- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

dockmaster addresses
by TCJones＠DOCKMASTER.NCSC.MIL 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Cypherpunks: I note that at least one of you (who won't say who he is) wondered about communications from this address. This address has one very appealing feature to me, it is company independant; that is, if I should move around, I get to keep the address. I started this before the acm begain their redirection effort, so now if you wish to reach me, you can email to peace at acm.org. That does sound much better doesn't it? I must echo some other sentiments that I have heard from others around here .. an issue that gets lost a lot on the majority of internet lists (including PEM-DEV) where company affiliation carries a very large amount of baggage. Namely I am who I am, and that's all that I am. I'm ..Peace ..Tom

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Re: Clipper Death Threat
by LYLE, DAVID R. 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-->David Lyle writes: --> -->> -->The Supreme Court disagrees with David in cases ranging from -->> -->NAACP v. Alabama to Griswold v. Connecticut. -->> --> -->> -->> Perhaps so, but the Supreme Court saying something does not a "right" make. --> -->Sure it does. Because the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution in a -->way that's binding on all American government. --> -->Take voting for example. The Constitution doesn't mention your right -->to vote. The Supreme Court says your right to vote is implied by the -->Constitution. Now, are you ready to assert that the Supreme Court is wrong -->about this? --> -->I thought not. --> --> Actually, voting is not a "right" as such. It can be revoked by the government, and is revoked for all convicted felons. -->--Mike --> --> --> -->

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List of mail -> news gateways?
by danisch＠ira.uka.de 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, is there anywhere a list of hosts which allow to post news by sending mail? I am looking for such hosts which have the german (.de) newsgroups. Thanks a lot Hadmut

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I have FOIA'd the Clipper Key Escrow databases
by Alan (Miburi-san) Wexelblat 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I second Tim's sentiment that this is a *wonderful* move on John's part. Can you also FOIA the "family" keys? Or are they likely to be part of this database? --Alan Wexelblat, Reality Hacker, Author, and Cyberspace Bard Media Lab - Advanced Human Interface Group wex(a)media.mit.edu Voice: 617-258-9168 Page: 617-945-1842 na53607(a)anon.penet.fi We are Chaos Boys. We are coming to a paradigm near you.

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Clipper FOIA ! :-)
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Very nice. Another interesting FOIA victim would be the NSA - while the designs for the stuff are presumably classified, they may not have thought to classify the rules for accessing the data, or the plans for loading keys onto chips (which they had given Dorothy Denning to announce but have since said the design will be different.) The design of the "black box" for law-enforcement agency use, except for the skipjack and maybe LCM-1 portions, may also be unclassified; if not, then the number of them made, plans/schedule for making them, cost, plans for distributing, etc. may be FOIA-able. Bill

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what is a right?
by Carl Ellison 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

lyled(a)pentagon-emh9.army.mil writes: > > >Good question... what exactly is a "right"? To me, a right is something >that cannot be removed from any citizen. Life can be removed so there must be no rights because I can't imagine anything more irremovable from me than my own life. Actually, crypto is nearly that irremovable. The history of crypto is of spontaneous invention by human beings whenever they feel their privacy threatened. > I would like to see privacy as a >right. However, at what point do you draw the line? When does privacy >interfere with someone else's rights? Not anywhere I can think of -- except: there's always my mother's favorite one liner: "Officer, officer, arrest that man: he's whistling a dirty song." Along those lines, I took a massage class once and my boss at the time was a good, faithful church-going repressed citizen who heard what I was doing and apparently started fantasizing about the orgies we were having in massage class, but of course he was too embarrassed to actually ask me for details. I suppose my privacy interfered with his right to peace of mind. >Freedom of speech has never been a right. A lot of people think it is. But >go out on a street corner and try to incite a riot. See what happens. Or >threaten someone. Or commit treason. Speech is not a right. Ah...but private speech can not incite crowds to riot, by definition. As long as it's private, it can't be "fire" in a crowded theater. It can't be peddling porno. It's private while all those other actions are offensive because they're not private. - Carl Ellison cme(a)sw.stratus.com RIPEM MD5OfPublicKey: 39D9860686A9F075A9A83D49589C677A PGP 2.4 Key fingerprint = E0 41 4C 79 B5 AF 36 75 02 17 BC 1A 57 38 64 78

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Re: Pseudonyms and Reputations
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Blanc Weber <blancw(a)microsoft.com> > I'm sure I don't understand, said Alice in Wonderland: cryptology is > to create anonymity sufficient to prevent the identification of a > person; however, it is desireable to have a method/means of verifying > identity such that in games or digicash or whatnot, someone cannot take > advantage of that ability to obfuscate precise references to themselves. > > How could these two opposing needs be simultaneously satisfied? It > sounds like a self-defeating proposition. > > Blanc You don't try to satisfy these simultaneously. Rather, one or the other goal is achieved by the participants voluntarily participating in a protocol. In some contexts, absolute anonymity is desired and achieved. In others, the participants agree to some restrictions on their anonymity in order to allow various kinds of agreements. I may not be willing to loan you money if you are totally anonymous; on the other hand, I might be able to loan it to you if your anonymity would be broken only if you didn't pay it back, for example. If you didn't want to take the chance on breaking your anony- mity, you wouldn't have to. You would just choose not to play my game. The point of a lot of this work with pseudonyms and credentials and such is to create a lot of different possible options along the scale between perfect anonymity and perfect identification. That way people will be able to trade off their various requirements and come as close as possible to their ideal position. Hal

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Re: Zero Knowledge, Hamiltonian Cycles, and Passwords
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. May) > And yet suppose Alice shows you one. In a textbook, for example. How > did she "find" it? She likely didn't. Rather, she took 50 nodes, drew > a path visiting each node once, stored this as her 'Hamiltonian cycle' > and then proceeded to draw in 50 or 70 or whatever "other links," > which are "ringers," as it were (that is, they are never part of the > Hamiltonian she "constructed"). > > The resulting complete graph--50 nodes with maybe 100 or 500 or whatever > links--only she knows a valid Hamiltonian cycle for (there may be > others, which neither she nor anyone else will ever find). I think something like this may be the idea behind "obfuscated computing," which Mike Duvos was writing about here a little while back. The idea is that you do this trick not just with a graph, but with a boolean circuit composed of and, or, not gates, etc. Take your algorithm and express it as such a circuit, then obfuscate it by drawing in extra gates, connections, etc. The resulting circuit has your original circuit embedded in it, but figuring out what the total circuit does can be computationally intractable. Someone could build or emulate this circuit and get a result, but they would not be able to figure out exactly what formula they were computing. I'm not 100% certain that this technique is used, but Tim's posting reminded me that I had read something about this several years ago, and this is how I remember it. Hal

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Re: bumperstickers
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> They can have my crypto when they pry it from my cold, dead, keyboard. Or when they listen to the electromagnetic emanations from your live non-TEMPEST keyboard :-)

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Re: identity, privacy, & anonymity in cyberspace
by jim＠bilbo.suite.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

tmp(a)netcom.com writes/asks: > yes, remailers solve the problem of trying to post > messages without identity, but are we sure this is a > `problem' we want to `solve'? If this problem is not solved then all posts must contain a reference to the poster's true identity. Is that what you want, tmp(a)netcom.com? How would it be enforced? Government approved public-key pairs issued at birth? Random identity checkpoints on the Infobahn? A ban on all un-approved cryptography? Peer pressure? > hal argues below that there is `no line dividing the clean > from the unclean' (real name vs. pseudonymous vs. > anonymous etc.). to the contrary it seems to me to be the > case that either `i know who you are' or i don't. what does > it mean for me to `know who you are'? i admit there is no > basic definition, but it does seem to me that should not > prevent us from trying to find one. Instead of asking "who are you?", ask "what are you like?". I don't usually need to know who you are, but in certain contexts it is important to know what you are like. Further, I don't need to know what you are like in all contexts. Identity-based systems approach the "what are you like" question by demanding to know "who you are", and then determining "what you are like" by accessing various and sundry databases. These various and sundry databases are rapidly condensing into a few logical mega-databases. The problem with identity-based systems in which everyone has only a single identity is that it soon becomes very easy for someone to learn more about you than is necessary or desirable. Cross-referencing is the root of all evil! :-) I think much of the technology advocated on this mailing list can enable people to answer the important "what are you like" questions without creating systems that can also be used to pry into your entire life history. > the important goal is `defining what privacy really > means' I agree it is an important goal. > and cypherpunks seem to take the position, `it > means that nobody knows anything about me'. I disagree. I think cypherpunks want to retain (or re-acquire) the ability to control who knows what about them and when and under what contexts. This is a bit different from "nobody knows anything about me". However, I can't speak for all cypherpunks. > our society simply cannot function under this constraint. If by "our society" you mean the society in which we currently live, I'd have to agree. That does *not* mean I believe all possible societies become impossible under this constraint. Actually, I believe "under this constraint" is a strawman (see previous paragraph). > if you continue to insist that `nobody should know who i > am' i fear you will be bypassed by more sophisticated [?] > groups that have a less polarized view of issues of > identity and privacy. and it will ultimately be the least > controversial proposals that will shape the future we > live in. Being a pessimist, I'll have to agree with you here, although for slightly different reasons. I believe that as long as there are income and property taxes, the government will find ways to justify prying into our personal lives. Jim_Miller(a)suite.com

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