- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Kennedy School: Freedom, not wealth, squelches terrorist violence
by R.A. Hettinga 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

Nice to know Camelot High is good for *something*. Cheers, RAH ------- <http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/11.04/05-terror.html> Harvard Gazette: Current Issue: November 04, 2004 Alberto Abadie: 'In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but ... when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism ... but ... also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin.' (Staff photo Jon Chase/Harvard News Office) Freedom squelches terrorist violence KSG associate professor researches freedom-terrorism link By Alvin Powell Harvard News Office A John F. Kennedy School of Government researcher has cast doubt on the widely held belief that terrorism stems from poverty, finding instead that terrorist violence is related to a nation's level of political freedom. Associate Professor of Public Policy Alberto Abadie examined data on terrorism and variables such as wealth, political freedom, geography, and ethnic fractionalization for nations that have been targets of terrorist attacks. Abadie, whose work was published in the Kennedy School's Faculty Research Working Paper Series, included both acts of international and domestic terrorism in his analysis. Though after the 9/11 attacks most of the work in this area has focused on international terrorism, Abadie said terrorism originating within the country where the attacks occur actually makes up the bulk of terrorist acts each year. According to statistics from the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base for 2003, which Abadie cites in his analysis, there were 1,536 reports of domestic terrorism worldwide, compared with just 240 incidents of international terrorism. Before analyzing the data, Abadie believed it was a reasonable assumption that terrorism has its roots in poverty, especially since studies have linked civil war to economic factors. However, once the data was corrected for the influence of other factors studied, Abadie said he found no significant relationship between a nation's wealth and the level of terrorism it experiences. "In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin," Abadie said. Instead, Abadie detected a peculiar relationship between the levels of political freedom a nation affords and the severity of terrorism. Though terrorism declined among nations with high levels of political freedom, it was the intermediate nations that seemed most vulnerable. Like those with much political freedom, nations at the other extreme - with tightly controlled autocratic governments - also experienced low levels of terrorism. Though his study didn't explore the reasons behind the trends he researched, Abadie said it could be that autocratic nations' tight control and repressive practices keep terrorist activities in check, while nations making the transition to more open, democratic governments - such as currently taking place in Iraq and Russia - may be politically unstable, which makes them more vulnerable. "When you go from an autocratic regime and make the transition to democracy, you may expect a temporary increase in terrorism," Abadie said. Abadie's study also found a strong connection in the data between terrorism and geographic factors, such as elevation or tropical weather. "Failure to eradicate terrorism in some areas of the world has often been attributed to geographic barriers, like mountainous terrain in Afghanistan or tropical jungle in Colombia. This study provides empirical evidence of the link between terrorism and geography," Abadie said. In Abadie's opinion, the connection between geography and terrorism is hardly surprising. "Areas of difficult access offer safe haven to terrorist groups, facilitate training, and provide funding through other illegal activities like the production and trafficking of cocaine and opiates," Abadie wrote in the paper. A native of Spain's Basque region, Abadie said he has long been interested in terrorism and related issues. His past research has explored the effect of terrorism on economic activity, using the Basque country as a case study. Abadie is turning his attention to the effect of terrorism on international capital flows. Some analysts have argued that terrorist attacks wouldn't have much of an impact on the economy, since unlike a war's widespread damage, the damage from terrorist attacks tends to be relatively small or confined to a small area. In an era of open international capital markets, however, Abadie said terrorism may have a greater chilling effect than previously thought, since even a low risk of damage from a terrorist attack may be enough to send investors looking elsewhere. -- ----------------- 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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CIA Comic
by Major Variola (ret) 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

At 06:59 PM 11/7/04 -0800, John Young wrote: >Remember the CIA Comic from the late 90s? Told hilarious >inside the agency jokes that made everyone outside the >cocoon blanche and puke, sorry, Bob blew coke through >his nose. Cointelpro If you don't know what it was Then it's still happening Cointelpro http://www.covertcomic.com/CCSchool.htm

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Re: Your source code, for sale
by Tyler Durden 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

Well, I guess once you need a 3rd party for the e$, it's only going to make sense that the issuer offer a "value added" service like you're talking about. A 3rd party verifier is probably going to be too costly. But I'm not 100% convinced that you HAVE TO have a 3rd party verifier, but it's looking like that's what's going to make sense 99% of the time anyway. -TD >From: hal(a)finney.org ("Hal Finney") >To: cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net >Subject: Re: Your source code, for sale >Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 10:51:24 -0800 (PST) > >Ben Laurie writes: > > How do you make the payment already "gone" without using a third party? > >Of course there has to be a third party in the form of the currency >issuer. If it is someone like e-gold, they could do as I suggested and >add a feature where the buyer could transfer funds irrevocably into >an escrow account which would be jointly controlled by the buyer and >the seller. This way the payment is already "gone" from the POV of the >buyer and if the seller completes the transaction, the buyer has less >incentive to cheat him. > >In the case of an ecash mint, a simple method would be for the seller to >give the buyer a proto-coin, that is, the value to be signed at the mint, >but in blinded form. The buyer could take this to the mint and pay to >get it signed. The resulting value is no good to the buyer because he >doesn't know the blinding factors, so from his POV the money (he paid >to get it signed) is already "gone". He can prove to the seller that >he did it by using the Guillou-Quisquater protocol to prove in ZK that >he knows the mint's signature on the value the seller gave him. > >The seller thereby knows that the buyer's costs are sunk, and so the >seller is motivated to complete the transaction. The buyer has nothing >to lose and might as well pay the seller by giving him the signed value >from the mint, which the seller can unblind and (provably, verifiably) >be able to deposit. > >Hal _________________________________________________________________ Dont just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/

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[p2p-hackers] Re: anon-layer comparison (fwd from Euseval@aol.com)
by Eugen Leitl 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

----- Forwarded message from Euseval(a)aol.com -----

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Re: [p2p-hackers] MixMinion vs. onion routing & GNUnet question (fwd from seberino@spawar.navy.mil)
by Eugen Leitl 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

----- Forwarded message from seberino(a)spawar.navy.mil -----

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[ISN] E-gold Tracks Cisco Code Thief
by InfoSec News 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1713878,00.asp By Michael Myser November 5, 2004 The electronic currency site that the Source Code Club said it will use to accept payment for Cisco Systems Inc.'s firewall source code is confident it can track down the perpetrators. Dr. Douglas Jackson, chairman of E-gold Ltd., which runs www.e-gold.com, said the company is already monitoring accounts it believes belong to the Source Code Club, and there has been no activity to date. "We've got a pretty good shot at getting them in our system," said Jackson, adding that the company formally investigates 70 to 80 criminal activities a year and has been able to determine the true identity of users in every case. On Monday, a member of the Source Code Club posted on a Usenet group that the group is selling the PIX 6.3.1 firewall firmware for $24,000, and buyers can purchase anonymously using e-mail, PGP keys and e-gold.com, which doesn't confirm identities of its users. "Bad guys think they can cover their tracks in our system, but they discover otherwise when it comes to an actual investigation," said Jackson. The purpose of the e-gold system, which is based on 1.86 metric tons of gold worth the equivalent of roughly $25 million, is to guarantee immediate payment, avoid market fluctuations and defaults, and ease transactions across borders and currencies. There is no credit line, and payments can only be made if covered by the amount in the account. Like the Federal Reserve, there is a finite value in the system. There are currently 1.5 million accounts at e-gold.com, 175,000 of those Jackson considers "active." To have value, or e-gold, in an account, users must receive a payment in e-gold. Often, new account holders will pay cash to existing account holders in return for e-gold. Or, in the case of SCC, they will receive payment for a service. The only way to cash out of the system is to pay another party for a service or cash trade, which Jackson said creates an increasingly traceable web of activity. He did offer a caveat, however: "There is always the risk that they are clever enough to figure out an angle for offloading their e-gold in a way that leads to a dead end, but that tends to be much more difficult than most bad guys think." This is all assuming the SCC actually receives a payment, or even has the source code in the first place. It's the ultimate buyer bewarethe code could be made up, tampered with or may not exist. And because the transaction through e-gold is instantaneous and guaranteed, there is no way for the buyer to back out. Dave Hawkins, technical support engineer with Radware Inc. in Mahwah, N.J., believes SCC is merely executing a publicity stunt. "If they had such real code, it's more likely they would have sold it in underground forums to legitimate hackers rather than broadcasting the sale on Usenet," he said. "Anyone who did have the actual code would probably keep it secret, examining it to build private exploits. By selling it, it could find its way into the public, and all those juicy vulnerabilities [would] vanish in the next version." "There's really no way to tell if this is legitimate," said Russ Cooper, senior scientist with security firm TruSecure Corp. of Herndon, Va. Cooper, however, believes there may be a market for it nonetheless. By posting publicly, SCC is able to get the attention of criminal entities they otherwise might not reach. "It's advertising from one extortion team to another extortion team," he said. "These DDOS [distributed denial of service] extortionists, who are trying to get betting sites no doubt would like to have more ways to do that." _________________________________________ Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable - http://www.osvdb.org/ --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- 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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[ISN] E-gold Tracks Cisco Code Thief
by InfoSec News 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1713878,00.asp By Michael Myser November 5, 2004 The electronic currency site that the Source Code Club said it will use to accept payment for Cisco Systems Inc.'s firewall source code is confident it can track down the perpetrators. Dr. Douglas Jackson, chairman of E-gold Ltd., which runs www.e-gold.com, said the company is already monitoring accounts it believes belong to the Source Code Club, and there has been no activity to date. "We've got a pretty good shot at getting them in our system," said Jackson, adding that the company formally investigates 70 to 80 criminal activities a year and has been able to determine the true identity of users in every case. On Monday, a member of the Source Code Club posted on a Usenet group that the group is selling the PIX 6.3.1 firewall firmware for $24,000, and buyers can purchase anonymously using e-mail, PGP keys and e-gold.com, which doesn't confirm identities of its users. "Bad guys think they can cover their tracks in our system, but they discover otherwise when it comes to an actual investigation," said Jackson. The purpose of the e-gold system, which is based on 1.86 metric tons of gold worth the equivalent of roughly $25 million, is to guarantee immediate payment, avoid market fluctuations and defaults, and ease transactions across borders and currencies. There is no credit line, and payments can only be made if covered by the amount in the account. Like the Federal Reserve, there is a finite value in the system. There are currently 1.5 million accounts at e-gold.com, 175,000 of those Jackson considers "active." To have value, or e-gold, in an account, users must receive a payment in e-gold. Often, new account holders will pay cash to existing account holders in return for e-gold. Or, in the case of SCC, they will receive payment for a service. The only way to cash out of the system is to pay another party for a service or cash trade, which Jackson said creates an increasingly traceable web of activity. He did offer a caveat, however: "There is always the risk that they are clever enough to figure out an angle for offloading their e-gold in a way that leads to a dead end, but that tends to be much more difficult than most bad guys think." This is all assuming the SCC actually receives a payment, or even has the source code in the first place. It's the ultimate buyer bewarethe code could be made up, tampered with or may not exist. And because the transaction through e-gold is instantaneous and guaranteed, there is no way for the buyer to back out. Dave Hawkins, technical support engineer with Radware Inc. in Mahwah, N.J., believes SCC is merely executing a publicity stunt. "If they had such real code, it's more likely they would have sold it in underground forums to legitimate hackers rather than broadcasting the sale on Usenet," he said. "Anyone who did have the actual code would probably keep it secret, examining it to build private exploits. By selling it, it could find its way into the public, and all those juicy vulnerabilities [would] vanish in the next version." "There's really no way to tell if this is legitimate," said Russ Cooper, senior scientist with security firm TruSecure Corp. of Herndon, Va. Cooper, however, believes there may be a market for it nonetheless. By posting publicly, SCC is able to get the attention of criminal entities they otherwise might not reach. "It's advertising from one extortion team to another extortion team," he said. "These DDOS [distributed denial of service] extortionists, who are trying to get betting sites no doubt would like to have more ways to do that." _________________________________________ Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable - http://www.osvdb.org/ --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- 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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[ISN] Velva Klaessy, government code breaker, dies at 88
by InfoSec News 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

http://www.startribune.com/stories/462/5072390.html Trudi Hahn Star Tribune November 7, 2004 Velva Klaessy, a government cryptanalyst who accomplished some firsts for female code breakers -- with accompanying problems in the male-dominated field -- died Sept. 16 in Golden Valley. She was 88. "She could never talk about it," said her brother Dale Klaessy of Minnetonka. "It was a lonely, lonely job." Born to a farm couple in 1915 in Renwick, Iowa, Klaessy got a scholarship during the Depression to attend what is now Northern Iowa University. With no money to buy clothes, her father bought her 500 baby chicks to raise. When she sold them, she bought fabric and made her wardrobe. She received her degree in math in 1937 and took her first job in a small town dominated by a Protestant congregation. It decreed that the public-school teachers weren't allowed to play cards or go to the movies. After the town protested that she was insulting its sons by dating a young man from a different town, she left at the end of the year. In 1944, she was teaching high school math and science in Cherokee, Iowa, when a government recruiter came to ask if she had any students good in math who might want to join the war effort as a cryptologist in the Army Signal Corps. Her best students were all headed for college, so she didn't want to recommend them, but she took the job herself. After World War II she stayed in the field as the Armed Forces Security Agency and the National Security Agency (NSA) were formed. Although much of her work remains classified, information from the National Cryptologic Museum of the NSA, based at Fort Meade, Md., states that she was a member for many years of the highly respected Technical Consultants group, which assisted other analytic offices with their most difficult problems. In the summer of 1953, she and a male officer were posted temporarily to the Far East to train military personnel. According to oral tradition, the museum said, female NSA employees had never gotten temporary posts in that part of the world. Before she left the consultants group, she was posted temporarily to the United Kingdom. Her British counterpart threw a welcoming party -- in a men's club from which women were barred, her brother said. Female NSA employees battled for recognition at home, too. At one point a supervisor told her that she had earned a promotion but he was giving it to a male co-worker "because he had a family," her brother said. From 1958 to 1967, Klaessy finally received positions of high responsibility in sectors dealing with cutting-edge technology, the museum said, including being named chief in 1964 of the New and Unidentified Signals Division. She returned in 1967 to what is now called the extended enterprise when she was named deputy senior U.S. liaison officer in Ottawa, Canada. In 1970 she was named senior liaison officer in Ottawa, becoming the first woman to hold the senior post anywhere in the world. As senior officer, she represented the U.S. Intelligence Board and the NSA with appropriate organizations in Canada in all matters about signal intelligence and communications security. She returned to Fort Meade in 1975 but retired shortly afterward to care for ill relatives, her brother said. She was found to have Parkinson's disease about 1987 and moved to the Twin Cities to be close to relatives. In addition to her brother Dale, survivors include another brother, Earl of Spencer, Iowa. Services have been held in Iowa. _________________________________________ Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable - http://www.osvdb.org/ --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- 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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[ISN] Velva Klaessy, government code breaker, dies at 88
by InfoSec News 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

http://www.startribune.com/stories/462/5072390.html Trudi Hahn Star Tribune November 7, 2004 Velva Klaessy, a government cryptanalyst who accomplished some firsts for female code breakers -- with accompanying problems in the male-dominated field -- died Sept. 16 in Golden Valley. She was 88. "She could never talk about it," said her brother Dale Klaessy of Minnetonka. "It was a lonely, lonely job." Born to a farm couple in 1915 in Renwick, Iowa, Klaessy got a scholarship during the Depression to attend what is now Northern Iowa University. With no money to buy clothes, her father bought her 500 baby chicks to raise. When she sold them, she bought fabric and made her wardrobe. She received her degree in math in 1937 and took her first job in a small town dominated by a Protestant congregation. It decreed that the public-school teachers weren't allowed to play cards or go to the movies. After the town protested that she was insulting its sons by dating a young man from a different town, she left at the end of the year. In 1944, she was teaching high school math and science in Cherokee, Iowa, when a government recruiter came to ask if she had any students good in math who might want to join the war effort as a cryptologist in the Army Signal Corps. Her best students were all headed for college, so she didn't want to recommend them, but she took the job herself. After World War II she stayed in the field as the Armed Forces Security Agency and the National Security Agency (NSA) were formed. Although much of her work remains classified, information from the National Cryptologic Museum of the NSA, based at Fort Meade, Md., states that she was a member for many years of the highly respected Technical Consultants group, which assisted other analytic offices with their most difficult problems. In the summer of 1953, she and a male officer were posted temporarily to the Far East to train military personnel. According to oral tradition, the museum said, female NSA employees had never gotten temporary posts in that part of the world. Before she left the consultants group, she was posted temporarily to the United Kingdom. Her British counterpart threw a welcoming party -- in a men's club from which women were barred, her brother said. Female NSA employees battled for recognition at home, too. At one point a supervisor told her that she had earned a promotion but he was giving it to a male co-worker "because he had a family," her brother said. From 1958 to 1967, Klaessy finally received positions of high responsibility in sectors dealing with cutting-edge technology, the museum said, including being named chief in 1964 of the New and Unidentified Signals Division. She returned in 1967 to what is now called the extended enterprise when she was named deputy senior U.S. liaison officer in Ottawa, Canada. In 1970 she was named senior liaison officer in Ottawa, becoming the first woman to hold the senior post anywhere in the world. As senior officer, she represented the U.S. Intelligence Board and the NSA with appropriate organizations in Canada in all matters about signal intelligence and communications security. She returned to Fort Meade in 1975 but retired shortly afterward to care for ill relatives, her brother said. She was found to have Parkinson's disease about 1987 and moved to the Twin Cities to be close to relatives. In addition to her brother Dale, survivors include another brother, Earl of Spencer, Iowa. Services have been held in Iowa. _________________________________________ Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable - http://www.osvdb.org/ --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- 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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[p2p-hackers] Anti-censorship Proxy Networks (without the HTML this time - sorry!) (fwd from paul@paulbaranowski.org)
by Eugen Leitl 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

----- Forwarded message from Paul Baranowski <paul(a)paulbaranowski.org> -----

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