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[Fwd: [Spooks] British Telecom-Menwith Hill connection]
by Sunder 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To: Spooks <spooks(a)qth.net> Subject: [Spooks] British Telecom-Menwith Hill connection From: Bob Margolis <rttyman(a)wwa.com> Date: Tue, 06 Oct 1998 23:32:36 -0500 Reply-To: Bob Margolis <rttyman(a)wwa.com> Sender: owner-spooks(a)qth.net BT condemned for listing cables to US sigint station 4 September, 1997 A judge has lambasted BT for revealing detailed information about top secret high capacity cables feeding phone and other messages to and from a Yorkshire monitoring base. BT admitted this week that they have connected three digital optical fibre cables - capable of carrying more than 100,000 telephone calls at once - to the American intelligence base at Menwith Hill, near Harrogate. Menwith Hill is run by the US National Security Agency (NSA), which monitors the world's communication for US intelligence. NSA acknowledges that "the Hill" is the largest electronic monitoring station in the world. Over 1,200 US civilians and servicemen work round the clock at the base, intercepting and analysing communications mainly from Europe, Russia and the Middle East. Much of the information reaching the base comes from spy satellites. The base has 26 large white golfballs or "radomes" for space communications, making it an inescapable landmark in the Yorkshire dales. In a courtroom fiasco this week, British Telecom's solicitors first sent documents and a witness to give details of the cables to York Crown Court, where two women campaigners were appealing against conviction for trespassing at the station. The next day, they sent a second solicitor to attempt to silence their own witness and to withdraw evidence already given. Judge Jonathan Crabtree agreed to grant public interest immunity "BT had no business whatsoever to disclose anything of the kind", he said. He then ordered Mr R.G. Morris, BT's head of emergency planning, not to give any more evidence about the secret cables. After being privately briefed in his chambers by BT's second solicitor, the judge said that it was immaterial if Menwith Hill was spying on British citizens and commercial communications and may have cost British companies in billions of dollars of lost sales. "The national interest of the United Kingdom, even if if is conducted dishonestly, requires this to be kept secret", said Judge Crabtree. "The methods of communicating to and from Menwith Hill, whether military intelligence or commercial spying, is clearly secret information. The governments of the United States and United Kingdom do not want this information to be divulged", he explained. But he said that BT's list of secret cables in and out of Menwith Hill could not be withdrawn from the case. "Half the cat is out of the bag. The contents of the letter are now in public domain. I just don't know what BT think they were doing", he added. According to the letter, the Post Office (now BT) first provided two high capacity "wide bandwidth" circuits to Menwith Hill in 1975. They were connected on a coaxial cable to the BT network at Hunters Stones, a microwave radio station a few miles from the US base. During the 1970s and 1980s, almost all Britain's long-distance telephone calls were carried on the microwave network of which Hunters Stones is part. The existence of the cables connecting the network to Menwith Hill has been known since 1980, but the authorities have always refused to comment. BT now claims that the cables were connected directly to the United States via undersea cable, and did not link to other parts of the British system. The system was upgraded in 1992, says BT, when a new high capacity optical fibre cable was installed. This linked to a different part of the BT network, but was also carried directly to the United States via undersea cable. Since then, BT revealed, the capacity of the system has been trebled by adding two more optical fibre links. These could carry more than 100,000 simultaneous telephone calls. Lawyers for the two women campaigners, Helen John and Anne Lee, say they were astonished by the company's sudden change of heart. They said that the letter giving details of the cables may have been written for PR purposes, and appeared intended to suggest that BT wasn't helping NSA tap telephones. This, BT said, was a "misapprehension which is damaging to this company's reputation". BT staff also hinted that other British communications companies are supplying tapping capacity to the American base. Even as BT's solicitor was seeking to have his evidence prohibited, BT's witness was outside court giving further information to the women's solicitor implying that other British communications companies were also involved in the spying activities at Menwith Hill. "You should ask me about other companies", he said before he was silenced. Tony Benn - who was the Postmaster General at the time cables were first installed connecting Menwith Hill to the British communications network - also gave evidence. He said that although a Cabinet minister and privy councillor, he had been told nothing of the secret arrangements with the Americans. BT were ordered to pay the legal costs caused by their change of heart. The judge accused them of giving away confidential commercial information and national secrets. "If I had a burglar alarm system, I would now think twice about having it operated by BT", he said. --- Submissions should be sent to spooks(a)qth.net To unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe spooks" to majordomo(a)qth.net

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Fwd: Social Security
by Brian B. Riley 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------------- Begin Forwarded Message ---------------- Date: 02/09 10:25 PM Received: 02/09 10:29 PM From: James A Chappelow, chappja(a)mail.auburn.edu Reply-To: Vermont Libertarian, vtlp-list(a)catamount.com To: Multiple recipients of, vtlp-list(a)catamount.com Outside of Birmingham, a kid was arrested Saturday for not giving a cop his Social Security number. The bumper fell off his truck, so he stuck the tag in the rear window; not a rare sight in Alabama. He got pulled over for it. Alabama licenses have the holder's SSN on them (because that way the state gets more Federal highway $), except his parents had never applied to get him one, because of their religion. When the cop demanded his SSN ("Deine Papieren!"), and he didn't tell him one, he was arrested for disorderly conduct. He's still in jail because in order to bail him out his parents had to supply their (guess what) SSNs. Clinton recently declared his intention to use his supposed budget surplus to save Social Security. In order to maintain Social Security payments, it is estimated that combined Federal taxes will have to rise to 84% of national income! Social Security is doomed as a retiremant option; there is no reason for any able bodied citizen born after 1950 to ever expect to see any benefits from it. So why should any of those people have SSNs? Because securing retirement is not the real goal of Social Security. However, it is still quite valuable as a means for tracking and controlling people, and it looks like voluntary compliance is now being strictly enforced. That's why Clinton wants to save Social Security. James A. Chappelow --------------------------------------------------- This message is from the VTLP-list (Vermont Libertarian) mailing list. To send a message to everyone on this list send email to <vtlp-list(a)catamount.com>. To unsubscribe from the list send email to <listserv(a)catamount.com> with "unsubscribe vtlp-list" in the body of the message. To subscribe to the list send email to <listserv(a)catamount.com> with "subscribe vtlp-list your name" in the body of the message. ----------------- End Forwarded Message ----------------- Brian B. Riley --> http://members.macconnect.com/~brianbr For PGP Keys <mailto:brianbr@together.net?subject=Get%20PGP%20Key> "Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don't have film."

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Base conversion
by grimm＠MIT.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I am trying to write some code to perform base conversions on very large numbers (possibly as large as 256^(2^(ULONG_MAX))). Specifically, I store the numbers in base 256, but I would like to be able to print them in base 10. Any really brillant ideas? -James

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Re: pgp broken?
by hoz＠univel.telescan.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:42 AM 1/17/96 -8, you wrote: >On 16 Jan 96 at 19:16, Derek Atkins wrote: >To give further perspective, he kept claiming that a "triple DES with >RS4 overlay" was the most secure method of encryption. Well, he's wrong. A one time pad (properly generated and used) is provably secure as the "most" secure cipher. Speaking of "provably", ask him if he's sure that "triple DES with an RC4 overlay" is more secure than, say, "quintuple DES with an RC4 overlay" (since we're making up combinations). I would be VERY interested in any mathematical proof or empirical evidence that putting the RC4 on top of the encryption would be more secure than doing it first or between the DES rounds. Some pretty good mathemeticians have failed to produce such sweeping results (for the public domain, anyway.) Let's see if I have this right. Someone with access to the internet claims that someone with access to the DOD claims that some cipher system is good and another is bad. I have no reason to believe you. You seem to have no reason to believe him. He does not seem to know what he's talking about, on a subject where a great deal of effort is expended to promote confusion... I think I've got it! Rick F. Hoselton (who doesn't claim to present opinions for others)

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Re: noise levels and hack-Microsoft
by R. J. Harvey 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:47 AM 1/18/96 -0500, you wrote: > >"R. J. Harvey" writes: >> At 10:20 AM 1/18/96 -0500, Perry wrote: >> > >> >Posts on windows registration wizards, gun control, unemployment, >> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >> Well, I'm sure you're correct on most of those, >> but the post on Microsoft using ENCRYPTED databases >> of competitor programs as part of its plan to surreptitiously > >Actually, the database isn't encrypted -- its plaintext -- and the >wizard isn't surreptitious and tells you everything its doing and lets >you stop it if you like. In short, the topic has no cryptography >or security relevance *AT ALL*. > I don't mean to sound argumentative, but I'm wondering if you actually read the article cited earlier today by the person you were criticizing for 'noise.' To quote from Andrew Schulman, the author of the piece he referenced, and a person who has more than a little credibility on such topics, REGWIZ.EXE in turn loads a dynamic-link library, \WINDOWS\SYSTEM\PRODINV.DLL. This is the "Product Inventory DLL," normally used for compliance checking of upgrades to Microsoft Office programs such as WinWord. (In fact, PRODINV.DLL's internal module name is "COMPLINC," for "compliance checking.") Of course, when you buy the upgrade edition of something like WinWord, there needs to be a mechanism to check that in fact you really are upgrading from some previous word processor -- be it a previous version of WinWord, or a competitor's word processor, such as AmiPro or WordPerfect. So there's an encrypted database (the reasons ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ for this encryption are discussed below) inside PRODINV of about 100 products, ... At this point, it was trivial to locate the beginning and end of the buffer, and write it to disk. (Recall that the database is stored on disk in encrypted form; this is why a search of ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ the entire hard disk did not find it.) ... The database is encrypted because otherwise it would be trivial to fool this "wizard" (hmm...; examination of RegWiz/ProdInv shows it to be anything but wizardly) simply by creating an appropriately-sized file with the appropriate name in the appropriate subdirectory. Although I haven't personally verified the above, I'm quite confident that Schulman is correct here. Of perhaps greater relevance to this list, the final passage cited above should provide a potentially very interesting "project" for those list-readers who are interested in the "hack Microsoft" project. Schulman got at the cleartext by looking at the program in a debugger, AFTER it had decrypted the database and loaded its contents into memory; he didn't try to crack the encryption method itself. My point is, if the crypto used here is as poor as has been seen in the password area, and somebody were to come up with a way to fool this "compliance checking" protocol (which would defeat BOTH the "voluntary" registration function and the potentially much more interesting reduced- price product upgrading authentication mechanism), I think that might constitute very poor PR for Micro$oft, as well as a highly crypto-relevant issue. That is, a hell of a lot more people might exploit a flaw like that in order to falsely qualify for cheap upgrades than would ever be involved in exploiting the password cache problem. For those who missed it, and who care, the URL is ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/examples/windows/win95.update/regwiz.html rj

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Keyboard emulation
by Steve Makrecky 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Looking for a design of a keyboard & mouse emulator. What I would like to do is control a main computer's keyboard and mouse functions by a second RS232 remote IBM PC. Has anybody tried this? Do you foresee any problems?

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mailing list
by myrkul＠limestone.kosone.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

please add my address to the mailing list.

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RE: Random Number Generators
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:40 PM 1/17/96, Kurt Buff (Volt Comp) wrote: >If you're going to work with hardware to get really random numbers, why not >go to the back of any of several PC-type magazines, and order the radiation >detector board that someone is hawking? Can't really do any better than >that, can you? Counting cosmic ray hits and noting their time differentials ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >should be just what the doctor ordered, right? Almost all of the counts in simple radiation detectors are from earthly sources, not from cosmic rays. For Geiger tube counters (not very common these days), the main counts are for gamma rays and for beta particles (if a beta window is included). For solid-state detectors, most of the counts are still betas and gammas, even though solid-state detectors (e.g., PIN diodes) are certainly _capable_ of detecting alpha particles. The reason is that alphas are very nonpenetrating, so alpha detectors for intentional use must have extremley thin (and hence fragile and expensive) windows or protective layers. Basically, it makes little sense to count alphas when a rough radioactivity measurement is sought, as with cheap detectors. Solid state detectors specially set up with alpha sources in proximity to the detector are possible, but are a specialty item. RNGs based on thermal noise and natural radioactivity have been discussed on our list at least a dozen times (multiple posts each time), so I suggest further research be done there. --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Microsoft's CAPI
by Lee Fisher 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Matt Blaze <mab(a)research.att.com> writes: | I attended a meeting at Microsoft the other day at which they | described their Crypto API project. As CAPIs go, it's reasonable | enough; ... As of today, some basic information on "Microsoft CrytoAPI" is available at http://www.microsoft.com/intdev/inttech/cryptapi.htm. It looks like this page has an overview, a 25-page Programmer's Guide, and 5 sample apps which use the API. In general, http://www.microsoft.com/intdev/ is the best place to check for any new for Internet developer-related stuff from MSFT. __ Lee Fisher, leefi(a)microsoft.com, 206.936.8621

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Re: Clinton's fake apologies (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1998 10:28:01 -0400 > From: Duncan Frissell <frissell(a)panix.com> > Subject: Re: Clinton's fake apologies (fwd) > Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, we just conducted a > favorable/non-favorable public opinion survey about the ADA over there and > found out that 3% had a favorable opinion of him 3% unfavorable and 94% > were DK or No Opinion. I therefore plead that he has insufficient personal > popularity to conduct this prosecution. I like that one, talk about 'jury of their peers'... ____________________________________________________________________ The seeker is a finder. Ancient Persian Proverb The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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