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CDR: Re: Courts interfering with election
by George＠orwellian.org 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

TimMay wrote: # I thought I was jaded, but this is too much even for me to believe. # # A judge in St. Louis has ordered the polls kept open later, until 10 # pm local time. The effect will be to let more inner city, # Democrat-leaning voters vote. What a lame-ass complaint. For some reason, certain polling areas got jammed up, as in long lines. The court agreed to keep the polls open longer so the people could vote. It didn't matter who the people might vote for, despite the Democrats asking for the extended hours. The Republicans actually went into federal court to try and block this, and failed. Did you expect a Republican judge to say no since the people who might be unable to vote by the normal deadline were Democrats? What's your objection to people voting? Try not to mention a political party in your reply. Tim the Troll, yet again.

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CDR: Your IFILM registration is confirmed!
by registration＠ifilm.com 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

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CDR: Gore's next move
by George＠Orwellian.Org 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

Gore has dispatched 50 staffers from Tennessee to Palm Beach County, contacted lobbyists in the area regarding raising $3 million in funds, petitions challenging the vote due to the bad form are being circulated, and, ugh, I forget. A legal challenge to the Palm Beach County vote seems to be in the works. ---- FoxNewsChannel posted: # Gore trails by less than 1,000 # with 32 of 67 Fla. counties recounted; It was 2100 votes in Bush's favor before the second count. County recounts, under half of them, lowered that to 1000. "At this rate", perhaps Gore will win anyway. ---- The ballot layout was illegal and resulted in a statistically verifiable set of erroneous votes. http://www.gopbi.com/news/local/ballot.html http://cnews.tribune.com/news/image/0,1119,oso-nation-82373,00.html http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/politics/AP-ELN-Florida-Ballot-Confusion.ht… Even though Bucanan got roughly the same number of votes in this presidential election as last, it means little compared to this data, all from the current FL election: http://web.mit.edu/norstadt/Public/election.pdf

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CDR: Re: A successful lawsuit means Gore wins!
by George＠Orwellian.Org 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

Spooky Cypherpunk Niggar Tim May Moroned: # There cannot be a re-vote of the County, or even of the entire State, # as this would distort the forces acting on the electorate in a way # never seen before. An honest attempt to get accurate vote from citizens is in no way a distortion of the purpose of voting. You have no case. Spooky Cypherpunk Niggar Tim May Moroned: # The Palm County voters would know _they_ would be electing # the next president. Gosh, they might have a higher turnout! How evil, right? Spooky Cypherpunk Niggar Tim May Moroned: # Billions of dollars would be spent # trying to buy each and every voter. More of your money-related miscalulations. And even you would have to admit people could still vote as they originally did without repercussion. Again: you've got nothing. Spooky Cypherpunk Niggar Tim May Moroned: # And there is no precedent for using "statistics" by Democrat # consultants to propose that votes be Buchanan be assigned to Gore. So # Gore won't get those votes, and there won't be a County-wide revote. Egad, are worms eating your brain? The statistics were for convincing a judge that people lost their votes due to the bad form. It doesn't matter if the people charged with it didn't catch the written legal requirement that the holes be to the right of the text. 19,000 can change the election, so it's important to get peoples' votes right. I'm glad Jesse Jackson is down there, agitating this issue. Spooky Cypherpunk Niggar Tim May Moroned: # (If there is, I'll help in rigging the dynamite truck .) More delusions of power. All you can do is shoot up your house. You are a useful troll.

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CDR: Test Ignore
by Secret Squirrel 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

Test Dick

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CDR: Phil Zimmerman Profiled
by James D. Wilson 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Watch the word wrap: http://developer.earthweb.com/earthweb/cda/dlink.resource-jhtml.72.1081. |repository||softwaredev|content|article|2000|10|03|SDLairdZim|SDLairdZ im~xml.0.jhtml?cda=true (PGP Signature applied with appreciation to PRZ) Meet Phil Zimmermann, creator of the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption suite and one of the world's best-known cryptographers. Published October 04, 2000 By Cameron Laird Page 1 of 2 1 2 Programmers can be celebrities too. Just ask Philip (Phil) Zimmermann. He's spent most of the last decade as a folk hero, and admits to having enjoyed that status. Just this summer, he suffered the flip side of fame as wildly inflated rumors circulated about his role in compromising the security of the PGP encryption suite, and he watched his e-mail inbox fill with venom. A Human Rights Project He recognizes it comes with the territory. Zimmermann is probably the world's best-known cryptographer. He created the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption suite in 1991. Since then, it has come to dominate the market for programming protection of online confidentiality. PGP has been heralded for its role in protecting numerous political dissidents around the world, and earned Zimmermann the prestigious Norbert Wiener Award for responsible use of technology in 1996, as well as the 1995 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, and a 1998 Lifetime Achievement Award from Secure Computing Magazine, along with at least a dozen other distinctions. It also brought him into highly public patent disputes with RSA Data Security Inc., and a nightmarish multi-year criminal investigation by the United States government. It began as a human rights campaign. As the '90s opened, Zimmermann was an experienced programmer -- and a pretty good one by all accounts, including his own -- specializing in data security and communications and real-time embedded systems. Electronic communications technologies were becoming widely available, and politically significant: combinations of underground radio, video tapes, satellite news updates, and e-mail are generally acknowledged to have been indispensable in the popular overthrow of Iran's Shah, Eastern Europe's Bolsheviks, and several dictatorships throughout the third world. Technical challenges remained. How, for example, could human rights monitors communicate their on-site findings without risking recrimination or distortion? How might any citizen communicate freely and fearlessly over channels subject to tapping? One technical solution was encryption: "scrambling" a message so it was unreadable except to the sender and intended receiver. Zimmermann had worked on commercial encryption systems during the '80s, and he envisioned that it could be applied more widely. He developed PGP as an "add-on" that any e-mail user could install to ensure confidentiality. A Response to Legislation And it worked. It also became controversial, which brought more attention, and encouraged even more users to experiment with it. Nowadays it's become part of the popular culture of computing. It has been so widely disseminated that even many industry participants who rely on it know nothing about Zimmermann, and assume it was first created for the commercial applications -- retail sales, banking, and so on-in which it is used today. Zimmermann, however, emphasizes that for him it remains a human-rights project. PGP was born in controversy. Zimmermann wrote version 1.0 as a response to United States Senate Bill 266. If it had been passed, this legislation would have required all communications vendors to embed "back doors" to permit government agencies to tap their products. He rushed a release of 1.0 into the hands of his computing friends, at least one of whom began to distribute it on bulletin boards throughout North America. Its circulation meant that any criminality resulting from passage of the bill would have been difficult to enforce. Code-sharing didn't stop at national borders, though, and there was nothing hypothetical about it: export of PGP outside the U.S. (with possible exceptions involving Canada) was definitely illegal. Everyone involved agreed that the Office of Defense Trade Control's enforcement of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) extended to cryptographic software. Whom to Prosecute? Whom could the US Department of Justice indict, though? Zimmermann just programmed and talked; he was careful not to engage in any "munitions exports" himself. Despite these precautions, criminal charges were brought against him. The programming and civil rights communities joined to create a legal defense fund. After three years of what Zimmermann calmly categorizes as "persecution," prosecutors dropped the case in early 1996 with as little comment as they had earlier justified it. Controversy didn't end there. Even before the criminal indictment, RSA notified Zimmermann that it considered PGP an infringement of its patents. Zimmermann had been careful to engage only in "educational use" of applicable documents and inventions. He consistently emphasized in his presentations that users were responsible for securing applicable licenses. The RSA battle ended as undramatically as the ITAR one had. Zimmermann and Public Key Partners (PKP), an RSA affiliate, signed an agreement that Zimmermann would continue not to distribute RSA inventions and PKP would not sue Zimmermann. RSA threatened Zimmermann and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for various alleged infringements. Zimmermann programmed around legal problems, and MIT shielded him from others in pursuit of its own intellectual rights. While the publicity around these disputes served as valuable marketing for PGP, it also made it hard to move on. Hecklers continue to believe, for example, that Zimmermann had secretly acquiesced to government demands and somehow weakened PGP. Although it's hard to prove covert arrangements do not exist, it's equally difficult to imagine how Zimmermann might contaminate source code available for public review, which PGP was. PGP Inc. With the disposal of the government case, Zimmermann founded PGP Inc. in 1996 to finance maintenance and enhancement of PGP. Late the next year, he sold the company to Network Associates (NAI), while agreeing to stay on as senior fellow. The programming fraternity continues to honor Zimmermann in its characteristic ways: T-shirts are silk-screened with him as subject, he speaks regularly at conferences and in the classroom, and people who haven't met him often speculate on Usenet and other public forums about his motives and interests. He is often addressed with the reverence accorded an accomplished software engineer martyred for resistance to governmental invasions of privacy. PGP's Present and Future So where are PGP and Zimmermann in the year 2000? He still has a full schedule. Between his assignments with NAI and independent consulting, he sometimes fails to make adequate time for sleep, let alone pack carefully for his many professional travels. He does little coding these days. However, he sees his contribution as critical, believing that "encryption software architectural decisions must be made by knowledgeable cryptographers, not software engineers." He has very firm opinions, for example, about Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG), an open source competitor to PGP. There's no doubt in Zimmermann's mind that GnuPG suffers for being managed by programmers. He offers the Blowfish encryption method as an example: "I would never, ever allow Blowfish to be implemented in PGP, because it's not as good a design as Twofish; Twofish is superior. PGP 7 implements Two fish. Yet we see GnuPG implemented Blowfish." Even the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) makes cryptographic mistakes, he says. Zimmermann asserts, "I would never allow El-Gamal signatures to be put in PGP. I don't know how that got in" RFC 2440, which defines the OpenPGP standard. NAI still has a large backlog of serious technical work to do: integration of new algorithms and functionality, ports to new architectures, and more. Embedded systems -- encryption processing within telephones, automobiles, and so on -- are likely to be particularly important during the next few years. Also, the original RSA patent expired just a couple of weeks ago, and NAI is already offering products that exploit this. Minor controversies continue to dog PGP. Just within the last year, two small faults in the released code were discovered. While experts agree that neither one presented any practical danger to the security of PGP-based communications, both sparked arguments about NAI's ability and even its intentions. In the first case, a fault in a specific version for Unix could, in principle, compromise a key generated by a method PGP had always deprecated: automatically, without user input. Then, in mid-August, German researchers spotted an error in PGP's Additional Decryption Key (ADK) functionality. Like the key-generation error, it was quickly fixed, and detailed investigations confirmed it was unlikely that any real keys had ever been tampered with, let alone any messages cracked. However, before all the facts came out, speculation erupted that Zimmermann had personally installed a deliberate vulnerability, or perhaps allowed NAI to do so. Zimmermann promptly published an extensive personal statement through the PGP Web site, and most observers now grant that, as he concludes there, "If NAI tried to put a back door in PGP, all the engineers on the PGP team would quit in a highly visible protest, and I would be talking to the press about it. There is no way that I would let this happen." The Future Is Busy Zimmermann's personal scheduling often leaves him in what he calls "decapitated chicken mode." Apart from the frustration of overload, he likes what he does, and proudly regards it as important technically and politically. He's just beginning to redevelop PGPphone on his own, outside NAI: "I think it's a cool project." He continues to speak before university and industry groups, often in Europe. However painful the name-calling and conspiracy theorizing is to him, he plans many more contributions to cryptography and computing. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 6.0.2 iQA/AwUBOgpEWyavYwibXjmcEQL6BgCgs/fOglVgSiXKVIjsel6IIN1uWhcAoNY8 mEuqj4uT1WKyUFmLGQt4OgAO =tFYW -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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CDR: RE: A successful lawsuit means Gore wins!
by Ernest Hua 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

Well, Tim, maybe I'm just part of a huge conspiracy to piss you off. Or maybe you utter lots of theoretical purity of process without being the least bit accomodating to the fact that often times, in a large distributed process, things don't go as smoothly and as perfectly as you would prefer. You really should try managing a large organization or process and try to be able to claim that you can make it perfect. And, of course, to get to YOUR point ... What is different this time? Will their evil twins to be doing the voting? What? What is the problem? It's the same damn vote. One for one. If someone does not feel like "fixing" his/her vote, he shouldn't have to. If the second pass is a clean slate, then he/she can vote the same damn way again. I really don't get it. Do they get TWO votes this time? Are they now FORCED to vote even if they did not the first time? Let's face it, if there are "forces", then they'll be there this time around as well. These people weren't objective one day, and the next day, they were suddenly sheeples toppled over by political ads. So what's the difference? Just spit it out, Tim. You just aren't talking substance, but you love insulting me ... What a way to communicate ... but maybe that's not your goal. Ern -----Original Message----- From: Tim May [mailto:tcmay@got.net] Sent: Wednesday, November 08, 2000 9:28 PM To: cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net Subject: RE: A successful lawsuit means Gore wins! At 8:57 PM -0800 11/8/00, Ernest Hua wrote: > > There cannot be a re-vote of the County, or even of the entire State, >> as this would distort the forces acting on the electorate in a way >> never seen before. The Palm County voters would know _they_ would be >> electing the next president. Billions of dollars would be spent >> trying to buy each and every voter. > >"distort the forces ..." Lord! No! Don't let them do that! > >Geez, Tim. What happened to personal responsibility? Who gives two >bits what "forces" will be upon them. They will ultimately still >have to cast a vote which they were casting just days earlier. Who >cares if idiots spend billions to sway a few thousand votes. That's >THEIR problem. It's free speech, as you have claimed in the past. You're a complete idiot if you don't understand this point. I made my points, briefly, above. This would not be a matter of the same voters simply recasting their same ballots. Think about it. (I'm not convinced you can, Ernest. In reading hundreds of your posts I have concluded that you're just part of Vinge's "Slow Zone.") --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.

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CDR: [Correction] More blather from the DEMS on FL
by William H. Geiger III 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

>While the recount of the FL ballots is going on the Democrats are now >complaining about the format of the ballot and threating legal action. It >seems that the ballot is "confusing". The complaint is that the double >sided ballot contained 2 columns on each side rather than one. >I personally used the FL ballot. It was large, well printed, and quite >legible. Anyone who was "confused" by it's format is just too dam stupid >to vote. >I am starting to get the feeling that the SC is going to decide this >election before it is all over. :( My mistake, seems that one county in FL used a different ballot than the rest of the state. They used a punch style ballot with one column of punch holes and candidates on both sides: Bush --> 0 0 <-- Buchanan Gore --> 0 0 <-- Nader 0 0 Still seems simple enough to me. IMHO if the courts order a new election in this county then they need to do it for the entire state as the electorial college is winner take all and it would be unjust to allow this one county to determine how these delegates vote. -- --------------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://www.openpgp.net Geiger Consulting Data Security & Cryptology Consulting Programming, Networking, Analysis PGP for OS/2: http://www.openpgp.net/pgp.html E-Secure: http://www.openpgp.net/esecure.html ---------------------------------------------------------------

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CDR: Re: A successful lawsuit means Gore wins!
by George＠Orwellian.Org 08 Nov '00

08 Nov '00

At 7:02 PM -0800 11/8/00, Evan wrote: >what the hell is the electoral college still doing in existance? it >should have gone out w/ unlimited presidential terms.... voting with >their conscience my ass.... voting in a partisan fashion is more like it Spooky Cypherpunk Niggar Tim May Moroned: # If you are an American citizen, you have failed to understand that # this nation is a federal republic, not a direct democracy. # # Perhaps there are night school classes in your area to help you to # fill in the gaps in your education. I hear it used to be clearer: they didn't even list presidential candidates on the ballot, just the electorial college members. ---- George(a)Orwellian.Org wrote: >Wow, NBC reports 19,000 Palm Beach County ballots >were discarded because _two_ holes were punched, >presumably by people confused by the illegally >formatted ballot. Buchanun received three times >the votes expected. Spooky Cypherpunk Niggar Tim May Moroned: # Earth to George: that the ballots were discarded does not mean # anything for the vote total already reported. Those 19,000 ballots, # if this is true, will simply vanish into the great black hole of # defective ballots (more than one vote per category, torn, etc.). # # So? So: added fuel for a Palm Beach County revote. That's on top of an illegally formatted ballot that can demonstratably (statistically) be shown to be the cause of impossibly high Buchanan votes. Both are indicators the badly formatted ballot robbed people of their right to vote.

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CDR: Re: A strange election scenario.
by James B Windle 08 Nov '00

08 Nov '00

-- On Wed, 8 Nov 2000 20:36:04 Tim May wrote: > >Actually, MacBride _was_ the elector, in the 1972 election. He ran as >the LP candidate in 1976, presumably on account of his 1972 action. > >(The 1972 was my first election, and I voted for John Hospers, >candidate of the very new Libertarian Party.) > Interesting. That may be right I remember it happening as I grew up in Virginia but I was pretty sure it must have been 1976 as I didn't think I remembered much about 1972 except Nixon won as I wasn't even a teenager. A little research didn't help regarding that vote, but there are several other instances of electors voting for other candidates as the elector are not apparently legally bond to vote as they are elected to vote. 1956 An Alabama elector voted for a circuit court judge instead of Adlai Stevenson 1960 An Oklahoma elector voted for Harry F. Byrd instead of Richard Nixon 1968 A North Carolina elector voted for George Wallace instead of Richard Nixon 1988 A West Virginia elector voted for Lloyd Bentsen instead of Michael Dukakis Jim Windle > > > Get FREE Email/Voicemail with 15MB at Lycos Communications at http://comm.lycos.com

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