- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Re: YAA (yet another article)
by karn＠qualcomm.com 23 Jun '93

23 Jun '93

At 11:18 AM 6/16/93 -0500, Jason Zions wrote: >Legalize drugs and prostitution and the Mafia will dry up and blow away. Amen. It was a real eye-opener to see the statistics on legal wiretaps (the ones they tell us about, anyway). The vast majority, and I do mean vast, are related to drugs. A distant second was gambling, and I think "racketeering" was in there somewhere (not sure what makes that distinct from "drugs" these days). >>Hellman has an ingenious idea that might appeal to those concerned >>about civil liberties. He would require not one but three judges to >>authorize a Clipper wiretap. A judge could answer the request with >>"Yes," "No or "Oh, my God!" The latter means, "This looks like an >>attempted abuse of power, as in Watergate." I must admit I'm disappointed to hear Hellman say something like this. Every time somebody comes up with a "new" or "improved" key escrow scheme, they give implicit approval to the whole basic idea of key escrow. Which is fundamentally unacceptable in *any* form. Although his idea may appeal to some naive people, I wonder how many have actually seen any search warrant affidavits. I read the one for Steve Jackson Games, and you certainly wouldn't know from that that they weren't all guilty as sin. Too bad it was completely defective. Do I sound like I don't place much faith in the warrant requirement acting as a meaningful safeguard? You bet! Phil

2 1

Re: DH for email (re: email protection and privacy)
by Mike Godwin 23 Jun '93

23 Jun '93

Phil Karn asks: > >You're not required to go *beyond* what is specified in a subpoena. > >But the subpoena's specifications can be pretty broad. > > Are you talking civil, criminal, or both? I assume you're asking about civil versus criminal contempt. My tentative answer (I can't look this up because my reference books are still packed) is both. Civil contempt, strictly speaking, is not a separate legal action--a federal judge has broad authority to impose civil-contempt sanctions on people who are noncompliant with subpoenas, who disrupt court proceedings, and so on. Criminal contempt *is* a separate legal action, and I think you can be prosecuted for intentional noncompliance with court orders, but I'd have to look up the criminal-contempt statute to be sure. --Mike

1 0

Re: Weak stenography.
by karn＠qualcomm.com 23 Jun '93

23 Jun '93

One thing keeps bugging me about steganography. Let's say that "unlicensed cryptography", including the mere possession of ciphertext, is totally outlawed. You may well be able to bury encrypted data in all sorts of things (gif files, digital audio, "free" blocks on a hard disk, etc). But if you ever want to be able to retrieve it, you have to leave yourself an Achilles Heel: somewhere you need to keep a computer program, in plaintext, that you can execute to extract and decrypt the hidden ciphertext. You may be able to get away with claiming that the low order bits of your Doors tapes really *are* meaningless random bits picked up when you dubbed all your worn-out LPs to DAT, but if they find "readdat.exe" on your PC, disassemble it and discover that it's a program to extract and decrypt ciphertext from DAT tapes, you're in trouble. And if you encrypt your copy of "readdat.exe", well, you now need a plaintext decryption program to decrypt THAT. Short of devising a scheme that's so simple that you don't mind recoding it from scratch (and from memory) every time you want to extract and decrypt something, what can be done? Phil

4 3

Re: YAA (yet another article)
by George A. Gleason 23 Jun '93

23 Jun '93

Re Phil's criticism of warrants and the Oh My god proposal on wiretaps. It would seem that an additional safeguard can be put in place which would create some kind of liability for deliberately exaggerated warrants. One could also require the services of an investigator serving in the capacity of a public defender, who would act as devil's advocate against warrants by bringing countervailing information to bear. -gg

1 0

Re: Corporate Ethics and the Profit Margin
by George A. Gleason 23 Jun '93

23 Jun '93

Re Robert. Good one there, catching me saying "positive reinforcement for PKP and negative reinforcement for AT&T." The thing is, I agree corporations don't have feelings, but Jim Bidzos *does* have feelings and he is singularly responsible as an individual, to a range of constituencies. Some of those constituencies have legal relationships such as stockholders. Others are informal, such as Us Here. But all of them come directly to HIM. That's not the case with AT&T which is a HUGE bureaucracy. If someone would find the single individual in AT&T who got them involved with the Clipper thing, we might have an interesting round of questions to ask. The thing is though, once you're dealing with a specific person, the relationship of adversariality has to be modified to take into account the respect for the individual human being. -gg

1 0

Re: YAA (yet another article)
by karn＠qualcomm.com 23 Jun '93

23 Jun '93

At 01:46 PM 6/16/93 -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: >Torture, believe it or not, is a very effective way of police to get >information. Our society bans it. Every mechanism that is useful is >not acceptable. Not to dilute your argument or anything (you know I agree with it), but the reading I've done on the history of the Fifth Amendment says that one of the reasons torture was eventually banned in Western countries (through mechanisms like the American Fifth Amendment) was the growing realization that it actually was NOT particularly effective. People would falsely confess to all sorts of crimes just to get the torture to stop. Consider how many confessed witches were burned in New England. One of the problematic things about encryption (as it's usually practiced now) is that it's relatively easy to tell if an encryption key is the right one or not. This makes it tempting to resort to torture (or a "contempt of court citation", in modern terms) to extract it from an unwilling defendant. That's why both steganography and "duress key" schemes will remain important for some time, even if the 5th amendment were to be held as applicable to compelling crypto keys. You could cry "torture", while the police would claim that they discovered the key by other means (or that you disclosed it "voluntarily") and it would be your word against theirs. Phil

1 0

Re: 2600 testimony to Markey's subcommittee
by karn＠qualcomm.com 23 Jun '93

23 Jun '93

Having heard Markey in action (during John Gage's testimony, and again during some hearings on HDTV), and having read his atrocious "scanner bill" really drives home the old saying: a little knowledge is *dangerous*. To which I would add "especially in the hands of a politician". Phil

1 0

PGP Menu on soda.berkeley.edu
by J. Michael Diehl 23 Jun '93

23 Jun '93

I have just uploaded version 1.0 of my pgp menu system for 4dos/Ndos. It presents a menu interface to all of the major pgp functions and I'm quite proud of it. It does, however, require 4dos or Norton's Ndos to run. But hey, once you use 4dos, you will never go back to regular dos. If there is positive response to this version, I will try to port it into portable C so that it can run on (anything?). Hope you enjoy it. +-----------------------+-----------------------------+---------+ | J. Michael Diehl ;-) | I thought I was wrong once. | PGP KEY | | mdiehl(a)triton.unm.edu | But, I was mistaken. |available| | mike.diehl(a)fido.org | | Ask Me! | | (505) 299-2282 +-----------------------------+---------+ | | +------"I'm just looking for the opportunity to be -------------+ | Politically Incorrect!" <Me> | +-----If codes are outlawed, only criminals wil have codes.-----+ +----Is Big Brother in your phone? If you don't know, ask me---+

1 0

Re: Digital Cash$$$$
by karn＠qualcomm.com 23 Jun '93

23 Jun '93

At 04:09 PM 6/14/93 EDT, Duncan Frissell wrote: > > 1.) You mail cash/MO to First Digital Bank of Cyberspace (at an >offshore > maildrop) together with a public (unique if you like) key and anonymous >email > address (on Julf's remailer perhaps). Recall that the US has money-laundering laws that require you to file a form every time you move $10,000 or more in or out of the country. If the First Digital Bank of Cyberspace is offshore, it could come under these laws, at least with respect to priming your account with real money. It's an interesting question whether they could then get you for sending more than $10,000 of digital cash across the border without filing the form. It's even more interesting if you encrypt all these cross-border transactions... Another wonderful set of laws we can credit to the "war on drugs". Phil

1 0

Corporate Ethics and the Profit Margin
by rclark＠nyx.cs.du.edu 23 Jun '93

23 Jun '93

rge Gleason) writes: [My suggestions on ways to make it unprofitable for PKP to behave "unethically" deleted.] >That's like, if you want your kid to behave, beat him any time he >misbehaves. Yeah, uh-huh. Unlike the child, though, a corporation is not human. In addition, it is, alas, the manner of American business of late to be reactive instead of proactive. Thus, rather than see the future catastrophe which will inevitably result if Clipper/Capstone is mandated as a standard, PKP will look toward this year's profit margin. To get the attention of an American corporation, it is regrettably necessary to "beat it every time it misbehaves." If it behaves, free market forces will take care of the reward. In the case of PKP and AT & T, though, free market forces have been subverted because they have been "incentivised" by Uncle Sam. ("Incentivised," ecch. Sounds like a suitably grisly operation, no? Ever notice that euphemisms are usually uglier than what they euphemise? Even "bribe" would sound less tawdry and criminal.) >If we want PKP to behave ethically, we have to show them positive i.e. >profitmaking incentives for doing so. For instance commitments to buy their >products if they do (whatever). Unfortunately, it's far easier for a large, diverse group to agree _not_ to purchase something than get all of them to sign a group contract to buy a certain company's merchandise. It works, too. Check out the Chavez grape boycott, and the alarming success of the Moron Majority in bullying advertisers and television networks to cancel "immoral" programming. Unless there were a "Cypherpunks procurement committee," which purchased crypto merchandise from "cypherpunk correct" dealers and resold to cypherpunks, this would be difficult to manage. It may be a good idea, but I, for one, don't have the capital to set it up; and it doesn't seem likely to happen in the immediate future. Even you, when making concrete suggestions, seem to realize that punishment and/or negative reinforcement are effective tools, as in your next message you write: >Re AT&T being "incentivised;" again, I'd like to suggest it's time to >dis-incentivise them like right now. If you're on AT&T long distance, >change your carrier. If you're using an AT&T phone system, replace it with >anything else. [Other good suggestions elided.] This is the "whack 'em when they misbehave" tactic which you seemed to oppose in your prior message. It's really the main weapon in our arsenal against corporate misbehavior. ---- Robert W. F. Clark Stop the Clipper Chip! rclark(a)nyx.cs.du.edu clark(a)metal.psu.edu

1 0