I agree the current climate is substantially worse, in terms of respect for the rule of law, individual liberty, and the prospects for freedom of speech, than it was before the WTC bombing. However, none of this was unanticipated; this incident just accelerates our descent into a future dystopia of universal monitoring, global statism, and individual subjugation, but does not at all affect where we're going. We've been on this path for at least the past 50 years, and if this attack and the aftermath pushes us forward another 20 years in a single day, that's certainly important, but no one should be surprised when they look around themselves and don't like what they see. (I assume you mean legislative/legal/political climate; while the nay-sayers said we'd be out of business before the end of 2000 due to lack of demand, HavenCo at least is profitable, and I think E-Gold is as well.) This trend is far more damaging to firms whose core business is not the provision of anonymity and privacy to clients, but which require privacy and anonymity provided by others to make their services useful. If it becomes more difficult to provide privacy/anonymity/security, the demand for such services will increase even faster than the costs of providing them. Some firms with relatively weak technical or other basis may be unable to scale up to provide more secure solutions, but the ensuing vacuum will encourage others to step up to the plate. The greatest enemy of secure electronic mail, for instance, being widely deployed is the LACK of widespread monitoring. If every internet connection in the US were monitored actively, and the contents were routinely used in civil and criminal legal actions, technologies like ZKS Freedom, PGP, SSL would be in far wider use than they are now. Certainly an argument can be made that it is more complex to offer such services with active government prosecution in one or more jurisdictions around the world. However, certain fundamental technical conditions do not cease to be true simply due to terrorist action, political will, or legislative fiat. Blowing up the WTC is unlikely to have made factoring RSA any easier than it was on 10 September, it is unlikely to have found a backdoor in widely deployed symmetric ciphers, and it has not affected the laws of thermodynamics to lessen the difficulty of defeating steganography. Sure, identifiable persons, physical assets, etc. can now be more easily attacked through legal means, at least in most of the world, and there is public support in many countries for international military action against others, provided at least a tenuous link to the "global terrorist conspiracy". However, the fundamental game is not changed. All that is required for "cypherpunk" reality is: [*] at least one computer with secure local execution environment (processor, some internal secure memory for interim results) [*] some means of permanently storing data (which can be unreliable, monitored, etc.) [*] some means of communication (even highly monitored, maliciously modified, or other) to the humans involved [*] plus, for anything reasonable, multiple such setups and some means of communication among them in a large network, even monitored or modified, with traffic analysis possibly limited to "a member of the overall network" where "network" can be massively more broad than "conspirators"). [*] Code[1]. I think it highly unlikely even a new "War on Terrorism", even if 100 times more forceful than the "War on Drugs", will be able to eliminate every last pre-2001 laptop computer, PDA, etc. from the earth, or the ability for people to send email (even if monitored, and outright encrypted email is a capital crime) and connect to a global network. On top of that infrastructure, viable electronic cash systems protected from traffic analysis and resistant to censorship, anonymous publication systems, etc. can be built. Indeed, most of the technical challenges have been solved since the 1980s; the only difficulty has been general lack of demand from the public, standard software engineering complexity issues, excessive concern for legality and intellectual property concerns, and the distraction of the dotcom boom. If, as you seem to imply, open warfare on personal liberty shall be declared, most of those concerns go away; if it's a felony to deploy ecash, you'll want to be anonymous anyway, and then violating someone's patent just doesn't seem like a big deal in comparison. > [...] > Sealand will probably still keep maintaining its idiotic claim to be an > independent state, but if the UK government wants to search they can > easily get a warrant. If sealand were outside UK territorial waters (it > ain't anymore) the navy can board at any time of their choice any structure > or vessel that is not registered with the shipping registry of a recognised > state that is in international waters. Sealand's claim to statehood rests on the following argument: 1) An artificial island, Roughs Tower, was constructed in 1942 by the British Government in then international waters, for the purpose of defense. This island was not constructed for the purposes of extending the UK's territory, but only to defend the UK's mainland from air or sea attack. 2) Subsequent to cessation of hostilities, WWII, 1945, the UK removed personnel and some equipment from the island, abandoning it. The UK did not return to the island at any subsequent point. 3) In 1966, Roy Bates, a UK citizen, along with others, landed on Sealand and occupied it. It was at this point abandoned for over 20 years by the UK government. Roy, his wife Joan, and son Michael established permanent primary residence on the island, renaming it Sealand. 4) Through repeated legal challenges, including firing on ships of the royal navy, mounting armed counter-invasion, resolving the issue of taxation of UK citizens resident on Sealand as if they were resident in any other foreign country, etc., Sealand's sovereignty has been repeatedly reaffirmed. We have a large body of supporting documentation from the past 59 years; I'll try to put more of it up on our website in the future. 5) Despite the UK extending territorial waters in 1987 to 12nm, Sealand was by that point established for more than 20 years, and extended its own territorial waters to 18nm the day before. Similarly, treaties and amendments to the laws of the sea in the 1980s prohibiting the construction of platforms in international waters by sovereign governments in order to extend territorial waters did not apply to the UK in 1942, nor did they apply to Sealand when founded in 1966. Such treaties also support the long legal tradition of artificial and reclaimed land being treated as land for the purposes of international and national law. None of this has been in the least affected by an apparent new willingness on the part of the US and other nations to invade arbitrary other nations. Sealand has nothing to do with any of the recent terrorist events; if Osama bin Ladin were, for instance, living on Sealand, I would fully expect Sealand would be asked to turn him over[1] or face invasion. Sealand's legal status is NOT the issue; international realpolitik of larger states vs. smaller ones is much more the issue. In fact, given such a situation, it seems more likely they would treat Sealand as a state, and ask us to comply with a demand placed in such language. Independently of that, HavenCo operates. If HavenCo/Sealand is shut down by invasion by the nation of -------, HavenCo can continue to operate from other locations; indeed, eliminating Sealand would simply establish more need for our services and ensure our next facility has more customers and capital equipment than Sealand. [1] There *was* a time where cypherpunks wrote code, rather than worrying about influencing legislation; they assumed the government was malicious and all powerful anddesigned technical systems to defeat them still; I don't think that time is over. Indeed, an upcoming conference, CodeCon, exists to advance the state of the art in and promote discussion of such systems; CFP to be sent shortly.) [2] Which would be done, but in multiple boxes/bags/jars, just as our ultimate response to someone presenting a clear military threat unless we hand over a given customer machine is to destroy it completely and then refund the customer's unused balance. -- Ryan Lackey [RL7618 RL5931-RIPE] ryan(a)havenco.com CTO and Co-founder, HavenCo Ltd. +44 7970 633 277 the free world just milliseconds away http://www.havenco.com/ OpenPGP 4096: B8B8 3D95 F940 9760 C64B DE90 07AD BE07 D2E0 301F --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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Larry Ellison's taste for little boys
by Subcommander Bob 24 Sep '01

24 Sep '01

At 02:48 AM 9/24/01 -0500, Bill Scannell wrote: >Registration of the domain name boycottoracle.com is >complete! As requested, your domain will be registered for 1 year(s). How about some of those Andre-the-giant OBEY posters with Ellison's ugly visage postering SF? Or just near Oracle campusses and eateries. ....... "Terrorists are the only true avant-garde artists because they're the only ones who are still capable of really surprising people." ---Laurie Anderson

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No Regrets About Developing PGP
by Sandy Sandfort 24 Sep '01

24 Sep '01

C'punks, Phil Zimmermann asked me to post this. He would like it freely disseminated, so feel free to post it wherever you wish. S a n d y -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 No Regrets About Developing PGP The Friday September 21st Washington Post carried an article by Ariana Cha that I feel misrepresents my views on the role of PGP encryption software in the September 11th terrorist attacks. She interviewed me on Monday September 17th, and we talked about how I felt about the possibility that the terrorists might have used PGP in planning their attack. The article states that as the inventor of PGP, I was "overwhelmed with feelings of guilt". I never implied that in the interview, and specifically went out of my way to emphasize to her that that was not the case, and made her repeat back to me this point so that she would not get it wrong in the article. This misrepresentation is serious, because it implies that under the duress of terrorism I have changed my principles on the importance of cryptography for protecting privacy and civil liberties in the information age. Because of the political sensitivity of how my views were to be expressed, Ms. Cha read to me most of the article by phone before she submitted it to her editors, and the article had no such statement or implication when she read it to me. The article that appeared in the Post was significantly shorter than the original, and had the abovementioned crucial change in wording. I can only speculate that her editors must have taken some inappropriate liberties in abbreviating my feelings to such an inaccurate soundbite. In the interview six days after the attack, we talked about the fact that I had cried over the heartbreaking tragedy, as everyone else did. But the tears were not because of guilt over the fact that I developed PGP, they were over the human tragedy of it all. I also told her about some hate mail I received that blamed me for developing a technology that could be used by terrorists. I told her that I felt bad about the possibility of terrorists using PGP, but that I also felt that this was outweighed by the fact that PGP was a tool for human rights around the world, which was my original intent in developing it ten years ago. It appears that this nuance of reasoning was lost on someone at the Washington Post. I imagine this may be caused by this newspaper's staff being stretched to their limits last week. In these emotional times, we in the crypto community find ourselves having to defend our technology from well-intentioned but misguided efforts by politicians to impose new regulations on the use of strong cryptography. I do not want to give ammunition to these efforts by appearing to cave in on my principles. I think the article correctly showed that I'm not an ideologue when faced with a tragedy of this magnitude. Did I re-examine my principles in the wake of this tragedy? Of course I did. But the outcome of this re-examination was the same as it was during the years of public debate, that strong cryptography does more good for a democratic society than harm, even if it can be used by terrorists. Read my lips: I have no regrets about developing PGP. The question of whether strong cryptography should be restricted by the government was debated all through the 1990's. This debate had the participation of the White House, the NSA, the FBI, the courts, the Congress, the computer industry, civilian academia, and the press. This debate fully took into account the question of terrorists using strong crypto, and in fact, that was one of the core issues of the debate. Nonetheless, society's collective decision (over the FBI's objections) was that on the whole, we would be better off with strong crypto, unencumbered with government back doors. The export controls were lifted and no domestic controls were imposed. I feel this was a good decision, because we took the time and had such broad expert participation. Under the present emotional pressure, if we make a rash decision to reverse such a careful decision, it will only lead to terrible mistakes that will not only hurt our democracy, but will also increase the vulnerability of our national information infrastructure. PGP users should rest assured that I would still not acquiesce to any back doors in PGP. It is noteworthy that I had only received a single piece of hate mail on this subject. Because of all the press interviews I was dealing with, I did not have time to quietly compose a carefully worded reply to the hate mail, so I did not send a reply at all. After the article appeared, I received hundreds of supportive emails, flooding in at two or three per minute on the day of the article. I have always enjoyed good relations with the press over the past decade, especially with the Washington Post. I'm sure they will get it right next time. The article in question appears at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1234-2001Sep20.html -Philip Zimmermann 24 September 2001 (This letter may be widely circulated) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.0.3 iQA/AwUBO69F2sdGNjmy13leEQIn+QCg2DjDeyibtRe61tUSplSAobdzAqEAoOMF ir3lRc4c1D/0Mmmv/JtP/E73 =HmRO -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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RE: What might have happened on Sept. 11...
by Trei, Peter 24 Sep '01

24 Sep '01

> Zombywuf[SMTP:0094247@sms.ed.ac.uk] wrote: > > Quoting "Trei, Peter" <ptrei(a)rsasecurity.com>: > > > What would actually happen is that there would not be an attempt > > to hijack the plane. The only reason the terrorists pulled it off > > on the first three was that the usual protocol for hijacks involves > > landing, and letting most/all of the passengers off unharmed. > > For disarmed passengers, the best option for survival was to > > anticipate this protocol, and sit tight. > > What would actually happen is that in order to commit an act of suicidal > terrorism all you'd have to do is stand up and rely on the other > passengers to > shoot up the plane for you. It's a great stratagy, requires almost no > effort > and no weapons. I everyone in the Us had that kind of attitude and a > handgun > how many innocents would hav been killed for looking suspicious so far? > Zombywuf appears to be a Brit - one of those people who have been disarmed for so long that he/she has no real knowledge of firearms. That, or he/she does not read very well. I made specific reference to 'frangible, low velocity' ammunition. This is to prevent the very scenario he describes. (this is basicly a plastic dumdum bullet with a low charge of propellent - at short range quite lethal, but unable to penetrate objects much more solid than cloth or meat. If every adult in the US was armed, we'd be a much more polite society, and have much less crime. Peter Trei

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��
by Alexey 24 Sep '01

24 Sep '01

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Expectation of privacy in public?
by Anonymous 24 Sep '01

24 Sep '01

For the lawyers and lawyer larvae out there... In an article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian this week, there is an article about MUNI's policy of making audio recordings of passengers. <quote> Nathan Ballard of the City Attorney's Office told the Bay Guardian that they were well aware of the policy and approved it. "There are no expectations of privacy in public," he said. Ballard asserted that the policy was constitutional and did not fall under any wiretapping laws. When asked if all of the vehicles that employ this surveillance policy post signs to inform passengers that their conversations are being recorded, he said, "This policy does not require signs." </quote> Frankly, if I'm sitting in the back of an empty bus, talking to the person next to me, it's my opinion that there certainly is a reasonable expection of privacy. Does anyone more qualified than I care to tell me why I'm right or wrong? Legal or not, I'm also curious to see what the EFF has to say about this wonderful incarnation of Big Brother. http://www.sfbg.com/SFLife/35/51/cult.html

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Re: FC: Oracle's Larry Ellison urges national ID card for Americans
by Bill Stewart 24 Sep '01

24 Sep '01

I hate to trigger Godwin's Law so soon (though somebody else already did it), but are there any Bay Area tattoo shops that want to volunteer to help with the National ID numbers? At 12:40 AM 09/24/2001 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote: >Matt Drudge writes: >http://www.drudgereport.com/id.htm >>A proposal for the creation of a national ID card was presented to >>President Bush in recent days, top government sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT. > >http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/svfront/ellsn092301.htm >>``We need a national ID card with our photograph and thumbprint digitized >>and embedded in the ID card,'' Ellison said in an interview Friday night >>on the evening news of KPIX-TV in San Francisco. >>``We need a database behind that, so when you're walking into an airport >>and you say that you are Larry Ellison, you take that card and put it in >>a reader and you put your thumb down and that system confirms that this >>is Larry Ellison,'' he said. [...] >>``We're quite willing to provide the software for this absolutely free,'' >>he said. > >---- > >Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2001 18:49:33 -0700 >To: declan(a)well.com (Declan McCullagh) >From: David Theroux <DTheroux(a)independent.org> >Subject: Ellison and ID cards > >Dear Declan, > >According to Drudge, Larry Ellison is now offering to donate the >technology to create a national ID card. What else would we expect from a >firm that was created by the CIA: > >http://beta.kpix.com/news/scripts/fri5pm.htm#77tz:_Ellison > >Best regards, > >David

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