- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Big Brother vs. Cypherpunks
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Time, October 14, 1996, p. 78. The Netly News Joshua Quittner Big Brother vs. Cypherpunks For more than three years, the White House and the U.S. computer industry have sat locked, eyeball to eyeball, in a seemingly intractable face-off over who will control the secret codes that protect our most sensitive communications. The government claimed to be working to protect us from nuke-carrying terrorists; the computer industry said it was championing the individual's right to privacy. Neither was telling the whole truth. Last week, in a concession to Silicon Valley, the Administration blinked -- or perhaps it merely winked. Fittingly, in the arcane world of code making and breaking, it's difficult to ferret out who's doing what to whom. And why. A few things are incontrovertible. Vice President Al Gore announced the new encryption initiative at midweek, timed to coincide with support from an alliance of high-tech businesses that included such hardware heavyweights as IBM, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. However, most of the big software makers -- and every civil liberties group -- still opposed it. At the core of the initiative is a new code-making scheme known as "key recovery." Here at last, the government and its supporters claimed, was a way to get around the more noxious aspects of the reviled Clipper chip, the Administration's first doomed attempt to balance the industry's call for stronger encryption with law enforcement's need to surveil our shadier citizens. Clipper, as proposed, would use a powerful encryption formula to encode communications sent over telephones and computer networks but would require that a "back door" key be built into each chip that would give police -- where warranted, of course -- a means to eavesdrop. Nobody -- especially foreign companies -- liked the idea of the U.S. and its agents holding those keys. The new key-recovery proposal tries to get around that objection by chopping the keys into several pieces and storing them with "trusted agents" of the user's choosing. Some nice Swiss banks, perhaps. But the Administration's plan still falls short of what civil libertarians, and especially a vocal group of cryptoextremists who call themselves cypherpunks, say they need: encryption powerful enough to give back to the citizenry the right to absolute privacy, which we have lost in the information age. According to the cypherpunks, the so-called 56-bit code the Administration has okayed for export can be cracked by the National Security Agency's supercomputers in a matter of hours. Are they right? It's hard to know whom to believe in this cloak-and-dagger debate. Civil libertarians tend to gloss over the fact that the world is full of bad people with crimes to hide. The software industry -- which makes 48% of its profit overseas -- is clearly less concerned with privacy than with losing foreign sales. And it may be no accident that the Administration chose to start making concessions the same week an influential software CEO -- Netscape's Jim Barksdale -- excoriated Clinton's cryptopolicy and endorsed Bob Dole. The issue is too complex -- and too important -- for political gamesmanship. It will never get sorted out until somebody starts playing it straight. ----- Read the Netly News daily at netlynews.com on the World Wide Web [End] Thanks to JQ.

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challenging wiretap law
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

alright, let me try to rephrase this. if you feel the urge to flame me over a simple post, without actually posting anything substantial, please avoid it. I was trying to get at something in a previous post. I regularly see cpunks here scheming about how to attack things they don't like using court decisions. I think it's a great way to try to move the law in a favorable direction I see Bernstein/Junger as really embodying cpunk guerilla-like tactics in trying to take on the status quo govt using the legal system. of course this is not cheap, but EFF is helping out at least, and PRZ proves the public is generally willing to put its money where its mouth is on these issues. there's also a lot of scheming over patent laws going on among cylink, RSA data securities, etc. the point is that I don't recall seeing this same kind of scheming against wiretap rules here; if it was here then forgive me, I missed it. for anyone who would like to, I'd be very interested in a brief discussion over wiretap laws and which ones have gone to the supreme court in court challenges. here's my curiosity: if you were a lawyer, or actually are one, how would you go about challenging the legitimacy of wiretaps, in the same spirit in which ITAR is being challenged? note that even if there are court precedents at "lower" courts, this does not preclude strategizing to try to take the cases to the supreme court. I am not asking anyone to do my "homework" for me. I'm merely proposing that this might be a neat exercise for the collective cypherpunk brain. of course it won't get far if people rant about it, but merely discussing existing case law would make a good and interesting topic imho. if there are people out there who are familiar with it and would like to discuss it, and can stand Unicorn ranting at you no matter what you say, please do-- it would be signal in the noise around here. challenging these laws in the weak spots could be a very devastating means of defying law enforcement claims that they only want to "preserve the status quo" and want "no new authorities to wiretap". could wiretapping be "nipped in the bud" somehow? there is tremendous economic incentive for laywers to challenge things like patents etc, but this same incentive doesn't seem to exist in challenging wiretap rules. hence I wonder if they have been challenged to the same extent that other court decisions have been. of course, there are areas where wiretaps have been challenged and the challenges failed. but that doesn't mean there aren't weak spots that might exist somewhere that could "crack" it. it's like hacking, a bit, in this way, hence why I think it would make a good topic for discussion. or would the lawyers assert there are no weak spots in the wiretap laws? that the issue has been fleshed out as far as it will ever be in courts? again, what I am trying to suggest is that if there was a "new angle of attack" not used in any previous wiretap cases, it's highly relevant. again, merely because certain cases approved wiretapping does not necessarily mean all future decisions will support it.

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Re: Can somebody unsubscribe cyberpromo from CP?
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:43 PM 10/7/96 -0400, Simon Spero wrote: >On Mon, 7 Oct 1996, Timothy C. May wrote: > >> At 10:23 AM -0800 10/7/96, jim bell wrote: >> >I think somebody subscribed that Cyberpromo organization to the Cypherpunks >> >list. It needs to be unsubscribed... >> >> "I have a solution." >> > >[Looks through pockets] - 7 Zlotys, 1.5 DM, and 1.20 GBP says October >21st, in the library, bludgeoning to death with 20lbs of junk mail Your code name is "Col. Mustard." Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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What's the deal with EUB.com?
by Black Unicorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There are two servers that EUB.com uses. 1> That provides information and blurbs and pretty pictures. This is near D.C. 2> That provides secure connections to the bank for account information and transactions. This is in the islands. Again, this was adopted to get around expensive bandwidth uses by idle and casual browsers. I believe, though I am not sure, that I mentioned this when EUB first "went net." -- I hate lightning - finger for public key - Vote Monarchist unicorn(a)schloss.li

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FW: Returned mail: User Unknown
by Butler, Scott 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> >>The address you mailed to is no longer valid. >>This is probably because the user in question was an >>old Open Net subscriber. Open Net is NO LONGER an ISP, >>and has not been since May 1996. > >>We have no redirection address for that user. Please >>remove them from any mailing lists you might have. > >>This response was generated automatically. > Can whoever is responsible for this please........STOP IT ! Thanx ScOtT >;-D

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Re: Put up or shut up! (fwd)
by William Knowles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Mon, 7 Oct 1996, Mr Unicorn replies to what snow wrote: > > Mr. Unicorn wrote: > > > I suggest that you just walk into a bank in Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, > > > perhaps in Switzerland and compare the experience to doing the same in the > > > United States. It may be a bother to get to a real bank, but the > > > difference in service, attitude, and skill can be substantial. > > > You get what you pay for in sweat too. > > > > Yeah, but the walk to the bank in Liechtenstein is a real bitch in > > winter. > > You get what you pay for. I thought I said that? > Many banks open accounts by mail. I tend to recommend against this > because I think it's important to face to face with your bankers. Being that I totally agree that you get what you pay for in banking, and have had the opportunity of using a small private bank for business some time ago. What would be your list of best offshore banks to do business with, Keeping in mind the ease of opening an account but still getting top notch service? Bank of Ireland??? Cheers! William Knowles erehwon(a)c2.net -- William Knowles <erehwon(a)c2.net> PGP mail welcome & prefered / KeyID 1024/2C34BCF9 PGP Fingerprint 55 0C 78 3C C9 C4 44 DE 5A 3C B4 60 9C 00 FB BD Finger for public key -- Vote Harry Browne for President -- http://www.HarryBrowne96.org

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Re: Voice Stress Analysis of Debates? [NOISE]
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As far as the technical issue, can you use digital signal processing to insert/delete the features that the VSE is looking for? Sure, if you know what the VSE product is looking for. (And you can crank up the bass while you're at it.) Doesn't matter if you call it microtremors, it's a characteristic well-defined enough that an $89.95 retail hardware device can detect, so it's a characteristic you've got a not-terribly-complex model for. If all the popular VSEs use the same algorithm, or if you know what brand the TV Networks were convinced to use, you're fine. (If you don't know, that makes it tougher, but you can experiment....) Or you can distribute a cheap software-based VSE program, with hooks that let you feed it "Truth" or "Lying" overrides :-) At 11:28 AM 10/7/96 -0800, jim bell <jimbell(a)pacifier.com> wrote: >I think it's particularly revealing that the TV networks don't try to use >it. They're supposed to be looking for an edge, something to make the news >seem more interesting. The political establishment would see the >publicizing of this as going beyond an unwritten limitation on the media. I've never seen the TV networks use handwriting analysis to spice up their news reporting either, and the only "news" shows I've only seen mention people's astrological signs were the Entertainment-Tonight types. (I'd rate VSE as slightly more scientific than graphology, and both of them somewhat above palm-reading and astrology, and a bit below polygraphs.*) They get more market asking what kind of underwear the candidates wear. Besides, what would they do with it - subtitles "He's Lying" or "He Seems To _Believe_ This Nonsense?" or "He Doesn't Really Care What The Teleprompter's Telling Him To Say"? You'd need to leave at least one of them on during the whole Bipartisan Establishment Debate**, and you don't need any piece of hokey machinery to If they actually _wanted_ to make the shows more interesting, the networks could have reporters ask the candidates real questions. But they wouldn't get invited back next election.... And if they ask questions like "How could you possibly expect us to believe _that_, Mr. President?"***, they'd get thrown out immediately. [*VSE and Graphology have some chance of a causal basis, though polygraphs have the extra advantage that the people administering them get to intimidate the victim while doing the test, which is more likely to get results than running VSE on a speech somebody's practiced and is reading off a teleprompter, even if interpretation of both weren't pretty much subjective anyway.] [**And they'd have to interlace the subtitles with the fnords.] [***Did you ever notice how much George Bush _sneered_ when he was lying? Clinton's polite enough to smile when he's talking.] # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk Imagine if three million people voted for somebody they _knew_, and the politicians had to count them all.

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(fwd) RSA on GAK
by nobody＠cypherpunks.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

RSA Optimistic on User Benefits of Administration's Recent Key Recovery Initiative Announcement; Further policy change required for U.S. vendors to be competitive worldwide Source: Business Wire REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE) via Individual Inc. -- RSA Data Security Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Security Dynamics Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:SDTI), issued the following comments on the administration's recent announcement of a Key Recovery Initiative: The administration's proposed Key Recovery Initiative is a positive step towards meeting the needs of individuals and organizations that buy and use products which utilize encryption. However, the proposal leaves significant competitive issues unresolved for suppliers who compete overseas. Modern encryption and authentication technologies are crucial to the growth of electronic commerce and the health of the future global electronic economy. The continued leadership of American computer and software firms in the world market depends on their ability to provide competitive solutions for consumers and businesses around the world. These consumers and businesses depend increasingly on encryption and authentication technologies -- such as those developed at RSA -- to provide solutions that protect the privacy of consumer purchases, personal medical information, sensitive corporate data, and electronic commerce and funds transfers as they travel over the global Internet. U.S. government agencies, however, have long insisted that they must have potential access to all encrypted information for law enforcement purposes, and have advanced several proposals toward those ends. To date, these proposals have met with little support from the user and vendor communities due to concerns about privacy and competitiveness. This new proposal from the administration, however, is a move in the right direction for users. One positive step is that the administration has indicated, for the first time in over six years of discussion, that it will lift all key size restrictions on the export of products which utilize cryptography, provided that manufacturers provide a viable means of key recovery for legitimate government access. In addition, under the administration's proposal, industry, not government, will develop and propose the actual key recovery mechanisms. This will result in more effective solutions to managing and recovering keys. Finally, the proposal addresses the concerns of users that any third party designated to hold user keys might improperly disclose those keys, thereby compromising a user's right to privacy. The administration has agreed that under certain circumstances, organizations would be allowed to "self-escrow" their own encryption keys. RSA is confident that industry can develop and gain approval for several excellent key recovery mechanisms that would be acceptable to government concerns. In fact, RSA has been a pioneer in this field with our RSA Emergency Access technology in its award-winning RSA SecurPC product. In the case of SecurPC, companies using the product can use Emergency Access keys with RSA's unique secret-splitting technology to gain access to critical information in the event of an emergency. The recently announced Key Recovery Alliance, of which RSA is a part, is chartered to provide a flexible, workable solution for users working within the government's proposed key recovery framework. Members of the group are working on technology which will allow users to maintain the privacy of their keys while allowing legitimate business or law enforcement authorities to recover keys when appropriate. It will also address challenges that arise when a user must comply with the differing encryption policies in countries around the world. The technology could allow products to provide the flexibility a user needs to take full advantage of the maximum privacy allowed in their locality, while maintaining interoperability and information exchange with other users regardless of location. It is not clear, however, to what extent the administration's proposal provides relief to U.S. software and hardware companies who must compete with foreign suppliers. These foreign suppliers, not subject to U.S. law, can provide strong, non-key-recovery encryption in their products. Today, most major computer and software solutions firms derive significant revenues from outside the United States. The government's proposal, while satisfying the U.S. government's needs, does little to enhance the competitiveness of American products overseas. Robust encryption products are already available from many overseas suppliers, and U.S. market share in encryption-enabled products is under siege. Under this proposal, it appears that U.S. companies will still be prohibited from selling non-key-recovery encryption solutions in overseas markets, creating a significant barrier to their competitiveness. RSA looks forward to additional announcements by the administration that specifically address this issue and provide competitive relief for the U.S. computer software and hardware industries. RSA Data Security Inc. RSA Data Security Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Security Dynamics Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:SDTI), is the world's brand name for cryptography, with more than 75 million copies of RSA encryption and authentication technologies installed and in use worldwide. RSA technologies are part of existing and proposed standards for the Internet and World Wide Web, ITU, ISO, ANSI, IEEE, and business, financial and electronic commerce networks around the globe. The company develops and markets platform-independent developer's kits and end-user products and provides comprehensive cryptographic consulting services. Founded in 1982 by the inventors of the RSA Public Key Cryptosystem, the company is headquartered in Redwood City. Note to Editors: RSA Emergency Access, RSA SecurPC, BSAFE and TIPEM are trademarks of RSA Data Security Inc. All other product and brand names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. CONTACT: For RSA Data Security Inc. | Patrick Corman, 415/326-9648 | corman(a)cerfnet.com [10-04-96 at 08:17 EDT, Business Wire] Contact: Business Wire

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ABC Newz on Dole Homepage
by Censored Girls Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

ABC Newz has run the crack of the dolekemp page. However, even they have the story wrong, too! No wonder crypto stories are sometimes better off not reported. CarolAnne Member Internet Society - Certified BETSI Programmer - Webmistress *********************************************************************** Carol Anne Braddock (cab8) carolann(a)censored.org 206.42.112.96 My Homepage The Cyberdoc *********************************************************************** ------------------ PGP.ZIP Part [017/713] ------------------- M8H,),S$8G>&.WP(8IRA`-M['+`Q%&_C"">5-F%LX@<_Q$;*P'',Q$Z/AA[8M MF=O0H+*%(-S%&>S%+FS&<LS%3(Q&#W1"<]2%`H^;,]^1C$'HBN8PX$4SYAU^ MPGD<Q0ZLA0D+,`MCT!LA**4M[-JPAK9F?40!AJ,CW"'%DR#:'9?Q)3[%<DQ` ------------------------------------------------------------- for next chunk to export --> http://dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/export/

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Global online intellectual property conf at American Univ
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 21:05:09 -0700 (PDT) From: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> To: fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu Subject: Global online intellectual property conf at American Univ Folks in the DC area might want to stop by this free conference on intellectual property next week at American University. I'll be giving the closing remarks; Mike Nelson from the White House will be presenting the opening statement. -Declan ---------- Forwarded message ---------- All who are interested are invited to attend a conference . . . The 1996 Conference of American University's Global Intellectual Property Project OWNERSHIP ON-LINE: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IMPLICATIONS OF THE GLOBAL INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE October 16, 1996 1:00-6:00 pm Husghes formal Lounge American University 4400 Massachusetts Ave., NW Washington, DC 20016-8071 Free and Open to the Public Opening Session: Michael R. Nelson Special Assistant for Information Technology White House Office of Science and Technology Panel 1: Where are we and how did we get here? Panel 2: Where are we going? Closing Session: Declan McCullagh, HotWired Participants Include: David Holtzman, IBM's inforMarket Theodore Henke, Atlantic Mutual Insurance Companies Adam Eisgrau, American Library Association Elizabeth Blumenfeld, America On-Line Chris Meyer, Meyer and Klipper (formerly of the Patent and Trademark Office) Carsten Fink, World Bank Edward Comor, American University James Boyle, American University Peter Jaszi, American University Edward Malloy, Department of State Manuel Gameros, Mexican Finance Ministry Organizing Committee: Erran Carmel, American University Carole Ganz-Brown, American University and National Science Foundation Renee Marlin-Bennett, American University Conference Sponsors: American University Atlantic Mutual Companies Visit our Website, under construction, but with updated information, at: http://gurukul.ucc.american.edu/MOGIT/glipp96.htm or call: 202-885-1843

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