- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Re: FCPUNX:ecure Phones
by Dave Emery 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Don't think I will bore the list with it, But a slightly more complex version of this scheme was one of the major tactical medium security voice scrambling systems used by the US in the 70's and 80's and even to a slight extent into the 90's on military radio circuits. The military version is called Parkhill and the crypto gear is the KY-65 and KY-75. At one time (in the 70's) it was used for at least secret traffic. It was downgraded a couple of times since and is now considered obselete and compromised. A Parkhill crypto box can be seen in the NSA museum... The NSA version used time inversion (playing voice samples backwards) and faster shuffling than this one does, and possibly a more secure key generator. But it is rumored to have been broken by more than one opponent, perhaps including drug cartels. Its appeal and why it was so extensively used for a while is that it interfaces to normal voice radio gear at the audio input and output level rather than requiring different modulations and complex digital modems integrated into the radio. It also gives pretty good speech quality and speaker recognition. Its primary replacement is the ANDVT digital voice terminal which takes advantage of modern DSP technology to implement modems usable over radio links and vocoders which can produce acceptable speech at 1200 or 2400 baud. Dave Emery die(a)die.com

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Re: My Departure, Moderation, and "Ownership of the List"
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

tmcghan(a)gill-simpson.com wrote: > in a message allegedly from: "Timothy C. May" <tcmay(a)got.net> > > the really important issue is this: is the _physical hosting_ of the > > Cypherpunks mailing list coterminous with the "Cypherpunks"? > { much thoughtful and well-phrased commentary elided } > > I would have had no problem had John announced that he was creating > > a new list, the "Good Stuff" list, with Sandy has his Chooser of > > Good Stuff. But by making the _main list_ the censored one, this > > skewed things considerably. > Now that the horse is out of the barn, ( or maybe not? ), I can't help > but ask whether one specific 'change to the change' would have > satisfied most of your objections: retaining 'cypherpunks' as the > name of the unedited, all-the-crud-you-can-read-and-then-some, > version, and adding an 'cp-worthwhile' list for those of us who prefer > not to wade thru mountains of garbage to glean a few precious tidbits. > What's in a name? Is perception more important ( to you ) than > reality? If just swapping names between cp and cp-unedited would make > such a large difference, I humbly suggest to you that you consider how > much labels need to matter. Is the title of the group more important > the the content? From where I sit, this looks a lot like a > style-over-substance complaint. Of course, I don't have my trifocals > on just at the moment. If it did not suit a specific purpose, they wouldn't have done it that way. You can take it to the bank that they did this because it was the only way to keep the 1300-plus sheep subscribed to what they wanted to be their "main" list.

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Re: New X-Ray Imager
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Steve Schear wrote: > New X-ray gun trades privacy for safety > Reported by Andy C > Seen in The Nando Times on 13 August 1996 > "I'm incredibly concerned," said John Henry Hingson, a past president of the > National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, meeting here this past > week. "The entire nation could become a victim of illegal searches and > seizures and the law is powerless to protect them from these police abuses." > But in these nervous times following the the crash of TWA Fight 800 and > bombings at the Olympics, Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center, many > Americans are now willing to trade some of their privacy and civil liberties > for greater security. > A poll last week by the Los Angeles Times found that a majority of people -- > 58 percent -- said they would curtail some civil liberties if it would help > thwart terrorism. Thirteen percent said it would depend on what rights were > at stake. The poll didn't ask people to single out any rights. The L.A. Times quotes this "poll" all the time, and in fact probably just made it up. Why do I know that? Because they ran a "letter" from a "teacher" in the valley somewhere about a year ago which said exactly this same thing. The "teacher" ran a poll of her students and they agreed to give up the rights without even knowing which rights they were giving up.

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Re: More Hacking of the Mykotronx Site!
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

While this report may be true, I wonder if it's not a spoof or even official disinformation to mislead about the details of Aaron's mission as well as what Rainbow and others are really peddling to rabble-fearing paranoids. This last sentence seems a bit too melodramatic even for a suck-up crippled-chip manufacturer: >The MYK-82, developed by Mykotronx and fabricated by VLSI Technology, >Inc., is the first of a series of security products to be developed as >part of an alliance with the NSA, targeting both Government and >commercial citizen monitoring markets. Granted that defense to LEA-market conversionists like to pornograph the godawful carnage their technology can wreak on disobedient civilians to arouse ex-military-to-LEA converted glands -- do they actually write SOF drool like this?

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IBM's SecureWay Key Recovery technology
by Marshall Clow 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From <http://www.ibm.com/Security/html/prkeyrec.html>: >At the RSA Conference, IBM announced the details of its highly >anticipated SecureWay key recovery technology. IBM is developing this >technology in response to market demands for exportable strong >encryption required to advance the growth of global e-business. >[ yada yada yada snipped ] I attended this presentation. Basically, what they do is to add two packets to the "channel setup process", one that depends only on the coorespondents, the other that contains the information about this particular session. A problem with this, as I pointed out to the presenters, is that the first packet can be trivially used for traffic analysis. The eavesdropper may not be able to determine who is cooresponding, but they can tell if it is the same people as in a previous conversation. >From <http://www.ibm.com/security/html/wp_keyrec2.html> >In order to minimize the preparation overhead, the recovery information >is prepared in two phases: one phase is independent of the particular >session/archive key being prepared; the second phase is dependent on the >particular key and session parameters. The first phase, which uses >public-key encryption, can be shared across multiple invocations of key >recovery preparation, thus reducing overhead. The public-key encryptions >can be stored for repeated use. > As you can see, IBM suggests cacheing the contents of the first packet, so that you don't have to recalculate it each time. Imagine how easy traffic analysis would be if the identification packets were identical instead of just related. -- Marshall Marshall Clow Aladdin Systems <mailto:mclow@mailhost2.csusm.edu> Warning: Objects in calendar are closer than they appear.

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Re: If guilty of a lesser crime, you can be sentenced for a greater
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Igor Chudov @ home wrote: > Dale Thorn wrote: > > Igor Chudov @ home wrote: [some arguments deleted for lack of time to reply] > > > Another story: suppose that OKSAS hired me to work for her, but then > > > our relationships go south and she fires me. Again, her fate is very > > > unclear, although I would probably spare her life if it were she. > > If she does it right, with empathy, there is not likely to be a > > problem. On the other hand, if she bad-mouths you to prospective > > employers or customers you want to do business with, you might be > > inclined to hit her. This happens a lot when AP is not available. > ... But would happen more often if it was. Why, if AP was readily available, would she want to risk being hit by bad-mouthing you unnecessarily? > > people who have such money are not going to bump off very many more > > people than they already do, because: > > 1. They need the people to make money off of (Mafia rule #4, never > > kill someone who owes you money [or is a money source]). > This is a wrong Mafia rule, they do kill debtors who are in default. Really? Then how do they collect their money? BTW, I heard the rule from the mouth of a real mob hitman. > > 2. Rich people have a lot of eyes on them, and it would be easy to > > triangulate a series of murders to them, even without hard evidence. > > In an AP world, this triangulation/correlation would be enough to > > convince people to either shun this killer, or kill him outright. > When ten people make deals with each other, it becomes hard to > triangulate. And it is easy, if you know what deals are done, to change > the result of triangulation: suppose that I know that you borrowed 1 > million from Toto, that my _and_ yours business partner had been > murdered (by me, but no one knows), and I am afraid that someone will > triangulate me and implicate me in that murder. I secretly order > the AP bot to kill Toto, and you get implicated. Not good. We all know how people are framed, and we've seen the Hitchcockian murder scenarios on TV, in movies, etc. Certainly the CIA et al can create these scenarios, but what does that have to do with AP as used by ordinary persons?

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Re: New X-Ray Imager
by Lucky Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:38 AM 2/4/97 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote: > >| A poll last week by the Los Angeles Times found that a majority of people -- >| 58 percent -- said they would curtail some civil liberties if it would help >| thwart terrorism. Thirteen percent said it would depend on what rights were >| at stake. The poll didn't ask people to single out any rights. > > Its worth noting the 'if it would help thwart terrorism.' It is irrelevant if terrorism is indeed be thwarted. The public does not require this to happen. All that matters is to generate the *perception* of increased security, not to increase security itself. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred "I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence." Mahatma Gandhi

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Re: Moderation, Tim, Sandy, me, etc. * Strong crypto == DES?!
by Against Moderation 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

John Gilmore <gnu(a)toad.com> writes: > Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this > month. I'll admit I made it easy for them, but the results are > conclusive. There are 1311 addresses in the cypherpunks list today; > 42 in the unedited list; and 19 in the flames list. Forty people > cared enough to read every posting; the other thousand either wanted > to try the experiment -- or didn't care enough to send an email > message. Which, as we all know, is a very low threshold. I just have to point out that you are ignoring some important factors (though I do trust your intentions and believe it is unintentional). I initially tried subscribing to all the lists, but the headers of the edited and unedited lists were identical making it impossible to sort the mail. To make matters worse, some messages seem to have gone out only to the edited list, and not to the unedited (particularly at the beginning), so that, unable to come up with a decent filtering scheme easily, I finally gave up and just subscribed to cypherpunks. In general, unsubscribing and resubscribing to a mailing list is not completely trivial. In addition to the particulars of cypherpunks, there are also the issues of what if your E-mail address depends on the machine you send mail from and your unsubscribe request gets delayed for confirmation. What if the new list no longer works properly with your mail filter and you end up with 1,000 pieces of cypherpunks mail in your main mailbox, etc. These are not insurmountable obstacles, but they certainly provide a strong enough disincentive for people to switching their list subscriptions that I think the numbers you list above are meaningless. Perhaps a better comparison would be to look at how many people subscribe to the other two filtered cypherpunks lists. > Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is > now suggesting. Well, you don't appreciate the content of the list, and you seem to feel that many members of the list don't appreciate what you are doing. Why not shut the list down? I can think of one reason: cypherpunks seems to suck in a lot of crap, and might be keeping that crap away from the coderpunks list. Other than that, though, I think killing this list would probably be a good idea.

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BA Crypto Machine Photos (fwd)
by Dave Emery 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: >From boatanchors(a)theporch.com Tue Feb 4 12:01:17 1997 Date: Tue, 4 Feb 1997 10:53:20 -0600 (CST) Message-Id: <Chameleon.4.01.2.970204112304.jproc@> Errors-To: listown(a)jackatak.theporch.com Reply-To: jproc(a)bellglobal.com Originator: boatanchors(a)theporch.com Sender: boatanchors(a)theporch.com Precedence: bulk From: jproc(a)bellglobal.com To: Multiple recipients of list <boatanchors(a)theporch.com> Subject: BA Crypto Machine Photos X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas X-Comment: Amateur Radio Equipment Using Vacuum Tubes Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Chameleon - TCP/IP for Windows by NetManage, Inc. Dear BA'ers, Recently, I acquired some BA crypto machine photos courtesy of the Canadian Security Establishment. If anyone wants full size, selected, JPEG copies of these photos, please let me know and I can send them as attached files to E-mail. As a reminder, there are two stories beginning with the same file name in the BA archives which accompany the photos. KL7.JPG Colour 108 kbytes KWR37.JPG B & W 51 kbytes BTW, does anyone know the meaning of 'order wire mode' in the context of a crypto broadcast? This mode is found in the KWR-37 online crypto receiver. Please send all photo requests or responses via private E-mail. Regards, ------------------------------------- Jerry Proc VE3FAB E-mail: jproc(a)bellglobal.com HMCS Haida Naval Museum Toronto, Ontario 'Looking for a 'AN/SRC-501' -------------------------------------

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Re: Moderation [Tim,Sandy]
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Adam writes: >The problem with censorship or moderation is that it waters down the >absolutism of free speech. Free speech in electronic media, with >cypherpunks type I, and type II remailers, is the closest thing to >truly free speech yet. I agree and disagree. Moderation often *increases* the value of speech. The Wall Street Journal, or Time Magazine, or the JAMA have strict policies regarding what information they print; these policies increase the publication's value. Moderation is not necessarily censorship. Would you criticize the National Coalition Against Censorship for not including in their newsletter (to which I subscribe) off-topic rants by Jesse Helms? What Vulis and the rest (whom I killfiled long ago) have done is polluted a common resource, making it unusable for the rest. It's the tragedy of the commons. When all can speak without limit in a public forum, the drunken boor can shout everyone else down. -Declan ------------------------- The Netly News Network Washington Correspondent http://netlynews.com/

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