- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Re: Moral Crypto
by A. Melon 05 Sep '01

05 Sep '01

Tim May writes: > > It would be nice to see at least one example of something nasty that > > could be done with an anonymous remailer in the next few years where > > you couldn't get the same effect at the corner phone booth or dropping a > > letter in a public mailbox. > > Are you dense, or just ignorant? > > Consider the broad class of two-way communications, whether for > information buying and selling, extortion, espionage, arranging contract > killings, etc. Are these sufficiently "nasty" for you? Get real. There's no way these are going to be serious problems in five years. For one thing, they all depend on an established anonymous cash infrastructure for payoff off the crooks, buying the intelligence, etc. There's very little chance that such a system will come into existence soon (look at all the progress in the last five years), and even if it did, any problems with criminal use will be blamed on the cash system, not the email delivery. > Now consider that both the "corner phone booth" and "dropping a letter > in a public mailbox" are untraceable only in _one_ direction. Two-way > communication is not untraceable. Two way anonymous communications have been around for years. Dead drops are a commonly used technique, likewise public postings in classified ads and similar places. It's nothing new and there have been no laws to ban this capability.

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05 Sep '01

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Re: Motives
by Bill Stewart 05 Sep '01

05 Sep '01

At 08:00 PM 08/19/2001 -1000, Reese wrote: >We assume the lamerz posting "h3lp m3 m4k3 b0mZ" queries are LEA's >trolling, but are they? Is posting bomb recipes a violation of >some applicable law? If so, what law? If not, why do we assume >those to be LEA trolls, and not some hopeless wank or kook who >needs to get in touch with HisOrHer inner child and beat it up? Our esteemed Senator Diane Feinstein from California, occasionally along with other people such as Joe Biden from my home state of Delaware, occasionally proposes laws against disseminating information on the internet, particularly about bombs and such. (By contrast, an elementary-school education in Delaware includes a trip to the duPont gunpowder-making mills, learning about local history, colonial industry, and safe explosives-making.) So some of the bomb ranting is about her disrespect for the First Amendment. Some of it's pretty clearly from people who troll for the fun of trolling. Some of it might even be lam3r k1ddi3z trying to look k3wl. Some if it, especially post-Columbine and post-J*m B*ll, does appear to be from people trolling usual suspects on the net hoping to find some of them who are scary or stupid enough to entrap into some witch-hunt, a political speech, a newspaper story, a criminal conviction, whatever floats their boat. There actually are laws against blowing stuff up or possessing tools to do so, at least in some circumstances, or conspiring to do Bad Things, or corrupting minors into doing so, and for many purposes an accusation is really more useful than a conviction. Most of it's actually produced by the service* that the Cypherpunks Cabal Central Conspiracy Committee hires to make the list appear to be Mostly Harmless by posting a flood of decoy material and other slanderous and evil material so that the few genuinely dangerous messages can be dismissed as "oh, yeah, kooks troll us with stuff like this all the time" or "Oh, yeah, and last week they claimed we were conspiring with hizbollah.org and the Bilderbergers." [*Plausible Deniability Inc.]

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Re: The Privacy/Untraceability Sweet Spot
by Nomen Nescio 05 Sep '01

05 Sep '01

Mark Leighton Fisher writes: > Tim's point, which many seem to have missed, is that by design a tool that > enforces the privacy, anonymity, and pseudonymity of a women striving for > equal rights in Afghanistan can also be used by the Taliban in their quest > to track down and kill Afghans who converted to Christianity and are now > preaching the Word. That's absurd. The Taliban doesn't need crypto anonymity. They hold the reins of power. If they want to go after Christians, they just issue an edict. Their Islamic police stalk the streets of Kabul armed with guns and whips. They assault who they will, go where they wish. What would they need with anonymous remailers and pseudonym based credentials? The larger mistake, which others have made as well, is that these technologies are "tools" which, once created, may be used by everyone. Granted, with a basic encryption program this may be the case. (And indeed bin Laden is already using this technology, http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001-02-05-binladen.htm.) But the more sophisticated technologies are not self-contained tools. They require a supported and maintained infrastructure to operate. Anonymous posters are painfully aware of how inadequate the current remailer system is. A truly reliable and effective anonymity technology will be more like a service than a tool. This means that the operators choose to whom they will market and sell their services. This was one of the main points of the original message. You can't just deploy a technology and hope that someone finds it useful. You need to identify and target a market segment where the value exceeds the cost. And Tim May himself raised the issue of further looking for profitable markets which are morally acceptable. He sometimes seems reluctant to admit it, but the point of crypto anarchy is to improve the world by reducing the impact of government coercion. It's not supposed to be a nihilistic attempt to tear down institutions just for the sake of destruction. Any cypherpunk who creates a privacy technology which targets bin Laden and his cohorts as a market is deluding himself if he thinks he is making the world a better place. You can say all the nasty things you like about Western civilization, but crypto anarchy has the best chance of survival under a democratic government that pays at least lip service to values of individual freedom. You who believe that the U.S. government is the epitome of evil should spend some time living in Afghanistan. See how far you get with your crypto technologies in a country which has banned the internet, vcrs, satellite dishes, television, movies and music. The point is that cypherpunks have a goal. The technology is not the end, but the means to the end. The end is a world with more freedom and more privacy. Getting there is not easy, the path is not obvious. And it is certainly not inevitable, as the past ten years of failure should have made clear. It is important to identify markets which will advance the cause rather than set it back. Tim May made a good start on this in his earlier posting. Those who reject the idea of judging groups and markets by their morality are the ones who are missing the point.

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Errata - Re: Cypherpunks List Info
by Bill Stewart 05 Sep '01

05 Sep '01

Infonex.com is the same system as cyberpass, so it's presumably dead now. The information on UNsubscribing still should be there, since some people may need to do that, but subscriptions don't need to be. At 08:00 PM 09/02/2001 -0700, cpunk(a)lne.com wrote: >Cypherpunks Distributed Remailers list info. > >Last updated: 8/22/01 > >This message is also available at http://www.lne.com/cpunk > >--------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Infonex: > >Subscription: "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)infonex.com >Unsubscription: "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)infonex.com >Help: "help cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)infonex.com >Posting address: cypherpunks(a)infonex.com >Filtering policy: raw >Message Modification policy: no modification >Privacy policy: ??? > >---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Trend Marketing & Associates
by Trend Marketing & Associates 04 Sep '01

04 Sep '01

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Re: Moral Crypto
by A. Melon 04 Sep '01

04 Sep '01

declan(a)well.com writes: > Anonymity allows people to evade laws. Governments don't like that. > Read the archives. It would be nice to see at least one example of something nasty that could be done with an anonymous remailer in the next few years where you couldn't get the same effect at the corner phone booth or dropping a letter in a public mailbox. So far there have been no prohibitions on sending information anonymously via those mechanisms. Why would email be singled out?

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Re: Moral Crypto
by A. Melon 04 Sep '01

04 Sep '01

At 12:38 PM 9/4/2001 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote: >In the next five years or so, I would not be suprised to see a call >for federal licensing of remailers. Some of the more mainstream >remailer operators might even go along with it, eventually, calling >for a "voluntary-mandatory" code of conduct and industry self- >regulation. What makes you think remailers are such a threat that the federal government would attempt to license them? How exactly will they help criminals and terrorists in the time frame of the next five years? They're not being used for much today, other than annoying people. It doesn't seem like criminals use them. What's the killer app (so to speak)?

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Alien Tentacle Reaming!
by mangawhore＠aol.com 04 Sep '01

04 Sep '01

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U.S. May Help Chinese Evade Net Censorship
by Nomen Nescio 04 Sep '01

04 Sep '01

AUG 30, 2001 U.S. May Help Chinese Evade Net Censorship By JENNIFER 8. LEE he United States government agencies that once tried to breach the Iron Curtain with radio broadcasts are taking the information war to the Internet, hoping to finance an American-based computer network designed to thwart attempts by the Chinese government to censor the World Wide Web for users in China. Government officials and private architects of the plan say the program would be financed by the International Broadcasting Bureau, parent agency of the Voice of America, which has been presenting the American view abroad mostly by radio for decades. It would mark a significant expansion of the long-running information war between China and the United States. The agency is in advanced discussions with Safeweb, a small company based in Emeryville, Calif., which has received financing from the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, In-Q-Tel. The discussions were confirmed by parties on both sides. Safeweb currently runs its own worldwide network of about 100 privacy servers computers that help disguise what Web sites a user is seeking to view which are popular with users in China. The privacy servers have been a continuing target for the Chinese government, which has blocked most of them in recent weeks. The bureau would provide money for new computers to run Safeweb software specifically tailored for the Chinese audience and intended to be more resistant to blocking by the government. It would also cover some of the costs of network bandwidth to carry the the Internet traffic, but would not act as host for the computers itself. The plan would initially pay for around a dozen computers, with an option to grow to a larger number after the new federal fiscal year begins on Oct. 1. The project would be financed from a Congressional allocation of $5 million last year intended to improve broadcasting to China, including both Internet and radio. Of that $5 million, $800,000 was approved for "Internet and multimedia enhancement," some of which is scheduled for use on this project. "We recognized that we have an obligation to reach out to our audience in ways that are effective, that includes the Internet," said Tish King, a spokeswoman for the International Broadcasting Bureau. To that end, Voice of America also started VOANews.com to make news available worldwide on the Internet. Currently, audio broadcasts in over 53 languages are streamed live and archived on the site. Text is archived in almost all the languages. Voice of America has been developing an Internet strategy to reach an audience in China with a daily newsletter in Chinese that is e- mailed to 180,000 people and a Chinese-language news Web site. In addition to a Chinese-language Web site, Radio Free Asia also maintains Web sites aimed at ethnic minority groups in China like Tibetans and Uighurs, who are concentrated in the northwest region of Xinjiang. But the Chinese government has sporadically jammed the radio broadcasts from Voice of America since 1989 and from Radio Free Asia since 1997, a year after it began, specifically those in Mandarin and Tibetan. The government has also blocked the Chinese-language Web sites of Voice of America since 1997 and Radio Free Asia almost since it began in 1998. For Chinese leaders, the Internet is a doubled-edged sword, a rapidly evolving medium that brings economic opportunity but remains beyond complete control. Internet use in China is growing dramatically, seeping from urban universities and businesses to homes and affordable Internet cafes all over the country. The Chinese government estimates there were over 26 million Internet users in July, compared to only 9 million at the end of 1999. Periodically, the government tries new ways to tighten control, including police raids. Since April the government has waged a campaign to shut down thousands of unlicensed Internet cafes, and the government has publicized the arrests of over a dozen "Internet dissidents" over the last three years. The government maintains an elaborate set of rules that requires Internet service providers to electronically filter content that may be pornographic, anti-government, violent, unhealthy or superstitious. Among sites that are blocked for the vast majority of users are those of The Washington Post (news/quote), Amnesty International and various sites identifying with the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which the Chinese government has accused of being a cult. However, users can access other news sites including ABCnews.com, the British Broadcasting Corporation and USA Today. Until early this month, the site for The New York Times (news/quote) on the Web was blocked. The blocking was lifted after an interview with President Jiang Zemin by top editors at The Times in which President Jiang was specifically questioned about the blocking of the site. Chinese Web users have nevertheless found methods to get around the censorship. In a recent study by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, more than a quarter of Internet users admitted to occasionally using Internet proxy computers, which work similarly to those of Safeweb, while 10 percent admitted to frequent use. That was much higher than was expected, said Guo Liang, one of the researchers. Among the most popular masquerade services is Safeweb, an 18- month-old company. The technology, dubbed Triangle Boy (after a character in an episode of the sitcom "Seinfeld"), can fool an electronic filter into thinking Web content is coming from a benign computer server instead of a blocked site like Human Rights Watch. But the service has become a target for the Chinese government, which has engaged in a cat-and- mouse game with Safeweb, blacklisting the Triangle Boy servers themselves. "They are becoming increasingly aggressive," said Stephen Hsu, chief executive of Safeweb. "We get these frantic emails from users saying they are totally cut off now." In addition, Safeweb says, the Chinese government is now blocking e- mail sent to users who request Triangle Boy e-mail addresses. As a response, Safeweb is encouraging users to sign up for free Web-based e- mail accounts at non-Chinese services like Hotmail and Yahoo (news/quote). Part of the proposal being financed by the International Broadcasting Bureau would have the Triangle Boy servers change their Internet addresses on a regular basis perhaps as frequently as every few hours to make them more difficult for the Chinese government to find and block. Despite government efforts to rein in the Internet, it is playing an emerging political role in China. The study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, one of the most rigorous Internet studies in China to date, found that 67.5 percent of adult users believe the Internet gives people more opportunity to criticize government policies. And more than 74 percent agree the Internet allows people to "express their political views" and to learn about politics. "We want to force the Chinese government to accept the pro-democracy consequences of the Internet," said Dr. Hsu. "Up until now the Chinese government has been amazingly successful at having their cake and eating it too." Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

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