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MD5 comes in for further criticism
by R.A. Hettinga 07 Feb '05

07 Feb '05

<http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?NewsID=3081&Page=1&pagePos=…> Techworld.com 07 February 2005 More experts warn of CAS arrays risks MD5 comes in for further criticism By Lucas Mearian, Computerworld (US) More security experts are warning against the use of the flawed hashing algorithm, MD5, for digital signatures on content addressed storage (CAS) systems. Last August, a Chinese researcher, Xiaoyun Wang, unveiled detailsof the flaw. Other security experts are now chipping in. An official at the National Institute of Standards and Technology said IT managers have good reason to be concerned about security flaws in MD5. "It's pretty well known right now that it's just not up to what you need," said Elaine Barker, head of NIST's computer security division. Barker said NIST has no plans to certify or recommend the MD5 algorithm for government use. The warnings come as more vendors unveil CAS systems to meet the need for disk-based backup of fixed data such as e-mail and medical images. Experts say that under specific circumstances, hackers could create files containing malicious data that could cause data loss or the dissemination of bad data. Of the four major vendors of CAS storage, two of them - EMC and Archivas - use the MD5 algorithm. The other two, Permabit and Avamar Technologies do not. Archivas said it provides the option of using another method of indexing, called the Secure Hash Algorithm-1. Users of EMC and Archivas systems say they aren't concerned about the warnings. "I believe that the possibility of a (problem) is so unlikely that it does not bother me," said John Halamka, CIO at Boston-based CareGroup, a hospital management company. "Thus far, we've been working with (the) Centera (array) for more than a year without a single issue." Curt Tilmes, a systems engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, has been beta-testing an Archivas Cluster CAS system for archiving satellite data about the earth's atmosphere for more than a year. He said he feels it's secure because it's on a private network with firewalls. "I suppose it wouldn't hurt [to use a more secure algorithm], but for my application, it wouldn't have an effect," Tilmes said. Meanwhile, Sun's long-awaited CAS system, code-named Honeycomb, won't use the MD5 algorithm because of security concerns, said Chris Woods, chief technology officer for Sun's storage practice. Woods would not say which algorithm the company will use to index stored objects. "It really is time for [the industry] to stop using MD5," said Dan Kaminsky, a security consultant at Avaya. "MD5 has been a deprecated hashing algorithm for almost a decade. The industry has clung to the algorithm, partially out of inertia, partially out of scarcity of computer power." In a report last month, Kaminsky pointed out that an attack could be used to create two files with the same MD5 hash, one with "safe" data and one with "malicious" data. If both files were saved to the same system, a so-called collision could result, leading to data loss or the dissemination of bad data, he said. Mike Kilian, CTO at EMC's Centera division, contended that MD5 flaws don't apply to Centera arrays because once a piece of content is stored, a company can't change it. "Centera from almost Day 1 has had multiple addressing schemes available to applications," Kilian said. Kaminsky disagreed. "Cryptography tends to be a 'garbage algorithm in, garbage security out' discipline," he said. "Let's say they were appending custom metadata to the end of their files. Conceivably, the attack would not care, as once two files have the same hash, you can append the same [identical] metadata to both of them and they'll still possess the same hash." Archivas officials noted that its CAS device does not use the MD5 hash key to name the file in the archive, the way EMC's product does. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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NIST moves to stronger hashing
by R.A. Hettinga 07 Feb '05

07 Feb '05

<http://www.fcw.com/print.asp> Federal Computer Week Monday, February 7, 2005 NIST moves to stronger hashing BY Florence Olsen Published on Feb. 7, 2005 Federal agencies have been put on notice that National Institute of Standards and Technology officials plan to phase out a widely used cryptographic hash function known as SHA-1 in favor of larger and stronger hash functions such as SHA-256 and SHA-512. The change will affect many federal cryptographic functions that incorporate hashes, particularly digital signatures, said William Burr, manager of NIST's security technology group, which advises federal agencies on electronic security standards. "There's really no emergency here," Burr said. "But you should be planning how you're going to transition - whether you're a vendor or a user - so that you can do better cryptography by the next decade." Hashing is used to prevent tampering with electronic messages. A hash is a numerical code generated from a string of text when a message is sent. The receiving system checks it against a hash it creates from the same text, and if they match, the message was sent intact. Speaking at a recent meeting of the federal Public Key Infrastructure Technical Working Group at NIST, Burr said some critics have questioned the security of the government-developed SHA-1 after some researchers managed to break a variant of the SHA-1 hash function last year. But Burr said no complete implementation of the SHA-1 function has been successfully attacked. "SHA-1 is not broken," he said, "and there is not much reason to suspect that it will be soon." But advances in computer processing capability make it prudent to phase out SHA-1 by 2010, he said. Burr said other widely used hash functions such as MD5 are vulnerable to attack and their use should be discontinued. "If by some chance you are still using MD5 in certificates or for digital signatures, you should stop," he said. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Iraq passport racket highlights lapses in security
by R.A. Hettinga 07 Feb '05

07 Feb '05

<http://www.theage.com.au/news/Iraq/Iraqi-passport-racket-highlights-securit…> Welcome to The Age Online. Passport racket highlights lapses in security By Paul McGeough Baghdad February 8, 2005 The passport details the bearer's Arab background but has Paul McGeough's picture. For a few hundred dollars, anyone can buy their way through most checkpoints and across borders. While officials in Baghdad and Washington berate Iraq's neighbours for failing to block insurgency movements across their borders, one of the most dangerous security lapses thrives in Baghdad's heart - a trade in illicit Iraqi passports. In a secretive exchange at a suburban gambling den, across the road from a heavily fortified government ministry that is an insurgency target, it costs only $US200 ($A250) for a pass through most of the security checkpoints in a city at war. The ease with which this deal was conducted is a chilling window on the easy movement of terrorists in and out of the country. The security blanket in the capital can be numbing - some wait for hours in snail's-pace queues for access to military, government, political and private establishments. Passing through the maze of blast walls and razor wire that isolates the Green Zone, within which top US and Iraqi officials are bunkered on the banks of the Tigris River, requires checks at four heavily armed posts only 150 metres apart. All bags are searched and visitors are frisked, physically and electronically, at two of them. At a ministry as mundane as Displacement and Migration there is a twist: personal IDs are held at the first check; and a special pale blue pass is issued that must be swapped for a darker blue tag at a second checkpoint closer to the building. Journalists reporting on the January 30 election had to carry three separately issued passes, each of which took half a day or more to be issued: one from the US-run Combined Press Information Centre; another from the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior; and the third from the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. But the starting point for any pass is a valid passport. And in the absence of most of the fancy laminated picture passes, a passport, or any other picture ID, say a driver's licence, are likely to get the bearer through most checkpoints. But take the Iraqi passport pictured above. It gives the name of the bearer's Arab mother and it describes him as a Baghdad businessman - but it has a picture of me. It was acquired through a former Iraqi policeman who replied cryptically when asked what his business was: "I'm retired." This is not a backstreet counterfeit, it is said to be real. It was to cost $US100 and could have been turned around in a couple of hours, but it was ordered during the weekend and had to be delivered 48 hours later. In the best opportunist tradition, the price suddenly doubled at the point of collection. The passport racket emerged last week in interviews with insurgency and criminal elements in Baghdad. They said Sabah al-Baldawi, one of the insurgency's top financiers and the man they say is behind most of the kidnapping in the city, moves freely between Baghdad and Damascus using up to 20 false passports. One said false Iraqi documents were used to spirit Saad al-Kharki, an insurgency leader in Baghdad, out of Iraq when he needed to hide in Cairo after a televised alert that authorities were hunting him. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Security's inseparable couple
by R.A. Hettinga 07 Feb '05

07 Feb '05

<http://www.itworldcanada.com:80/Mobile/ViewArticle.aspx?id=idgml-257f41ee-4…> Network World Security's inseparable couple By: Bob Brown Network World (US) (07 Feb 2005) The most familiar names in network security are neither vendors nor geeks: Try Alice and Bob. Since Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman - the R, S and A in RSA Security Inc. - introduced Alice and Bob in their seminal public-key cryptosystem paper in 1978, the couple has become the subject of countless security-related papers, test questions, speeches and even, ahem, jokes. Alice and Bob were the names given to fictitious characters used to explain how the RSA encryption method worked, with the thinking being that using names instead of letters like A and B would make a complex subject easier to grasp. They are so commonly used that most security experts don't even give a second thought to reaching for them. "They're like old friends," says Charles Kolodgy, research director for security products at IDC. "I use them the same way everyone else does. 'So the sender, Alice, is trying to message Bob. . . .'" "I use them conversationally. Sometimes I use them in documents, as well," says James Cupps, information security officer at Sappi Fine Paper North America in Portland, Maine. "I often use them in training because they are easier than Machine A and Machine B." Over the years, the Alice and Bob story line has become more complicated, something of a high-tech reality show. Not only are Alice and Bob trying to share a secret, say a Valentine's Day poem, but Carol and Dave want in and Eve is trying to eavesdrop. A whole cast of characters has been introduced to explain everything from micropayments to SSL to quantum cryptography. "Cryptography is the one area of mathematics where there are people, not just numbers," says Bruce Schneier, CTO of Counterpane Internet Security Inc. and author of Applied Cryptography, a book first published in 1994 that includes a table of "dramatis personae" headed by Alice and Bob (see graphic). "Alice and Bob are the links between the mathematical variables and the people." Whitfield Diffie, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s chief security officer and co-author of the Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol, says there is seemingly no end to this modern day Dick and Jane's adventures. "(They have) appeared in fanciful circumstances in numerous papers carrying on their stormy relationship entirely over unprotected communication media and against the plots of their exes, the secret police.," he says. One gossipy headline in a trade journal teased: "Alice and Bob grow apart." Some suspect the names stem from the swinging 1960s movie "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice." RSA co-founder Rivest, who is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor, says he came up with Alice and Bob to be able to use "A" and "B" for notation, and that by having one male and one female, the pronouns "he" and "she" could be used in descriptions. Rivest says it is possible that Alice came to mind because he is something of an Alice in Wonderland buff. Never did he expect the names to take on lives of their own. "Nor did I imagine that our proposed cryptosystem would be so widely used," he says. Ask those in the know about Alice and Bob and you'll inevitably be pointed to an after-dinner speech delivered at a technology seminar in Zurich, Switzerland in 1984 by data security expert John Gordon. In his "Story of Alice and Bob," Gordon refers to the speech as perhaps "the first time a definitive biography of Alice and Bob has been given." From the speech we learn that "Bob is a subversive stockbroker and Alice is a two-timing speculator" and that they've never actually met one another. Gordon, who runs a consultancy in the U.K., sums up their story like this: "Against all odds, over a noisy telephone line, tapped by the tax authorities and the secret police, Alice will happily attempt, with someone she doesn't trust, whom she cannot hear clearly, and who is probably someone else, to fiddle (with) her tax returns and to organize a coup d'tat, while at the same time minimizing the cost of the phone call." Gordon, who has been in cryptography since 1976, says over the years he has taken the text of the speech off his company's Web site, only to put it back on because of reader demand. "Today, nobody remembers I invented Strong Primes (special numbers used in cryptography), but everyone knows me as the guy who wrote the story of Alice and Bob," he says. Gordon estimates the speech gets viewed about 1,000 times a month. Security experts say Alice and Bob likely aren't going anywhere soon. Other names, such as Lucy and Desi, have been used, but without a following. "I suspect that (Alice and Bob) will be around almost forever," says Joel Snyder, a senior partner with consulting firm Opus One. "In our business, we tend to live by very long and ugly traditions, and people are using terms now that were invented by MIT and Cal Tech undergrads in the 1970s -- mostly without knowing why or what. Consider 'hacker' for example." Barry Stiefel, CTO for consulting and training company Information Engine and founder of the Check Point User Group, says he still gets "a wry little smile" whenever he hears or uses the names Alice and Bob. "As soon as you say those names, everybody's already 5 minutes into the story's exposition and excited to hear where the plot will take us," he says. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Ireland faces �50m e-voting write-off
by R.A. Hettinga 07 Feb '05

07 Feb '05

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/04/ireland_evoting_bill/print.html> The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT The Register » Internet and Law » eGovernment » Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/04/ireland_evoting_bill/ Ireland faces ¤50m e-voting write-off By electricnews.net (feedback at theregister.co.uk) Published Friday 4th February 2005 12:16 GMT A lack of public confidence in e-voting means that Ireland may be forced into writing off its ¤50m investment in electronic ballot systems. Michael Noonan, chairman of the Dail Public Accounts Committee, expressed doubts that the current system will ever be introduced, after last year's debacle where plans to initiate e-voting were scrapped over security concerns, the Irish Times reports. Even if the system is found to be safe, few ministers would give it the go-ahead because the public would have little trust in it, he told the newspaper. Noonan made his comments ahead of an inquiry into expenditure on the e-voting initiative. Officials from the Department of Environment are due before the committee today to answer criticisms over the the scheme. The civil servants are likely to be subjected to a serious grilling on why security concerns were not addressed before ¤50m was spent on e-voting systems. The storage of the unused e-voting machines is estimated to cost Irish taxpayers up to ¤2m per annum. Fine Gael, Ireland's biggest opposition party, has attacked the Government over the fiasco. "The criticisms contained in the report of the Independent Commission on Electronic Voting make it clear that this was a fiasco of the highest order," Fergus O'Dowd TD, Fine Gael spokesman on the Environment, said. "Considering all the information that is available to him, Minister Roche needs to fully explain the findings of these inquiries." "Is it now the case, as feared, that the government will have to write-off the ¤50m spend on electronic voting because of the botched handling of the project? I will be raising the issue through Fine Gael's priority questions in the Dail early next week. The Minister must give some definite answers." The Irish government had planned to introduce e-voting at local and European elections on 11 June 2004. But it abandoned the idea, following a report of the Independent Commission on Electronic Voting (ICEV) which raised doubts over the accuracy of the software used in the system. According to the Irish Citizens for Trustworthy Evoting (ICTE) submission to the commission, the Nedap/Powervote electronic voting system had a fundamental design flaw because it had no mechanism to verify that votes would be recorded accurately in an actual election. Consequently, results obtained from the system could not be said to be accurate, ICTE said. Other flaws identified included possible software errors and the use of the graphical user interface programming language Object Pascal for a safety-critical system. Although ICEV's remit was advisory, the government accepted its recommendation that the system should not be used until further testing had established the effectiveness of its security. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com

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Searching for a true friend
by Jessie Garcia 06 Feb '05

06 Feb '05

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FBI Computers: You Don't Have Mail
by R.A. Hettinga 06 Feb '05

06 Feb '05

<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6919621/site/newsweek/print/1/displaymode/1098/> MSNBC.com FBI Computers: You Don't Have Mail By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball Newsweek Feb. 14 issue - The FBI's computer woes got even worse last week when bureau officials were forced to shut down a commercial e-mail network used by supervisors, agents and others to communicate with the public. The reason, sources tell NEWSWEEK, was an apparent "cyberintrusion" by an outside hacker who officials fear had been tapping into supposedly secure e-mail messages since late last year. FBI spokesmen publicly sought to downplay the damage, saying the compromised commercial server-maintained by AT&T-was used exclusively for unclassified and "nonsensitive" communications that did not involve ongoing investigations. One example, they said, was notices from public-affairs offices' fbi.gov addresses to members of the press. But privately, officials were highly concerned-and recently notified the White House. One top FBI official says he regularly used his shut-down fbi.gov e-mail account to send messages to state and local police chiefs. Another source tells news-week that more than 3,000 old and current e-mail accounts were shut down. Others say the same apparently compromised server also provided accounts to other government agencies. Justice Department officials, who launched their own cybercrime investigation into the apparent intrusion, noted that there was no telling the potential damage at this point, given the common tendency for everybody to say too much-including making references to law-enforcement "sensitive" cases-even in theoretically routine e-mails. "This is an eye-opener for all of us," says one FBI official. The bigger question, sources say, was how the hackers penetrated the bureau's e-mails-and why it took the FBI so long to notify the rest of the government. The FBI e-mail system was erected with firewalls that were supposed to prevent even sophisticated hackers from penetrating. But while officials stressed there was no evidence that the apparent intruder or intruders were part of any terrorist or foreign intelligence organization, the authorities were still baffled as to how they got into the system. According to sources familiar with the investigation, one suspicion is that hackers either used sophisticated "password cracking" software that tries out millions of password combinations or somehow eavesdropped on Internet transmissions. Over the weekend, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Department of Homeland Security posted a computer-security alert to agencies throughout the federal government urging e-mail users to be more careful about choosing their passwords by avoiding obvious clues-like nicknames, initials, children's names, birth dates, pet names or brands of car. "Such information can be easily obtained and used to crack your password," the bulletin states. The e-mail compromise couldn't have come at a worse time for the bureau. Just last week, the Justice Department inspector-general released a report sharply criticizing the FBI's management of its new Virtual Case File computer system-a $170 million software upgrade that bureau officials now concede they may have to -scrap. The VCF system was supposed to make it much easier for agents to electronically access vital information relating to ongoing cases in different FBI offices. But the I.G. found that poor planning and ineffective management have resulted in a system that is nearly unworkable. FBI chief Robert Mueller, who sources say has personally briefed President George W. Bush on the matter, took responsibility "at least in part" for the fiasco before a Senate subcommittee. "No one is more frustrated and disappointed than I," he said. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Interview with Ward Churchill
by R.A. Hettinga 06 Feb '05

06 Feb '05

>I want the state gone: transform the situation to U.S. out of North >America. U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether. Cheers, RAH ------- <http://www.satyamag.com/apr04/churchill.html> Satya April 04 Dismantling the Politics of Comfort The Satya Interview with Ward Churchill Photo ) AK Press Ward Churchill is perhaps one of the most provocative thinkers around. A Creek and enrolled Keetoowah Band Cherokee, Churchill is a longtime Native rights activist. He has been heavily involved in the American Indian Movement and the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. He is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado and has served as a delegate to the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations. One of Churchill's areas of expertise is the history of the U.S. government's genocide of Native Americans-the chronic violation of treaties and systematic extermination of North American indigenous populations. His many books include A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas: 1492 to Present (1998) and The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the U.S. (2nd edition, 2002). His new book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality, was just published by AK Press (www.akpress.org) As a member of a people who have been on the receiving end of violence, Churchill has a rather distinct perspective of the U.S. and the effectiveness of political dissent and social change. Ward Churchill recently shared some of his views with Catherine Clyne. This issue of Satya is trying to push the debate about whether or not violence is an appropriate means for a desired end. With animal activists, there's a growing gap between people who feel it's not and others who feel that, for example, breaking into laboratories to liberate animals or burning down property is an effective way to stop abuse. Well, that's an absurd framing in my view. Defining violence in terms of property-that basically nullifies the whole notion that life is sacred. People who want to elevate property to the same level of importance as life are so absurd as to be self-nullifying. Some people feel that those who abuse animals or people negate their right to consideration and open themselves up to physical violence. What's your response to this? The individuals who are perpetrators in one way or another, the "little Eichmanns"* in the background-the technocrats, bureaucrats, technicians-who make the matrix of atrocity that we are opposing possible are used to operating with impunity. If you're designing thermonuclear weapons, you're subject to neutralization, in the same sense that somebody who is engaged in homicide would be, in terms of their capacity to perpetrate that offense. One or two steps removed should not have the effect of immunizing. Otherwise, only those who are in the frontline-usually the most expendable in the systemic sense-are subject to intervention. None of the decision-makers, the people who make it possible, would be subject to intervention that would prevent their action in any way at all. That brings me to one question, which is, in general, people like to think they're pretty decent. They don't like to think of themselves as violent or complying with a system that is oppressive... Heinrich Himmler viewed himself in exactly that way. He was a family man, he had high moral values, he'd met his responsibilities, blah, blah, blah-a good and decent man in his own mind. Do you think that applies to most American people? In the sense that it applied to most Germans [during the Third Reich]. Your recent works detail the documentable history of the consequences of U.S. imperialism. After reading On the Justice of Roosting Chickens and listening to your two CDs, what do you want your audience to walk away with? A fundamental understanding of the nature of their obligation to intervene to bring the kind of atrocities that I've described to a halt by whatever means are necessary. The predominating absurdity in American oppositional circles for the past 30 years is the notion that if one intervenes to halt a rape or a murder in progress, if you actually use physical force as necessary to prevent that act, somehow or other you've become morally the same as the perpetrator. What do you think those oppositional circles need to do to really effect change? Stop being preoccupied with the sanctity of their own personal security, on the one hand, and start figuring out what would be necessary. That might require experimentation with tactics and techniques. Not how, like an alchemist, you repeat the performance often enough to make yourself feel good in the face of an undisturbed continuation of the horror you're opposing. If your candlelit vigil doesn't bring the process you're opposing to a halt, what do you do next, presuming you actually desired to have an effect. Let's just presume that, in this case. That's not a safe presumption. There's a whole feel-good ethic out there. It's not [to] effect any substantive change. It's to bear moral witness to make the person feel good, to assuage their conscience in exactly the fashion you were talking about: they can then posture as good and decent people, while engaged in active complicity in the crimes they purportedly oppose. Complicity of acquiescence: that's the "Good German Syndrome." You move on. Rather than a vigil, you hold a rally. When that doesn't do it either, you march around, do petitions, letters, you hold alternative educational fora, you try to build bridges with people; you do whatever. None of that works. The obligation is not to be personally pure. The obligation is to effect a measurable change. Some argue that the ten million people who gathered last year on February 15th to stop a U.S. invasion of Iraq didn't really amount to much in terms of tangible results. Is there a precedent of experimentation you think people are not looking at? If you conduct your protest activities in a manner which is sanctioned by the state, the state understands that the protest will have no effect on anything. You can gauge the effectiveness-real or potential at least-of any line of activity by the degree of severity of repression visited upon it by the state. It responds harshly to those things it sees as, at least incipiently, destabilizing. So you look where they are visiting repression: that's exactly what you need to be doing. People engaged in the activity that is engendering the repression are the first people who need to be supported-not have discussion groups to endlessly consider the masturbatory implications of the efficacy of their actions or whether or not they are pure enough to be worthy of support. They are by definition worthy. Ultimately, the people debating continuously are unworthy. They are apologists for the state structure; [and] in [effect], try to convince people to be ineffectual. Nonviolent action can be effectual when harnessed in a way that is absolutely unacceptable to the state: if you actually clog the freeways or occupy sites or whatever to disrupt state functioning with the idea of ultimately making it impossible for the state to function at all, and are willing to incur the consequences of that. That's very different from people standing with little signs, making a statement. Statements don't do it. If [they] did, we would have transformed society in this country more than a century ago. What do you think holds people back? For all the rhetoric, there is no nonviolent context operating here-not at all. The more you become in any sense effectual, you're going to be confronted with the violence of the state to maintain order of a sort that perpetuates its functioning. So nonviolence renders one vulnerable to the lethal counter-force of the state. So there's tangible fear. It's basically, politically a consecration or concession of physical force to the state by those who purport to oppose the state. Even if there is a sort of inchoate understanding of a position of privilege in society, coming from an economically affluent background, if you're not going to face physical violence, ultimately, you are subject to consequences which are not physical: an erosion of your privilege, a making of your life more uncomfortable. Basically, nonviolence as it is practiced, espoused in the U.S., is not Gandhian. Gandhi never articulated anything that precluded personal sacrifice. This is a non-Gandhian appropriation of his principles for the purpose of confirming personal comfort. So it's a politics of the comfort zone. What are some of the solutions? Extreme events, like 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, have mobilized people out of such complacency, albeit temporarily. I don't have a ready answer for that. One of the things I've suggested is that it may be that more 9/11s are necessary. This seems like such a no-brainer that I hate to frame it in terms of actual transformation of consciousness. 'Hey those brown-skinned folks dying in the millions in order to maintain this way of life, they can wait forever for those who purport to be the opposition here to find some personally comfortable and pure manner of affecting the kind of transformation that brings not just lethal but genocidal processes to a halt.' They have no obligation-moral, ethical, legal or otherwise-to sit on their thumbs while the opposition here dithers about doing anything to change the system. So it's removing the sense of-and right to-impunity from the American opposition. In the case of the Germans during the Third Reich, outside influence could have altered their course. Do you think there's any place for that in terms of the U.S.? From Europe or Canada, to kind of kick things along? I'm thinking of systems that have power and leverage with the U.S. administration. That's looking for a painless fix again. Power and leverage in the traditional sense are not going to bring fundamental change into being. Each of those entities is a projector of the same kind of violence, but on a quantitatively lesser scale than the U.S. However, the nature of their intervention, based upon their perception of self-interest, is convincing the U.S. to [change] in a way that will not visit undue consequences upon them. You'd get cosmetic alterations-policy adjustments and so forth-a refinement of the system, thus the continuation of the status quo. It would ultimately create illusions of change and keep people confused. Third world opposition on the other hand understands this dynamic much more clearly. You have to have an eradication of the beast, not a retraining of the beast's performance. I can give a talk to a university in North America, to students and professors, and they are fundamentally confused about things that are automatically self-evident to people when you go to a village in Latin America, where the average educational attainment is third grade. Now why can these "peasants" automatically grasp concepts that are just beyond the reach altogether of your average university audience in North America? Why do you think? Partly because it's this fostering of illusion-and it's self-imposed-that repeating the same process yet again will somehow lead to a fundamentally different result. We can go through the charade of 'let's elect John Kerry instead of George Bush,' do things which are essentially painless to us, and the outcome is going to be different. You don't have politics, you have alchemy. That's delusional behavior. It's a state of denial in a social maybe even cultural sense. And that's what's masquerading as progressive politics. Is there a historical example of what could happen here? There is absolutely no historical precedent that I could name. We're [within] the belly of the beast. When you destabilize, when there is genuinely significant fracturing, the actual disintegration of the social and political order. Everybody goes on about the end of the 60s, but there nonetheless were conditions indicating substantial instability. The ability of the U.S. to project power didn't exactly evaporate but it was very sharply curtailed. But a complete curtailment of the U.S. ability to project power on a global basis has no historical precedent. So if it takes eradication of the beast from within, how would you see that happening? Well, first the withdrawal of consent, people imbued with consciousness to withdraw altogether from an embrace of the state. If I defined the state as being the problem, just what happens to the state? I've never fashioned myself to be a revolutionary, but it's part and parcel of what I'm talking about. You can create through consciousness a situation of flux, perhaps, in which something better can replace it. In instability there's potential. That's about as far as I go with revolutionary consciousness. I'm actually a de-evolutionary. I don't want other people in charge of the apparatus of the state as the outcome of a socially transformative process that replicates oppression. I want the state gone: transform the situation to U.S. out of North America. U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether. So what does that look like? There's no U.S. in America anymore. What's on the map instead? Well let's just start with territoralities often delineated in treaties of fact-territoralities of 500 indigenous nations imbued with an inalienable right to self-determination, definable territoralities which are jurisdictionally separate. Then you've got things like the internal diasporic population of African Americans in internal colonies that have been established by the imposition of labor patterns upon them. You've got Appalachian whites. Since the U.S. unilaterally violated its treaty obligations, it forfeits its rights-or presumption of rights-under international law. Basically, you've got a dismantlement and devolution of the U.S. territorial and jurisdictional corpus into something that would be more akin to diasporic self-governing entities and a multiplicity of geographical locations. A-ha, chew on that one for awhile. There's no overarching authority other than consensus or agreement between each of these. There has to be a collaborative and cooperative arrangement rather than something that's centrally organized and arbitrarily imposed. Is there any precedence for that in human history? Well, partial precedence at least. It's not worked out. My ancestors did, in fact, generate their agreements voluntarily, serving their own interests to do so; they did cede territory. Not the territory that's been taken, but the territory that's been ceded is legitimately in the ownership of someone else. So there is, in that sense, a place for different populations, and accommodation arrangement can be made for others. It's not a case of returning to things as they were in 1619 or 1606 or whatever you want to pick from history as being the "pre-here." It's a matter of reasserting or sustaining the values and understandings that came with the disposition of things that applied at that time, and reapplying it or continuing to apply it in a contemporary context. It's a reordering of relations both between people in the singular, and the rest of the natural order in a way that is coherent now. It's not everybody who's not in some sense discernibly native needs to leave in a physical sense. It's that everybody who is not in some sense native needs to figure out how to accommodate themselves to life in either a native jurisdiction (as natives have been accommodating themselves) and existing under somebody else's jurisdiction. Or, living in a jurisdiction of their own, but one that is constrained to that legitimate jurisdiction. In other words, not having arbitrary authority over anybody else's lives, land or resources. To exist on the basis of the resources available to them in this constricted land base. A whole reordering of consciousness goes into that. A self-defined spirit group in other words cannot assign itself a superior right to benefit from somebody else's property. That property, I'm using in the broadest sense, includes their very lives. What gives you hope? What gives me hope is that people are imbued innately with consciousness and you can potentially reorder that to arrive at an understanding of what needs to be done. Once the understanding is there, the capacity to do what necessary is obviously present. So despite the fact that my experience tells me that it is unlikely (because of the vast preference of the bulk of the people to indulge themselves personally, rather than engage in something that might be effective but personally uncomfortable), the possibility of an alteration in that consciousness, remains always present. There's where I find hope. That was a somewhat muddled response. What would I do in the alternative if I were completely divested of hope? Collect stamps. The reason to go on with the struggle is why it's work. It's not an event; it's a process. And if one understands one's place in the world properly one is obligated to struggle. Struggling, you've got to have hope that you can succeed. If not in the immediacy of my lifetime, then to plant the seeds that can reach maturation at some point. Now I have an obligation to my children and my children's children and generations out into the future, as do we all, whether we understand it or not. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Jim Bell WMD Threat
by John Young 06 Feb '05

06 Feb '05

The FBI continues to claim Jim Bell is a WMD threat despite having no case against him except in the media, but that conforms to current FBI/DHS policy of fictionalizing homeland threats. http://www.edgewood.army.mil/downloads/bwirp/mdc_appendix_b02.pdf See page 16. This document was initially prepared in June 2002, updated in June 2003.

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Tory party set to withdraw ID scheme support
by R.A. Hettinga 06 Feb '05

06 Feb '05

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/06/tories_id_flip/print.html> The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT The Register ; Internet and Law ; Digital Rights/Digital Wrongs ; Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/06/tories_id_flip/ Tory party set to withdraw ID scheme support By John Lettice (john.lettice at theregister.co.uk) Published Sunday 6th February 2005 12:10 GMT The Tory Party is to withdraw support for the UK's identity card scheme, following the Government's failure to deal with the 'five tests' (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/14/tory_id_support/) the Tories put forward as a condition of their support. Tory leader Michael Howard personally favours ID cards, but substantial sections of his party are either sceptical or totally opposed to them. According to a report (http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/02/06/nid06.xml) in today's Sunday Telegraph, short of a face-about by the Government when the House of Commons votes on the bill on Thursday, the Tories will now abstain. This may induce more Tory refuseniks to vote against the scheme, but even if the party line was to oppose rather than abstain, it would still be approved because of Labour's large majority. The Liberal Democrats have opposed the scheme throughout the bill's passage, and Richard Allan MP, who has been arguing the party's case through the Bill's brief committee stage, has moved a number of amendments which he expects to be ignored. Allan predicts that the report stage of the Bill (where the Standing Committee's report back is considered) will take approximately three to four hours, leaving as little as 30 minutes for the Commons to consider the Bill prior to the curtain being brought down (Allan's comments and amendments here (http://www.richardallan.org.uk/index.php?p=311)) The Bill will however be likely to run into stiffer opposition in the House of Lords, where the LibDems have a number of highly competent opponents, and where Tory opponents may view their party's tiptoeing away from support as carte blanche to cause mayhem. . Related Stories: Tory group report attacks ID scheme as a con trick (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/03/peter_lilley_id_report/) Parliamentary report flags ID scheme human rights issues (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/03/id_scheme_echr_concern/) UK gov ready to u-turn on passport-ID card link? (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/19/browne_biometric_passports/) ) Copyright 2005 -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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