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Despite an Act of Leniency, China Has Its Eye on the Web
by R. A. Hettinga 27 Jun '04

27 Jun '04

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/international/asia/27chin.html?th=&pagewa…> The New York Times June 27, 2004 Despite an Act of Leniency, China Has Its Eye on the Web By HOWARD W. FRENCH HANGHAI, June 26 - A Chinese court recently announced that an Internet democracy advocate charged with subversion would get a suspended sentence instead of a long prison term, with the case drawing criticism from human rights groups and serving as a rallying cry for this country's growing number of online commentators. Both in China and abroad, some commentators quickly applauded what seemed like an official show of leniency toward the accused man, Du Daobin, a prolific author of online essays on issues of democracy and free speech. But many among China's rapidly growing group of Internet commentators are warning that what appears to be government magnanimity in this high-profile case conceals a quiet but concerted push to tighten controls of the Internet and surveillance of its users even though China's restrictions on the medium are already among the broadest and most invasive anywhere. Internet cafe users in China have long been subject to an extraordinary range of controls. They include cameras placed discreetly throughout the establishments to monitor and identify users and Web masters, and Internet cafe managers who keep an eye on user activity, whether electronically or by patrolling the premises. The average Internet user, meanwhile, neither sees nor, in many cases, suspects the activities of a force widely estimated to number as many as 30,000 Internet police officers. Experts on China's Internet say the officers are constantly engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with equally determined Web surfers, blocking access to sites that the government considers politically offensive, monitoring users who visit other politically sensitive sites and killing off discussion threads on Internet bulletin boards. The Chinese government has also established a Web site where people are able to report fellow Web users for suspicious or provocative behavior. Web surfers who try to visit sites being blocked by the government receive messages announcing a page is no longer accessible, or their computer screen may simply go blank, or they may be redirected to unrelated sites. Similarly, people who participate in Web-based discussions on certain subjects may be warned that in order to log on to a discussion group, real names must be used, along with genuine e-mail addresses and even telephone numbers. As its first line of defense against what in another era China's Communist leadership might have called ideological pollution, Beijing controls the Internet by insisting that all Web traffic pass through government-controlled servers. Now, coming on top of these measures, which are all deployed at the national level, China's provincial governments are getting into the act, introducing regulations of their own that critics say severely impinge on privacy and freedom of speech. In recent weeks, Shanghai, China's largest and most Internet-connected city, has quietly introduced a series of controls, arguably the country's most far-reaching yet, and critics fear, a model eventually to be used nationwide. Described by city officials as a measure intended to combat pornography and to bar entry for minors to Internet bars, the Shanghai regulations require customers to use swipe cards that would allow administrators or others to record their national identity numbers and track their Internet use. The regulations have kicked up little public debate, in part because they have received little publicity here during the planning stage. But fierce protests have appeared online, where many active Internet users are interpreting the new regulations as an extension of the police state. "We will hold press conferences during each step of the implementation, and the public can express their own opinions and the media could discuss and question it,'' said an official with the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture, Radio, Film and Television, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "And we have made a priority of making sure that our actions are not against the law. That's our bottom line.'' Asked if the privacy of Internet users could be infringed, the official said that the Shanghai government had noted the issue, but added that "Internet bars are public areas, and some experts say that what one says in a public area should not be considered private.'' Speaking in an interview, one online commentator rejected out of hand the idea that invasive Internet controls had any legitimacy. "I can see that China's progress in the area of law is going very slowly,'' said Su Zhenghua, an economist who frequently posts his thoughts online. "This is a situation that I really must regret, and I hope the Chinese government will follow the spirit of the Constitution and protect freedom of speech and the individual's right to privacy.'' Some experts on China's Internet censorship say that in releasing Mr. Du recently, the government may have been making a subtle bow to China's own domestic public opinion, as expressed through online communication and debate. International analysts who follow China's Internet scene say that the government has been particularly taken aback by the explosion in a new form of online communication for China - the Weblog, or blog. It started last year with a celebrated case of a young woman who made a running online commentary about her own sex life, and now hundreds of thousands of people take enthusiastically to this form. Indeed, Mr. Du himself earned the government's wrath in this way when he wrote to condemn the jailing last year of another well-known Web commentator, Liu Di, whose online moniker was "stainless steel mouse.'' In turn, at least 1,000 people signed a petition in support of Mr. Du that urged the government to stop using antisubversion laws to hinder free speech. According to the analysts, the country's censors, always eager to contain waves of public opinion before they get out of hand, particularly in matters of politics, have become alarmed that despite their intense efforts, Internet technology is quickly making free expression far harder to control. "With the Du case, the government is saying, 'Look, our actions may be nicer than in the past, but fundamentally, the judgment of the crime is unchanged, so don't be fooled, we are also willing to be harsh,' '' said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley. "No matter how hard they try, though, it is a fact that the volume of online information is increasing vastly, and there's nothing the government can do about that. You can monitor hundreds of bulletin boards, but controlling hundreds of thousands of bloggers is very different.'' -- ----------------- 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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[IP] NYTimes.com Article: In an Age of Terror, Safety Is Relative (fwd from dave@farber.net)
by Eugen Leitl 27 Jun '04

27 Jun '04

----- Forwarded message from David Farber <dave(a)farber.net> -----

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Re: For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi
by Major Variola (ret) 27 Jun '04

27 Jun '04

At 12:01 AM 6/27/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: >Interestingly, some [early] models had external antenna jacks built in to >them. Again I am a few Moore's generations behind. (Does that make me a semi-Amish atheist? Or a reformed Luddite?) Where I vacation sometimes, I would need a metallized umbrella (or better) and tripod to find a cell basestation. And that rules out valleys leaving ridges, although a few hundred feet of RF cable isn't so expensive. I am aware of the need for non-fixed antennae for 802.11blah fun; I did not realize that modern cells don't have RF connectors. I have also heard of folks war-flying with a simple (tilted) dipole thus pointing part of the donut-shaped receptive region (orthogonal to the dipole) at the ground. >> Go for the head shot, they're wearing body armor > >If at close range, it is far easier to simply throw water at them prior to >firing. For one, the water acts as apowerful lubricant, effectively >removing the armor, huh? Wet kevlar is still strong, no? >and for two, it distracts the hell out of them ;-) The fundamental problem is the head is more agile than the C.G. However if you don't hit a seam, or aren't using something better than a handgun, only a rapid bit of ballistic neurosurgery will disable the target. Best to have enabled the claymores when your cameras notice a change. And as Mr. Burns says, to let the hounds loose. -------- A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government. --George Washington

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Re: For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi
by Major Variola (ret) 27 Jun '04

27 Jun '04

At 11:56 PM 6/26/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: > >Hrmmm... Cell Phone. TEMPEST Case. > >What's wrong with this picture??? 1. You can't receive calls. Only make outgoing, from a location which is known to fascists. 2. Use it for your toll-road-transponder too.

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Instant dissemination of cracks, biz models, etc
by Major Variola (ret) 27 Jun '04

27 Jun '04

At 07:04 AM 6/27/04 +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote: >On Sat, 26 Jun 2004, J.A. Terranson wrote: > >> Yes, I suppose that the more technical amongst us could selctively jam >> only the one signal, however, cellular phones are mighty low power >> devices, and I would not hazard a guess as to whether it would be possible >> not to overpower the wanted signals on something like this. > You still deal with triangulation and phone-tracking sats as a threat model. >> Even if this is doable, it is out of reach of Jane Citizen. > >If a J. Random Hacker with the necessary capabilities is within her reach, >the countermeasure is available to her regardless of her own tech skills. Yes, the internet effect, as described by Schneir amongst others. Cracks spreak instantly. >With continuing outsourcing, there should be enough out of work engineers >available who are sufficiently hungry to risk working for the underground >market. Their *employers* need a viable biz model. Many of us (quasi academics or engineers) forget this. The rest is just earning a living as an engineer building something, ideally something cool and challenging under a reasonable schedule for decent pay. ----------- "Il dulce far niente" The sweetness of doing nothing My unemployment motto -S Schear

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Re: [IP] When police ask your name,
by Major Variola (ret) 27 Jun '04

27 Jun '04

At 05:16 AM 6/22/04 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote: >----- Forwarded message from dave(a)farber.net ----- >The court's 5-4 decision upholds laws in at least 21 states giving police >the right to ask people their name and jail those who don't cooperate. I'm out of it for a few weeks and this is what happens. How many names can a person have? Anyone can change their name any number of times if not for fraudulent purposes. My brother changed his middle name from something normal to Cariboo. My dad's a lawyer so the fees were zero. Can I use Major Variola (ret) as a nym since I use it? Must I spell my last (real) name which is hard to write as its from another language? Can I abbreviate? Can I have a religious exemption (We do not identify our religion to nonbelievers, nor do we speak to government officials, in my faith). Can I use cyrillic or mandarin to write it, a temporary bout of elective mutism? Of course lying to a pig is illegal (but not vice versa) but lying is subject to interpretation. My name is yahway, ie I am. Yours is go away, ie fuck off. Go for the head shot, they're wearing body armor. Suicide by police is a noble cause, if you take one of them out.

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Re: For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi
by Major Variola (ret) 27 Jun '04

27 Jun '04

At 11:53 PM 6/26/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: > >Yes, I suppose that the more technical amongst us could selctively jam >only the one signal, however, cellular phones are mighty low power >devices, They can put half (?) a watt out, some of it absorbed by your brain and hand BTW. and I would not hazard a guess as to whether it would be possible >not to overpower the wanted signals on something like this. Even if this >is doable, it is out of reach of Jane Citizen. Any signal you put out is trackable to you geographically, whether its a cell or GPS frequency. I think the onion-routing phone scheme is best, albeit if they're watching your cellphone that UAV will be Hellfiring in your direction soon enough. Best to be in crowds of innocents in that case, my PSYOP consultants suggest. ------ How many Zionist Hellfires does it take to fry a quadroplegic priest in a wheelchair BTW?

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Re: For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi
by Major Variola (ret) 27 Jun '04

27 Jun '04

At 06:38 AM 6/27/04 +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote: >If the phone is shielded, it can't transmit/receive, which makes it rather >useless. :( When you don't want to use it, why should it not be useless? >There is one potential landmine as well; the inherent ability of any >device containing resonators to behave like a crude RFID tag. I heard >somewhere, and my memory may be failing, that it is possible to irradiate >the phone with the frequency of the cellular band, and it faintly >resonates and returns back its own echo, which has minute variations given >by type, manufacturing tolerances, and possibly age of the phone, giving >it a kind of unique signature. (This could potentially apply also to >radios and transceivers. Does anybody have any idea if it is possible to >do such kind of "active fingerprinting" of rf devices? This way it should >be possible to detect even powered-off devices like hidden transceivers or >body wires; take a transmitter, sweep the spectrum, and watch echoes on >the receiver - there could be peaks on the frequencies of the tuned >circuits inside the examined device.) Your "second order effect" physics is on target. Nonlinear devices generate harmonics when tickled. All devices vary and have characteristic RF signatures. I read something about that recently somewhere, but memory fails. >Question to RF heads here: could it work? I'm not an Elmer but I pretend to be one on the internet.

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Meshing, Onions, and Liars
by Major Variola (ret) 26 Jun '04

26 Jun '04

At 09:25 PM 6/26/04 -0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote: > >I wrote: > It would be hard to verify/test that you had in fact cut the correct >trace, > and it would depend on the phone, and you would void your warrantee. > > Firmware hacks are of course the free man's last refuge. > >Of course disabling your GPS unit will not prevent the fascists from >doing triangulation with signal strength, ie the alternative (and >cheaper >and less precise alternative). That's merely physics and >geometry. To counter that, you need to hack the antennae and and >can only displace yourself a few miles. Ok, so I'm commenting on an errata to my own post. Sosume. What you need is an Onion network linking cells to POTS or even other cells. Ie, you cellcall a number which routes the call to your desired apparent location. So you call the service, say you'd like to appear to be in Moscow, and a real phone in Moscow connects to your endpoint. Phone could be landline or cell; both are geo-tracable. Sorta like bookies in the 70's had POTS phone hacks to bridge endpoints. Which one could use today to mislead caller ID. This is of course vulnerable to eg satellites listening for your cellphone in the first place, so its not Osama level telecom rerouting. But it *would* let you appear to be at the library if you're at Cheech's place, unless there's a sytemwide Fedtap on your cell phone. (Which used to require a real thinking judge to approve, BTW; now thinking has been replaced by mere respiration.) ------- In the non-heterosexual sense, fuck bush.

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Re: For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi
by Major Variola (ret) 26 Jun '04

26 Jun '04

At 02:02 AM 6/27/04 +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote: > >Can it be disabled by hardware hack of the phone, a mikropower jammer, or >using an "unofficial" firmware? It would be hard to verify/test that you had in fact cut the correct trace, and it would depend on the phone, and you would void your warrantee. Firmware hacks are of course the free man's last refuge.

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