- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

LATimes: FBI's E-Mail Surveillance Getting Boost
by Blank Frank 19 Apr '01

19 Apr '01

http://www.latimes.com/business/cutting/20010419/t000033196.html FBI's E-Mail Surveillance Getting Boost Policy: Justice officials likely to call for continuing 'Carnivore,' with privacy protections added. By ERIC LICHTBLAU, Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON--Senior Justice Department officials are recommending that the FBI be allowed to continue using a controversial e-mail snooping tool against suspected criminals--with some new safeguards aimed at answering privacy concerns, law enforcement sources said Wednesday. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft met privately with FBI Director Louis J. Freeh on Wednesday for a briefing on the "Carnivore" surveillance program, and he is expected to announce a decision within the next few weeks on a thorny issue that pits law enforcement demands against privacy interests. Ashcroft, regarded as a strong defender of privacy rights from his days in the Senate, inherited the controversy from former Atty. Gen. Janet Reno after it was disclosed last year that the FBI had begun using the electronic surveillance program to track the computer activities of suspects in a small number of criminal and national security investigations. The FBI program, dubbed "Carnivore" because it can quickly get to "the meat" of a database, is capable of searching millions of e-mails per second under federal wiretap authority. But privacy advocates, civil libertarians and congressional critics say that, because the program is installed directly into a service provider's network, authorities can abuse it by eavesdropping on the activities of all the system users. Reno brought in an outside group last year to do a technical review of the program and also created an in-house review committee made up of senior personnel from the Justice Department and the FBI to assess the findings. The Justice Department review team, in a report delivered to Ashcroft several weeks ago but not yet made public, concluded that Carnivore has several shortcomings but, overall, plays a vital role in helping investigators track the activities of criminal suspects, sources said. "It's quite clear that it's a critical tool, and the FBI has to stay on top of changing technology," said one official familiar with the report, who asked not to be identified. "All you have to do is tell the drug dealers that law enforcement won't be able to do electronic surveillance on e-mail, and they'll all drop their phones and e-mail will be the tool du jour." In delivering its report to Ashcroft, the task force unanimously affirmed all the recommendations of the outside review, which was completed by the Illinois Institute of Technology's Research Institute. Several bigger-name institutions turned down the job, complaining it would not be a truly independent review because of restrictions on how it could be conducted. Among the key proposals before Ashcroft, the official said, are: tightening the audit trail to determine which FBI personnel are using the surveillance program "so people don't get sloppy and slip into unauthorized use"; more clearly defining what e-mail material and computer data can legitimately be reviewed by investigators; and developing a more up-to-date legal framework to match the rapid advance of technological law enforcement tools. "This tightens up the safeguards and the ability to audit the system to really try to protect legitimate privacy concerns," the official said. "I would view it as a tweaking." The findings will likely disappoint privacy advocates, who have been anxiously awaiting the final Justice Department report on the issue. "I think it's unlikely that the attorney general would flatly repudiate or banish Carnivore from the tools available to the FBI," said Jim Dempsey, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an advocacy group in Washington. "On the other hand, I think some serious concerns have been raised about it," Dempsey said. "This represents a departure from normal wiretap procedure in that it's something inserted directly into the network of the service provider which the service provider doesn't control. The fundamental problem is that it's controlled by the government." Carnivore has become so notorious that the FBI is planning to change the name of the program, using a blander, numeric designation because the old flesh-eating moniker has taken on such a negative connotation. Justice Department officials said Ashcroft is expected to meet this week with privacy advocates regarding their concerns about Carnivore and other issues.

1 0

CNN.com - Sci-Tech - Dutch government uses biometrics to ID immigrants - April 19, 2001
by Jim Choate 19 Apr '01

19 Apr '01

http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/04/19/biometric.ID.idg/index.html?s=8 -- Adapt, Adopt, Improvise! - Anonymous Venimus, Vidimus, Delevimus - 1st Linux Motto, Anonymous Tivoli Certification Group, OSCT James Choate jchoate(a)tivoli.com Senior Engineer 512-436-1062

1 0

Re: Making the Agora Vanish | OSINT distributed haven (Intellagora)
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 19 Apr '01

19 Apr '01

If you're already adept with text analysis you should be able to do the complementary operation. Make a system that gathers and analyzes gigabytes of real-world text in order to normalize input text for use with a nym and broaden the correlation with public writings. As it comes more into use it will start analyzing itself with the end result that vocabulary and variety will be minimized. The joys of positive feedback. Call it baa-sheeplifier-baa.pl. It may not make reading a pleasure but it could help in the neverending fight against *evil*. Mike > >(Re: CDR RE: snipped from headers.....) > >On Wed, 18 Apr 2001, Sunder wrote: > >>Ray Dillinger wrote: >>> >>> On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote: >>> >>> And your possible motive for spreading the word about his reputation, >>> which ties you to an illicit transaction, is what exactly? >> >>Wouldn't your own reputation be blinded by a nym anyway? > >Give me a few dozen writing samples from each of a hundred known >people, and another writing sample a hundred words long from one >of them under a pseudonym, and I can tell you to a 90% probability >which of the hundred known people wrote it. > >If some persistent pseudonym has a record with hundreds or thousands >of illicit transactions, the lions are going to be crawling cyberspace >for *any* writing that matches its style closely enough to have been >written by the same person. They'll get a short list. Then they'll >start eliminating possibilities and when they're down to three or four >they'll start getting wiretap orders. > >With the wiretap order, they can run a sting or a man-in-the-middle >attack so they've got one solid charge. That will net them an arrest >warrant if it works. But whether this works or not, they can still >get a search warrant after they give it a shot. > >If the machine is not theft-secure (and face it, almost no machines >are), the arrest warrant issues anyway and the owner of the pseudonym >winds up in jail. And the lions didn't have to do any particularly >clever cryptanalysis to get there. All they had to do was run a >spreadsheet counting grammar, word choice, sentence length, and a few >other parameters until they found a match. > > > Bear >

1 0

Group releases "Friendly AI guidelines," Webmind goes bankrupt
by Declan McCullagh 19 Apr '01

19 Apr '01

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,43158,00.html Intelligenesis Faces Dim Future By Declan McCullagh (declan(a)wired.com) 2:00 a.m. Apr. 19, 2001 PDT A pioneering New York company that once hoped to develop the first artificial intelligence is preparing to declare bankruptcy. Intelligenesis Corp., which was creating the Webmind software, has been evicted from its Broadway office suite and plans to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy next week. [...] ********** http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,1282,43080,00.html Making HAL Your Pal by Declan McCullagh (declan(a)wired.com) 2:00 a.m. Apr. 19, 2001 PDT Eliezer Yudkowsky has devoted his young life to an undeniably unusual pursuit: planning for what happens when computers become far smarter than us. Yudkowsky, a 21-year-old researcher at the Singularity Institute, has spent the last eight months writing an essay that's half precaution, half thought exercise, and entirely in earnest. This 750 KB treatise, released Wednesday, is not as much speculative as predictive. If a computer becomes sufficiently smart, the argument goes, and if it gains the ability to harm humans through nanotechnology or some means we don't expect, it may decide it doesn't need us or want us around. One solution: Unconditional "friendliness," built into the AI as surely as our genes are coded into us. "I've devoted my life to this," says Yudkowsky, a self-proclaimed "genius" who lives in Atlanta and opted out of attending high school and college. It's not for lack of smarts. He's a skilled, if verbose, writer and an avid science-fiction reader who reports he scored 1410 on his SATs, not far below the average score for Stanford or MIT students. Yudkowsky's reason for shunning formal education is that he believes the danger of unfriendly AI to be so near -- as early as tomorrow -- that there was no time for a traditional adolescence. "If you take the Singularity seriously, you tend to live out your life on a shorter time scale," he said. Mind you, that's "Singularity" in capital letters. Even so-called Singularitians like Yudkowsky admit that the term has no precise meaning, but a commonly accepted definition is a point when human progress, particularly technological progress, accelerates so dramatically that predicting what will happen next is futile. The term appears to have been coined by John von Neumann, the great mathematician and computer scientist who used it not to refer to superhuman intelligence, but to the everyday pace of science and technology. Science-fiction author Vernor Vinge popularized the concept in the 1980s, capitalizing the word and writing about whether mankind would approach Singularity by way of machine intelligence alone or through augmented mental processes. Predictions vary wildly about what happens at the Singularity, but the consensus seems to be that life as humanity currently knows it will come to a sudden end. Vinge is the closest thing Singularitians have to a thought leader, spokesman and hero. He offers predictions based on measures of technological progress such as Moore's Law, and sees the Singularity as arriving between 2005 and 2030 -- though some Vinge aficionados hope the possibility of uploading their brains into an immortal computer is just around the corner. One of them is Yudkowsky, who credits Vinge for turning him onto the Singularity at age 11. "I read True Names," he said, referring to a Vinge novel. "I got to page 47 and found out what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life." Since then, Yudkowsky has become not just someone who predicts the Singularity, but a committed activist trying to speed its arrival. "My first allegiance is to the Singularity, not humanity," he writes in one essay. "I don't know what the Singularity will do with us. I don't know whether Singularities upgrade mortal races, or disassemble us for spare atoms.... If it comes down to Us or Them, I'm with Them." [...] Like a character from science fiction, Yudkowsky sees his efforts as humanity's only hope. In an autobiographical essay, he writes: "I think my efforts could spell the difference between life and death for most of humanity, or even the difference between a Singularity and a lifeless, sterilized planet... I think that I can save the world, not just because I'm the one who happens to be making the effort, but because I'm the only one who can make the effort." ### [Clarification: Yudkowsky just emailed me to say he received a 1600 on his SATs when he took them again. --Declan] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if it remains intact. To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 0

RE: Making the Agora Vanish
by Ray Dillinger 19 Apr '01

19 Apr '01

On Thu, 19 Apr 2001, Sampo Syreeni wrote: >that anonymous markets develop. But I think governments have the necessary >motivation and resources to keep them extremely marginalized. Enough so >that most people will never notice. I think he's right. The only possible way around this one would be to have a substantial fraction of *ALL* traffic encrypted. The day that Homer Husband and Harriet Housewife routinely exchange mail that is encrypted and undistinguishable from the mail that the players in your "anonymous markets" exchange, the anonymous markets will have a chance of going undetected. And you know what? Homer and Harriet ain't going there, 'cause key management and crypto software is still a pain in the tush and they still don't know anybody's listening. Bear

1 0

None
by blue bird technologies 19 Apr '01

19 Apr '01

"*unsubscribe*"

1 0

None
by blue bird technologies 19 Apr '01

19 Apr '01

unsubscribe * unsubscribe * bbc(a)cal2.vsnl.net.in

1 0

business proposal
by fred3312＠excite.com 19 Apr '01

19 Apr '01

Hello, I own a design firm with headquarters in NYC, I am writing this letter to inquire about any design work you may have to outsource, Since my designers are students & recent grads, as well as graphic artists from all over NYC, I can enter quotes at well below market rate: $30 per hour on HTML or JAVA and $30 to $50 per hour on Flash depending on the project. If we can develop a relationship, I can even beat these rates. for more info reply to this email with info in the subject field. http://www.sitexposure.net/ oiliver23(a)excite.com Michael Miller 22 Greencroft Staten Island, N.Y.10310 (917)482-6089 ============================================= if you do not wish to recieve future emails from our Company reply to this email with remove in the

1 0

Java Courses
by harish bapodra 19 Apr '01

19 Apr '01

Dear sir, I need java courses .Are they free?Can you also teach HTML tags also. Please!

1 0

Dutch government asked to create "digital safe deposit boxes"
by Declan McCullagh 19 Apr '01

19 Apr '01

Personally, I can't think of a better use for *my* tax dollars! --Declan --- DUTCH CONSIDER DIGITAL SAFES FOR CITIZENS A Dutch commission has called on the government to consider creating 17 million digital safe deposit boxes to allow all Dutch citizens to store their personal information. Each citizen would get up to 200 items of data including medical and financial information. http://it.mycareer.com.au/breaking/20010418/A37177-2001Apr18.html

2 1