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by Igor Chudov ＠ home 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

----- Forwarded message from owner-cypherpunks(a)algebra.com ----- >From owner-cypherpunks(a)Algebra.COM Wed Jun 4 16:52:19 1997 From: owner-cypherpunks(a)algebra.com Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 17:52:04 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <199706042152.RAA01373(a)www.video-collage.com> To: owner-cypherpunks(a)Algebra.COM Subject: BOUNCE cypherpunks(a)Algebra.COM: Admin request of type /\bsub-scribe\b/i at line 7 >From cpunks Wed Jun 4 17:51:59 1997 Received: from sirius.infonex.com (sirius.infonex.com [206.170.114.2]) by www.video-collage.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id RAA01319 for <cypherpunks(a)algebra.com>; Wed, 4 Jun 1997 17:51:45 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from cpunks@localhost) by sirius.infonex.com (8.8.5/8.7.3) id OAA09047; Wed, 4 Jun 1997 14:51:41 -0700 (PDT) Received: from rigel.cyberpass.net (root(a)rigel.infonex.com [206.170.114.3]) by sirius.infonex.com (8.8.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id OAA09040 for <cpunks(a)sirius.infonex.com>; Wed, 4 Jun 1997 14:51:36 -0700 (PDT) Received: from toad.com (toad.com [140.174.2.1]) by rigel.cyberpass.net (8.8.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id OAA13609 for <cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net>; Wed, 4 Jun 1997 14:50:14 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from majordom@localhost) by toad.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) id OAA25146 for cypherpunks-unedited-outgoing; Wed, 4 Jun 1997 14:43:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: from pathfinder.com (relay2.pathfinder.com [204.71.242.22]) by toad.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id OAA25141 for <cypherpunks(a)toad.com>; Wed, 4 Jun 1997 14:43:50 -0700 (PDT) Received: from cp.pathfinder.com by pathfinder.com (8.7.3/SMI-SVR4) id RAA15204; Wed, 4 Jun 1997 17:43:19 -0400 (EDT) Received: from localhost by cp.pathfinder.com (SMI-8.6) id RAA03951; Wed, 4 Jun 1997 17:43:13 -0400 Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 17:42:33 -0400 (EDT) From: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)pathfinder.com> Reply-To: declan(a)well.com To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Subject: Anonymity should be banned for speakers and vendors Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970604174023.29555R-100000(a)cp.pathfinder.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com Precedence: bulk [Ray, a recent DC law school grad and anti-spam activist, is a good guy but is IMHO sadly mistaken here. Thought this might be interesting. --Declan] ---------- Forwarded message ---------- X-FC-URL: Fight-Censorship is at http://www.eff.org/~declan/fc/ X-FC-URL: To join send "sub-scribe" to fight-censorship-request(a)vorlon.mit.edu Date: Wed, 4 Jun 97 17:25:36 -0400 From: Ray Everett-Church <ray(a)everett.org> Sender: owner-fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu To: sameer <sameer(a)c2.net>, tbetz(a)pobox.com Cc: fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu Subject: Re: Spam costs and questions On 6/4/97 4:52 PM, sameer (sameer(a)c2.net) wrote: >> If Wallace were up against criminal and civil penalties if he continued to >> hide his customers' real identities, he'd give them up in a hot second. Of >> course, as soon as there was a chance of that happening, he'd get out of the >> business entirely. > > So how do criminal and civial penalties for not revealing a >customer's name protect anonymity on the internet? > Anonymity on the internet must be preserved. If you could come >up with a way to make spam illegal and preserve anonymity, I would be >very glad. Until then, I will have to oppose making spam illegal. As stated before, I have heard no convincing argument that it is in the consumers best interest to have an anonymous *vendor*. Sure it's vital that *consumers* be allowed to remain anonymous, but if you're selling a product or service, there's no legitimate reason why a business needs to remain anonymous given issues of warranties, product liability, sales taxes, etc. And in the case above, since the remailer in question is simply acting as an agent for the business, there's no question of legitimate anonymity implicated. Indeed, perpetuating anonymity for the business often times facilitates activites that constitute a breach of contract and sometimes even fraud. The whole reason to use a pro-spam anon remailer is so that you can violate your ISP usage agreement without being traceable or accountable. And if you've entered into that contractual relationship with the ISP with the *intent* to breach that contract, it's fraud. Anonymity for consumers, Yes! Anonymity for vendors, NO! -Ray <everett(a)cauce.org> ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ray Everett-Church, Esq. <ray(a)everett.org> www.everett.org/~everett This mail isn't legal advice. Opinion(RE-C) != Opinion(clients(RE-C)) (C)1997 Ray Everett-Church ** Help outlaw "spam"=> http://www.cauce.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- End of forwarded message from owner-cypherpunks(a)algebra.com -----

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No Subject
by Mix 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

May Timothy C. Mayo's forgeries get stuck up his ass so he'll have to shit through his filthy mouth for the rest of its miserable life. o o /< >\ Timothy C. Mayo \\\_______/// // \\

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Responses to "Spam costs and questions" (long)
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Yesterday I forwarded questions about spam from a friend who was speaking before the FTC next week. Here are most of the replies I received, which I've attached below. Some may have appeared here already. From: glee harrah cady <glee(a)netcom.com> From: Wei Dai <weidai(a)eskimo.com> From: Stanton McCandlish <mech(a)eff.org> From: Robert Moskowitz <rgm3(a)chrysler.com> From: "Halpert, James - DC" <jhalpert(a)pipermar.com> From: Azeem Azhar <aja(a)economist.com> From: Mark Grant <mark(a)unicorn.com> From: Charlie Stross <charlie(a)public.antipope.org> From: Bill Frantz <frantz(a)netcom.com> From: "Shabbir J. Safdar" <shabbir(a)vtw.org> From: djones(a)insight.dcss.McMaster.CA (David Jones) From: wyang(a)ktel.osc.edu From: clinton(a)annoy.com (Clinton at Annoy) From: Eric Murray <ericm(a)lne.com> From: Ray Everett-Church <ray(a)everett.org> From: Chris Poupart <jyhad(a)odyssee.net> From: "Marius Loots" <MLOOTS(a)medic.up.ac.za> From: Roger Bohn <Rbohn(a)UCSD.edu> -Declan *********** Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 15:26:33 -0700 (PDT) From: glee harrah cady <glee(a)netcom.com> To: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> A large amount of real costs are principally being borne not by the individual recipient but by the networks that are being abused in the process, which costs the users of the networks involved. Lots of spammers are not using "their own" networks to send out the spam, but using the open nature of the Internet to relay the messages off the mail servers of networks throughout the world. One really egregious instance of which I've been told is that someone used a mailserver in New Zealand as a relay for a large spam. I've heard that data charges in New Zealand are for info in AND out, the provider had to pay for the privilege. SInce this was a third-hand story, I can't cite you chapter and verse -- wish I could. When lots of spam hits a single network, email processing for all customers, whether or not they are recipients of that particular spam, is slowed. Lots of networks have this problem. Unlike email systems that stored one copy of an email, regardless of the number of recipients, the systems we're using on the Internet today send real physical bits for each message that take up space on mail queues. This, too, inhibits email of all involved. Then, folks have to deal with the fact that the spam is on their network: tech support folks are paid to answer queries about it, sysadmins are paid to toss it out (in cases where it hits large intranets -- one company local to here has two sysadmins that do nothing but get rid of spam coming into their local net) or to manage the disk space required to store the stuff. Smaller providers are getting killed with the stuff. The reason that many of us provider-types find more to like the Torricelli approach is that it goes after the deceptive practices that make it harder for us all to trace the sources of the spam: the hiding behind false or not accurate domain names; the hiding of the actual email address of the spammer; the harvesting of names and addresses from the open directories of whitepage services or of online providers, etc. This approach, we think will be more effective at getting to the root of the problem than labelling speech. After all, it's not only commercial speech that is being sent as spam and it's not responsible marketers who are doing it either. I'm not sure that legislation is actually needed to address the problem. I could make an argument that said that the deceptive practices that are making it difficult to go after the spammers actually fall into the purview of the FTC. I am concerned that we don't legislate something that we'll really be sorry about later. As usual, summarizing a complex and difficult policy and operational issue in one short email probably causes problems, too. I hope I've not left out anything, but probably I did. Ask if what I've said isn't clear. :-) ____________________________ glee harrah cady Manager, Public Policy, NETCOM +1.408.881.3227 1.800.NETCOM-1 glee(a)netcom.com co-author, _Mastering the Internet_, Sybex, 1995 & 1996 ********* Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 23:39:28 -0700 (PDT) From: Wei Dai <weidai(a)eskimo.com> To: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> Here's a cost that's seldomly counted: the occasionally useful spam that we delete without reading because most spam are simply garbage. I would argue that any spam protection system that does not allow useful spam to get through is flawed. ********* From: Stanton McCandlish <mech(a)eff.org> To: declan(a)well.com Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 16:22:12 -0700 (PDT) Cc: fight-censorship-announce(a)vorlon.mit.edu, mech(a)eff.org (Stanton McCandlish) Feel free to send this to FC, etc. This response does not constitute and official EFF position, but I believe it acurately reflects thinking here that will become EFF position shortly. Declan McCullagh typed: > > A friend who's going to be on one of the FTC panels next week sent me a > few questions about spam. Does anyone want to try their hand at answering > them? I'll forward along all responses I get. > > What are the costs to consumers of > unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it > takes to delete it might be one, hard > drive space might be another. I would ALL/MULTIPLE USERS * cost of storage (ISP, user or both, depending on mail system) in disk space and memory (remember it takes RAM to load a mailbox into any modern email program). * severe degradation and sometimes destruction of forums as they are over-run by spammage. * reputational harm and loss of all usefulness of Internet account (after being subject to a spammer's header forgery listing the innocent victim as the sender, who then receives all the hatemail the spamming generates). INDIVIDUAL END USER ADDITIONAL COSTS * time to read/examine * time to delete * time to filter * time to unsubscribe, complain, or otherwise respond * increased ISP/online service subscription fees as provider costs are passed on to customers. * per byte, per minute or per message costs from ISP (not all users) * per minute costs from phone or other conduit provider (not all users) CORPORATE END USER ADDITIONAL COSTS * lost productivity due to time sinks mentioned above, frustration, etc. * missed opportunities, deadlines, etc., due to too much mail to sort thru resulting in important messages being missed. Major potential for corporate lossage here. CORPORATE ADMINISTRATOR ADDL. COSTS * time (often quite a lot) filtering dependent users' mail, blocking spamming sites, contending with filled up disks, and other wastes of stafftime due to spamming. ISP/ONLINE SERVICE ADDL. COSTS * Help desk and admins' time filtering/blocking by customer request (not all sites do this) * Help desk and admins' time filtering/blocking by necessity to prevent exceedingly abusive spammers sucking up all available disk space * admins' time in cleanup after one of their users engages is spamming or is perceived to have done so due to forged headers, and 1000s of angry victims send in complaints, threats, etc. * company's losses in market share and reputation after one of their users engages is spamming or is perceived to have done so due to forged headers * admins' time in cleanup after one of their users engages is spamming or is perceived to have done so due to forged headers, and 10s or more of angry victims become vigilantes, and hack the provider, SYN flood them, send them crippling emailbombs, etc. * company's losses in mkt. share and reputation after their service slows, crashes or otherwise is negatively affected by such attacks. * company's liability when other subscribers sue for breach of contract, for return of subscription fees, etc., due to such outtages or degradation of service * CEO & legal staff time researching if any recourse is available. * increased connectivity costs as 56K, T1, etc. high-speed connections are not fast enough to keep up with all the spam (e.g. it is currently physically impossible to carry a full "Big 8" and alt Usenet feed with only a T1 connection [verify with a major ISP if in doubt], largely due to the amount of spamming in the alt groups. * increased staffing costs as more people have to be hired or consulted to deal with the problems caused by spammers. Please feel free to send suggestions for addtions to this list, which I've made for other purposes than answering Declan's query. Remember that TIME = MONEY and RESOURCES = MONEY in all above formulations. > like to know how to quantify it, and > compare it with the cost of sending > e-mail. It costs roughly $20 for Net access[*], plus the cost of a spamming-targeted mailing list ($50?) to send multiple millions of messages. [Actually this is not really true - unless AOL has changed the capabilities of its trial accounts, it actaully costs NOTHING to set up a temporary account that is capable of massive spammage. Worse yet, the technology to MAKE massive email lists is trivially available and/or creatable, so one does not even have to buy such a list. ZERO cost at all.) > If you banned commercial e-mail, > wouldn't it just affect legitimate > commercial transactions? That is to say, > wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme > builders still be able to spam? I would > think that if they are so untraceable > that it's hard to block their spam that > it wouldn't really matter if it were > simply made illegal. Certainly. There are many other problems: 1) Any ban is going to be very difficult to write in a way that will survive constitutional scrutiny. 2) Banning all commercial email is obvioulys stupid and unconstitutional - I have a First Amendment right to receive commercial messages if I want to. 3) Banning all unsolicited email is obviously stupid and unconstitutional - I have a First Amendment right right to tell IBM that I like their web page, even if they didn't ask me for my comments. 4) Banning all commercial unsolicited email is obviously stupid and arguably unconstitutional. I probably have a right to send you a message offering my product if something in an email or a post or web page by you indicated you might be interested in what I'm offering. Additionally, such a ban does not speak to the issue - commerciality is not the problem. Religious and political rants are, to most people, an even more offensive form of spamming that advertisements are. 5) Despite the optimism of some, no local (i.e. national) law will ever stop spam, it will simply move spammers off-shore. That fewer respondents will buy, due to distrust of foreign merchants, is irrelevant - the spamming business model is successful if only 1 out of a million people makes a purchase, because there are essentially no costs. 6) All such bans attack content. This makes them presumptively unconstitutional right from the start. The issue of spamming cannot be solved with a ban. Spamming as a problem is divisible into TWO problems: a) Theft, abuse or usurpation of resources owned by specific parties (i.e. ISP connectivity, staff time, etc., and your productivity), or owned by everyone (tragedy of the commons). This is a matter of the right to not be forced to bear the costs of another's expression (a component of the right to freedom of speech and press), with shades of the right to use public resources (i.e. offline if some bully, every time you try to go a public park, blocks your entrance into the park, you can get an injunction against this person. Hard to map this kind of thing to the offline world though, on legal grounds even if the ethics of the situation are plain as day.) b) Violation of the recipient's right to be left alone (a component of the right to privacy) and right to not be forced to read another's expression (a component of the right to free speech and press). Spammers love to contort this last into another *almost* opposite right - the right to speak freekly in public even if it offends someone. They avoid the issue of not having a right to do this in private spaces, and not having a right to force others to bear their costs even for public expression. Anyway, the privacy and freedom to not read issues seem to apply principally if not only to private email, while the arguments in point a) seem to apply to private mail, and forums (mailing lists, newsgroups). These two problems require different solutions (and probably in fact both require combinations of several different solutions, ranging from class action suits to fraud prosecution to better filters to increased system security to prevent forgery to tighter users contract to "don't route spamming ISP's traffic" agreements between ISPs and NSPs, etc., etc.) EFF is forming a working group to try to size up the various options and possible solutions and see which ones are viable, which ones are best for rights and for the Internet, which are expedient but would harm the public interest, which are unconstitutional or otherwise bad, and so on. We also have to look at this beyond the here-and-now. What about ISPs that in the fine print say they sell their entire user base's contact info to e-marketers? What about the use of "push" technology for spam-like purposes? What about a MoU between all backbones and major NSPs to simply drop service to any "spammer haven" ISP? What about calls for direct regulation by the FTC or FCC? Or by a UN body? Many proposals are flying, many problems envisioned (and some being missed by most), and many people are getting increasingly hysterical about this so we need to find some solutions quickly. None of the legislation produced so far does anything but cause more damage. -- Stanton McCandlish mech(a)eff.org Electronic Frontier Foundation Program Director http://www.eff.org/~mech +1 415 436 9333 x105 (v), +1 415 436 9333 (f) Are YOU an EFF member? http://www.eff.org/join ********* Date: Thu, 05 Jun 1997 06:52:36 -0400 To: declan(a)relay.pathfinder.com, From: Robert Moskowitz <rgm3(a)chrysler.com> Morning Declan. In today's Internet charging scheme, there are two costs to the Internet consumer: Time to retrieve mail, and time to process scams. The first will fade as higher bandwidth solutions come into play. The later may never fade. Most users are not email savy, even if their email software is. People do dumb things like post to USENET groups and then get on the big spam lists, further increasing their mail filtering efforts. But let's put this into perspective. Today, I might send 5 - 10 minutes everyday, sorting through my USMail. Now I am a good recycler, and I open everyone and put all of the papers into the proper bins; some days this can take me 20 minutes. Despite my Eudora Pro filters that color flag suspected spams (I don't delete them, the filters might be in error) for easy delete, I have dozens of emails among my hunderds of messages to read before trashing. Maybe 5 - 10 minutes a day. I really do not think spam is all that bad unless.... What I have discovered is that recreational email, ie use of USENET and recreational LISTSERVs is the way that people get on spam lists. Us techies thus may have a very low spam to message ratio. But poor johnQpub, naively posts to alt.rec.sailboats and then gets 100 spams a day semi-related to sailing (Sherri would LOVE to go sailing with you...). Interestingly, the answer to spam is NOT filters to block it, but filters to move ligitamate mail into folders for processing and leave your IN box for quick scan/trashing. Thus the cost of spam to the user is education and GOOD (read not free) email software. Now the cost to mail handlers is different, but they can and should fight back. Look at the lawsuit by flowers.com. Tracy and her husband run a small time operation. The spam that used their domain name as the reply-to cost them time and business. They are going after the kid. This is costing them, but it will get them on a list of 'do not spam' sights, we hope. Robert Moskowitz Chrysler Corporation (810) 758-8212 ********* From: "Halpert, James - DC" <jhalpert(a)pipermar.com> Date: Wed, 04 Jun 97 17:00:00 DST Declan, Very high volume spam can and does burden service providers' systems. Remember the cost of sending a million or so e-mails is very low, but engineering a network to handle, say, 200,000 improperly addressed e-mails that collect on a service provider's mail server costs a good deal more. Herein lies an economic problem. This is not to say that the Constitution shouldn't be sacrificed on the altar of an economic problem, but the concern about high volume spam should not be dismissed as trivial. -- Jim Halpert ********* Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 00:10:54 +0100 To: declan(a)well.com From: Azeem Azhar <aja(a)economist.com> Declan, Here are a variety of costs: 1. phone costs (non-us) 2. traffic costs (if you are one of the customers on metered useage that e.g. UUnet and BBNplanet offer) 3. hard-drive costs (my mac crashed a few weeks ago losing data in another application because an incoming e-mail took up my last bit of drive space. technically myu fault, i know, but a cost nonetheless.) 4. my time (to write and check anti-spam filters. it took me over an hour to construct a good system in eudora. my charge out rate is GBP100 an hour, minimum 8 hours.) 5. CPU time on mail-relays on the way. e-mail *does* impose a measurable load on an SMTP host. Azeem Azeem Azhar vx: +44 171 830 7133 The Economist fx: +44 171 681 1358 25 St James Street e-mail: aja(a)economist.com London SW1A 1HG www: http://www.economist.com/ Disclaimer: The views expressed in this email do not necessarily represent those of my employer. ********* Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 02:43:02 -0700 (PDT) From: Mark Grant <mark(a)unicorn.com> To: declan(a)well.com > What are the costs to consumers of unsolicited e-mail? Up to 150k of disk space, up to about 50 seconds of connect time for those who download it by modem (assuming 28.8k), a few seconds of time to delete it or a few minutes to send complaint mail back to their ISP. Worse is the indirect cost to consumers through the hassle it causes to their ISPs. They need faster links and more powerful mail servers to process the extra unwanted data and take time to install filters and deal with spammers. I've already had one spammer send out mail with a false unicorn.com return address which took a day of my time to sort out. >If you banned commercial e-mail, wouldn't it just affect legitimate >commercial transactions? Of course. Banning it is dumb and will cause all sorts of unexpected problems. A few class-action suits should eliminate most of them. Mark (postmaster(a)unicorn.com) ********* Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 11:02:49 +0100 (BST) From: Charlie Stross <charlie(a)public.antipope.org> To: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> On Wed, 4 Jun 1997, Declan McCullagh wrote: > What are the costs to consumers of > unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it > takes to delete it might be one, hard > drive space might be another. Those are minimal. Here in the UK, there are NO free local phone calls (unless you're lucky enough to live in Hull, or have a cableco who want to let you yack to your neighbours - it's a long and boring story). Furthermore, if you receive email via SMTP or UUCP (rather than via a mailbox reader protocol like POP3 or whatever) you can't filter the junk out before it reaches you. Thus, receiving spam costs money, in terms of dialup connect time. Moreover, some spammers use really poor, munged, address lists; I've seen 100Kb mails (a couple of minutes of download time on an old 14.4K modem, which is what many people still use) with maybe a 1K payload at the end of the headers. Given that I've got three or four users on my dialup site, and we get an average of 5 UCEs/person/day, it's probably costing us 5-15 pence/day extra on the phone bill. Not significant for _one_ site, but if you multiply by two million (est. number of UK internet users) you get a plague that's costing about 20 million UK pounds/year -- to the unwilling victims. This is before you factor in the online services like Compuserve or CIX that charge per unit connect time, or charge for mail received from the internet. The real victims, though, are the people whose addresses the spammers bung in the Reply-to: fields, so that they get mailbombed by indignant recipients. -- Charlie Stross ********* Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 23:17:10 -0700 To: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com>, cypherpunks(a)toad.com From: Bill Frantz <frantz(a)netcom.com> At 12:45 PM -0700 6/4/97, Declan McCullagh asked: > What are the costs to consumers of > unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it > takes to delete it might be one, hard > drive space might be another. I would > like to know how to quantify it, and > compare it with the cost of sending > e-mail. I don't think the costs of the 1-3 spam messages I get each day is significant. (But I don't post to Usenet.) > If you banned commercial e-mail, > wouldn't it just affect legitimate > commercial transactions? That is to say, > wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme > builders still be able to spam? I would > think that if they are so untraceable > that it's hard to block their spam that > it wouldn't really matter if it were > simply made illegal. Can you say regulatory arbitrage? The current social controls on spam are good enough that no one with any positive reputation wants to have anything to do with it. This means that spammers have to use anonymous offshore answering services. The widespread hatred of spam and spammers should keep the total amount under control without the legal action and in spite of the very low cost of spamming. The recent problems Spamford has been having with denial of service attacks is just one example of the social control process. The flood of hostile email spammers who include real email addresses receive are another. Legitimate commercial email does not evoke these strong reactions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | The Internet was designed | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | to protect the free world | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | from hostile governments. | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA ********* Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 16:15:27 -0400 To: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com>, fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu From: "Shabbir J. Safdar" <shabbir(a)vtw.org> The combined EF-Florida/EFF-Austin/VTW filings for the FTC workshop will contain an exhaustive examination of the costs associated with junk email and the technology paradigms for addressing it. It's a technology paper, and doesn't take any particular political agenda. -S ********* Date: Wed, 4 Jun 97 16:11:58 EDT From: djones(a)insight.dcss.McMaster.CA (David Jones) > What are the costs to consumers of > unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it > takes to delete it might be one, hard > drive space might be another. I would > like to know how to quantify it, and > compare it with the cost of sending > e-mail. To many people, the cost of spam is simply the time and tedium wasted deleted unwanted messages. Pretty minimal. A burdensome set of regulatory restrictions would also be an annoyance as people waste time and effory making sure reasonable email correspondence "complies" with the new rules. To some users of certain online services, they must pay for email messages or disk space and must pay for connect time. In these cases, there is a real and measurable monetary cost of spam. I'm sorry, I can't quantify that for you. At the organizational level, some companies may pay for Internet traffic bandwidth. If a significant fraction of the traffic is wasted on spam (actually I *really* doubt this is the case) then it could be calculated. > If you banned commercial e-mail, > wouldn't it just affect legitimate > commercial transactions? That is to say, > wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme > builders still be able to spam? I would > think that if they are so untraceable > that it's hard to block their spam that > it wouldn't really matter if it were > simply made illegal. Hang on. A true "pyramid scheme" requires the victims to send money to the folks operating the scheme. Therefore, they can't be entirely anonymous ... or they'd never be able to cash in! Banning "commercial email" is just nuts. Should we also ban "business-related email" ? Or "advertising email" ? .... or what about "political advertising on the Net" ?? The Canadian government just made the front page of HotWired's online magazine for being foolish enough to ban certain political advertisements on the Net. Surely the U.S. won't make the same mistake. -- David Jones, PhD president, Electronic Frontier Canada -- djones(a)efc.ca ********* Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 18:15:59 -0400 (EDT) From: wyang(a)ktel.osc.edu To: declan(a)well.com Hi. I run a Free-Net -- a community outreach project of the Ohio State University and the Ohio Supercomputer Center, which gives free access to anyone who lives in our service area (we're serving about 20,000 people right now -- I understand that, in our service area, Compuserve only has about 12,000 customers). I don't read the censorship fighting list, but someone who does forwarded me your message. I don't know about user costs... but I do know about network-level (provider-level) costs. Disk space is only PART of the computational problem. There's also the swallowing of network bandwidth, and the drain on compute resources (CPU/RAM). My site normally carries about 25,000 unique message ID's per day. Our estimates (these are eyeball numbers, not based on hard-and-fast numbers) make it look as though 10% to 20% of those messages are spam. That's ten to twenty percent of our e-mail operation cost being immediately put toward spam. Beyond that, our users complain about spam. A lot. Right now, about an hour of my time every day is spent dealing with spam complaints (about other sites spamming us, mind). That's 1/8th of my work time, with a massive opportunity cost (as well as a real cost). The other staff members are *also* getting similar time drains. We currently estimate that between $500 and $2000 per month is completely lost to spammers -- funds redirected away from our community outreach/service mission, SUBSIDIZING COMMERCIAL OPERATIONS which generally do not enrich our community. That monthly cost is being drained out of a very small ($150k - $200k per year) project budget which is only getting smaller because people only donate to our donation-driven budget when they like what's going on, and they don't like spam. You might try to call it the cost of doing business... except for the fact that I'm not a normal network carrier. I'm a Free-Net, one of those community-minded sites that's trying to make sure that access to the informational wealth on the Internet is available at price that everyone can afford (free). Universal access is being threatened by this kind of activity, which has a massive user-level costs and implications. Most Free-Nets are incapable of handling the constant barrage of spam, and the complaints they generate. > If you banned commercial e-mail, > wouldn't it just affect legitimate > commercial transactions? That is to say, > wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme > builders still be able to spam? I would > think that if they are so untraceable > that it's hard to block their spam that > it wouldn't really matter if it were > simply made illegal. Everything can be traced on the 'net. The question is what the cost of tracing it is going to be. You need to remember that there's virtually NO cost associated with *sending* spam. ISP connectivity costs, maybe bandwidth metering for a couple of messages. Those messages, however, can be expanded (1:1,000,000 kinds of ratios are potentially possible; one message can theoretically generate a MILLION spam messages; in practice, I've seen 1:10,000 ratios). The networks that carry the traffic are taking that computational and network-bandwidth cost. And they get hit by complaints from their users. I recognize that no matter what the law is going to do, you're not going to *stop* spam. The issue is to reduce the volume of spam enough to make sure that the cost is reduced to acceptable and absorbable cost-levels. That may mean making spamming tools such as "e-mail blaster" criminal tools. Free speech is great... but it's only free when it's not invasive into the rights of others. Spam *is* invasive, and there are clear, acceptable, and frankly more effective alternative methods for communicating commercial messages. -Bill System Manager, Lead System Administrator The Greater Columbus Free-Net ******** From: clinton(a)annoy.com (Clinton at Annoy) To: "'declan(a)well.com'" <declan(a)well.com> It is vital to distinguish between "unsolicited email" and "spam". Spam is essentially considered mass e-mailing for commercial purposes, (usually such as the selling of a product or service). If "unsolicited e-mail" is rendered illegal, what will happen to someone who mistakenly sends an email to the wrong address? It's like prosecuting someone for dialing the wrong number. What about a deliberately targeted, but unsolicited email that is crafted to express displeasure to a politician, for instance? To be potentially prosecuted on such a basis could (and will) place a severe chill on the rights of people to communicate freely with elected officials - the cornerstone of democracy. A protocol to deal with spamming is by no means unwelcome, but to confuse it with unsolicited email is potentially very dangerous. Especially with a government so intent on censoring the free flow of information and thought. Perhaps the first place to start would be to clearly define spam. Clinton Fein Publisher and Editor annoy.com ************* From: Eric Murray <ericm(a)lne.com> Subject: Re: Spam costs and questions To: declan(a)well.com Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 14:09:42 -0700 (PDT) Declan McCullagh writes: > > A friend who's going to be speaking on one of the FTC panels next week > sent me a few questions about spam. Does anyone want to try their hand at > answering them? I'll forward along all responses I get. > > What are the costs to consumers of > unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it > takes to delete it might be one, hard > drive space might be another. I would > like to know how to quantify it, and > compare it with the cost of sending > e-mail. Also there's the cost of network transport of spam, both from the spammer's host to the recipient's ISP, and from the ISP to the recipients PC. The last is often the worst, as it eats up time the victim could be using to do something productive. In addition, most spam is bounced through an innocent third party who has a good network connection, like a university. Sending out a lot of spam takes much bandwidth, so the spammer steals the bandwidth and processing power from the innocent third party. > If you banned commercial e-mail, > wouldn't it just affect legitimate > commercial transactions? That is to say, > wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme > builders still be able to spam? I would > think that if they are so untraceable > that it's hard to block their spam that > it wouldn't really matter if it were > simply made illegal. Spammers need to have a way that you can respond to them. Since spam is legal, and they don't want email in return, they include phone numbers, fax numbers, or snail-mail addresses for people to reply to. If spam were illegal, then spammers could be tracked via the phone numbers. It's only the email's return path that's difficult to trace- spam, because it is selling something, must have a way for potential customers to respond. Most of the purported 'anti-spam' legislation is thinly-disguised LEGITIMIZATION of spam!! Anything that puts the burden on ISPs or recipients to filter out 'tagged' messages legitimizes spam. As annoying as spam is, I would much prefer that nothing be done rather than a poorly-thought-out law. So far, all the proposed laws I have seen have had flaws in them that make me unable to support them. To be honest, I can not myself come up with a law that I would find acceptable. It's a hard problem. -- Eric Murray ericm(a)lne.com Privacy through technology! Network security and encryption consulting. PGP keyid:E03F65E5 *********** Date: Wed, 4 Jun 97 16:10:07 -0400 From: Ray Everett-Church <ray(a)everett.org> To: "Declan McCullagh" <declan(a)well.com>, <fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu> On 6/4/97 3:44 PM, Declan McCullagh (declan(a)well.com) wrote: >A friend who's going to be speaking on one of the FTC panels next week >sent me a few questions about spam. Does anyone want to try their hand at >answering them? I'll forward along all responses I get. > > What are the costs to consumers of > unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it > takes to delete it might be one, hard > drive space might be another. I would > like to know how to quantify it, and > compare it with the cost of sending > e-mail. I also will be speaking at the FTC next week and address that question in my FTC filing which can be seen at <http://www.smart.net/~everett/comment.html> The short version of the answer is that UCE is difficult to assign a clear cost to in part because it is spread over such an ever widening base that the more people you spam, the harder it is to know where the costs are concentrated. However there are costs to the bandwidth provider for the site originating the spam in terms of consumed bandwidth, there's also costs of consumed bandwidth leading into every site that receives the mail. Once it arrives at an ISP, there are costs in terms of the CPU time and system efficiency issues, and disk space consumed, and costs for the consumers who may have to spend more time and money (if they pay on a metered basis) to download and sort through the stuff. It's hard to quantify in dollars and cents, but lets look at the quantities we're talking about. AOL has publically estimated that they process about 30 million pieces of email a day and further they've publically estimated that 40-45% of that is spam. I recently sampled 3 days of my regular spam load and the average piece was a hair over 5000 bytes. 5k * 13 million messages, you're talking roughly 65 million kilobytes a day. (somebody please correct my math... i'm a lawyer not an accountant). Since people don't read their email every day, some of that must be stored for several days. And if it is bouncing back to an invalid sender address, the rest ends up in the postmaster mailbox. Assuming that those same figures and costs are spread among other ISPs as well, that's a heck of a lot of data to transmit and store...which translates into costs for ISPs and their customers. > > If you banned commercial e-mail, > wouldn't it just affect legitimate > commercial transactions? That is to say, > wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme > builders still be able to spam? I would > think that if they are so untraceable > that it's hard to block their spam that > it wouldn't really matter if it were > simply made illegal. I don't think anybody wants to ban all commercial mail, just the unsolicited advertisements for which the advertisers don't bear the real costs. If you're truly trying to operate a moneymaking business, you've got to have someplace for people to send the money... So regardless of how you disguise the headers, you still have a means of tracking down the culprit... and in the case of the Smith legislation you'd have the chance to recover up to $1500 per message. There is at least one major national collection agency that I know of who is chomping at the bit to recover that for you. -Ray <everett(a)cauce.org> ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ray Everett-Church, Esq. <ray(a)everett.org> www.everett.org/~everett This mail isn't legal advice. Opinion(RE-C) != Opinion(clients(RE-C)) (C)1997 Ray Everett-Church ** Help outlaw "spam"=> http://www.cauce.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ******** Date: Wed, 04 Jun 1997 19:20:36 -0400 From: Chris Poupart <jyhad(a)odyssee.net> To: declan(a)well.com <quote> If you banned commercial e-mail, wouldn't it just affect legitimate commercial transactions? That is to say, wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme builders still be able to spam? I would think that if they are so untraceable that it's hard to block their spam that it wouldn't really matter if it were simply made illegal. </quote> making spam illegal would be a futile plan, unless the authorities were given the power to persue not just the sender, but the people for whome it advertises. Not only could the fly-by-night pyramid-schemes work, but there are programs out there that allow you to route your e-mail so that it is Anonymous, now these programs can also do bulk mailing... I think you get my picture. If you could also press charges against the advertised company (providing it was authorised by them), then that might work. If not, well then with all the free e-mail available (www.hotmail.com and www.netaddress.com or .net I can't remember), people might want to set up an e-mail account to use with Usenet and to give as pw, ect, and then they could keep one privit and "secret" amongst their friends. The internet has flourished w/out government help and I beleive that it will continiue to do so. Chris Poupart Montreal, Canada -- Chris Poupart mailto:chris@peacefire.org Support Freedom of Speech and visit: http://www.peacefire.org | http://www.eff.org http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Field/6078/censor-index.html ********** From: "Marius Loots" <MLOOTS(a)medic.up.ac.za> To: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 11:16:21 GMT+2 Hallo Declan I really enjoy your list. The mailings are very interesting and relevant. Thanks. My thoughts on the two questions: > What are the costs to consumers of > unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it > takes to delete it might be one, hard > drive space might be another. I would > like to know how to quantify it, and > compare it with the cost of sending > e-mail. It would be extremely difficult to quantify in monetary terms. It has been long since I had one of those BIG things in my mailbox. Most of these has lately been smaller emails that compare well in size to some of the material I send around. Because harddrives are not that expensive anymore, storage space is IMO, not a factor at all. The irritation factor is my biggest concern. You have to sort it from the valuable mail, that takes time. You have to delete it, that takes time. And some people has to download it, that takes time. This eating up of my time, irritates me. And with the present information overload, time is one of the few things we definitely don't have. > If you banned commercial e-mail, > wouldn't it just affect legitimate > commercial transactions? That is to say, > wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme > builders still be able to spam? I would > think that if they are so untraceable > that it's hard to block their spam that > it wouldn't really matter if it were > simply made illegal. You are not going to be able to ban it. As long as email is email, there will be people using it to spam. Even if you make it illegal, it will still happen. A few quick thoughts or ideas to be kicked around: 1. What could be made illegal is the selling of email addresses. 2. Ban *unsolicited* commercial email 3. Make ISP who supply service for free or without proper checking liable for prosecution if spam comes from their system. 4. Black-list people that are caught spamming (use in tandem with 3). A number of these spammers are not once-only fly-by-nighters. They strike again and again. Because it is not illegal at the moment, no-one can do anything. I am not able to write the legalese but these are some rough thoughts on the matter. Unsolicited email is unsolicited email, and the sooner we get that out of the system, the better. Groetnis Marius Loots ------------------------------------------------------- Maestro mloots(a)medic.up.ac.za +27-12-319-2144 pgp2.6 TOP 50 on the SA WebChart - Have a look and vote NOW!!! http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6398 Add some Chaos to your Life and put the World in Order ------------------------------------------------------- ********* Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 13:28:38 -0700 To: declan(a)relay.pathfinder.com From: Roger Bohn <Rbohn(a)UCSD.edu> Subject: Re: Spam costs and questions At 3:47 PM -0400 6/4/97, Declan McCullagh wrote: >A friend who's going to be speaking on one of the FTC panels next week >sent me a few questions about spam. Does anyone want to try their hand at >answering them? I'll forward along all responses I get. > > What are the costs to consumers of > unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it > takes to delete it might be one, hard > drive space might be another. I would > like to know how to quantify it, and > compare it with the cost of sending > e-mail. A big cost is that it reduces the S/N ratio of e-mail. As the amount of spam goes up, sooner or later you start missing legitimate messages that you should have read, because you do blanket erases, don't read carefully, close down entire accounts, etc. Personally I've not reached that point, but spam is growing exponentially so I give it 2 years. Cost of telephone connect time is also a consideration for most users. Even if you are on a flat phone rate, there is an opportunity cost from having your phone tied up longer. (Yes, even if you have 2 lines--the members of my household are always fighting over the second line.) > > If you banned commercial e-mail, > wouldn't it just affect legitimate > commercial transactions? That is to say, > wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme > builders still be able to spam? I would > think that if they are so untraceable > that it's hard to block their spam that > it wouldn't really matter if it were > simply made illegal. > Yes and no. Fly by nights would continue, certainly. But look how successful the mail fraud laws have been at limiting (not eradicating) mail based pyramid schemes, for example. Laws, if carefully drawn, would have an effect. I think mandatory labeling is much better than banning commercial e-mail, by the way. An outright ban has several problems, in the U.S. at least. A mandatory label deals with the S/N issue cited above (you can filter commercial messages), and as mail packages get smarter they can be set to not download messages selectively, thus dealing with the other problems. Something as draconian as an outright ban also encourages lawbreaking more than a labeling provision would. Roger Bohn ###

8 25

Re: Declan as a Crime Beat Reporter
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 14:38:49 -0700 (PDT) From: Joe Shea <joeshea(a)netcom.com> To: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> As a real Hollywood reporter, I'm sorry to tell you both Chasen's and the Brown Derby are long shuttered. So is Scandia and Cock 'n Bull. About the only old-line place of that type left is Tam O'Shanter. Best, Joe Shea Editor-in-Chief The American Reporter joeshea(a)netcom.com http://www.newshare.com:9999

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Re: McVeigh
by William H. Geiger III 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In <199706042335.TAA16934(a)muesli.ai.mit.edu>, on 06/04/97 at 07:35 PM, Hallam-Baker <hallam(a)ai.mit.edu> said: >Since its clear that the McVeigh appologists are simply repeating >arguments from alt.conspiracy I don't think theres much point continuing >the thread. >There is absolutely nothing that anyone did that justified McVeigh's >murder of the kids in the daycare center or anyone else. Frissel, Gieger >and co are simply trying to distract attention from that fact. No not at all Phil, while I can't speak for anyone else on the list I myself am try to bring to attention that no one cared about the children at Waco that were burned alive at the hands of the BATF. The general opinion was that those children shouldn't have been there and it was the fault of the Branch Dividians that the BATF murdered them. Now the same thing happens to some Federal Employes and now we hear the cries, and wails, "oh the humanity", "the children the children". Where was the outrage and demands for justice for the children of Waco. They were just an "evil cult" their children deserved to burn. I have heard this logic whispered by more than 1 Federal pig. I for one am sick and tired of hearing these two faced bastards wine and cry when it happens to them by cheer when it happen to someone else. >Hell, if we were to take them seriously they would have to all be FBI >agents attempting to entrap the unwary... > Phill >PS: Could the FBI agent monitoring the list tell us where to send in >evidence in connection with the Bell case? Don't worry Phil they know what a good little sheep you are and are confidant that you will do your duty when it comes time to fill the ovens. - -- - --------------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html - --------------------------------------------------------------- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3a Charset: cp850 Comment: Registered_User_E-Secure_v1.1b1_ES000000 iQCVAwUBM5YfCo9Co1n+aLhhAQHLfwQAgzs1PcCrLXW/apUy6mt1Pt06owV3eT7/ UHjPWsr1IRrDsv/yQmXcZm7ilCAOyq/WZvgnO8sFGqKXb5QAeldIEgwmENKHEPtv UchPpLAQCrYxWpciRfc5DwXL+fnQDUFvooXTOmZazP0qsZ/OmrjmkDPckXmUAcxf DwaeQrMxacM= =x5R/ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

1 0

Re: Webpage picketing (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, Forwarded message: > From: "Peter Trei" <trei(a)process.com> > Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 11:33:54 -6 > Subject: Re: Webpage picketing (fwd) > [Jim wants to be able to 'cyber-picket' - force people to read his > opinions before they can browse sites he does not like. He is > attempting to claim that the net backbones corrospond to public > spaces, where his local government permits him to picket.] Quit taking the drugs they are affecting your attention span. You should also quit trying to divine persons motivation, you are terrible at it. > 'Publically funded network backbones'? Can you name one (in the US)? Actualy I have already named two. > None of which have the slightest relevance - Internet II is a > proposed (and still vaporware) project for an academic-research-only > network Actualy the Internet II documents that I have seen have specificaly mentioned letting students at public schools use them as well as people doing research both private and publicly funded. I understand that it should start to take physical shape just after the turn of the century. The High Speed Supercomputer network is also going to be available for use within just a couple years as well. - it's future existence has no impact on those of us using > the private backbone system of today. You have obviously missed the entire point, today is not the issue. It is tomorrow that we should be looking at and the clear indications that Uncle Sam puts out about funding/supporting future expansion. The federal government can't afford to keep its fingers out of the pie. > Question: if you get the ability to put up your 'cyber-picket' frame, > how about cyber-counter-pickets? Cant the picketee put a page in > front of yours? Who gets priority? Where does it stop? Yes. Yes. First come first served. When the funds run out. > Jim, your idea is roadkill on that horribly imprecise analogy, > the 'information superhighway' (spit). It can't be resuscitated > by asking for 'information super-sidewalks' or claiming the existance > of 'information super-public-spaces'. The underlying metaphor is > fatally flawed. In your opinion, which so far has been nothing but inuendo, ad hominim arguments, and pure opinion. How about some reasoning to go along with it? _______________________________________________________________________ | | | Speak the truth, but leave immediately after. | | | | Slovenian Proverb | | | | Jim Choate ravage(a)ssz.com | | The Armadillo Group www.ssz.com | | Austin, Texas, USA 512-451-7087 | |_______________________________________________________________________|

1 0

Re: Webpage picketing (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, Forwarded message: > From: "William H. Geiger III" <whgiii(a)amaranth.com> > Date: Wed, 04 Jun 97 21:38:40 -0500 > Subject: Re: Webpage picketing (fwd) > >Correct and using my model would in no way interfere with a users use of > >the network. It would not add excessive delay or other impedemants. It > >would be a one time event that occured when the site was initialy > >accessed. Much like having to go past the picketers on the side of the > >road at least once. > > I guess we will have to agree to disagree. If I am stoped even once that > is one time too many. In the real world if a group of picketers try to > impead my entrance to a store parking lot the growl of a 427 does alot to > convince them of the errors of their ways. :) Whew, talk about fixated. NOBODY is talking about stopping anything but you, THAT would be unconstitutional. I am NOT saying that such a situation would prevent you from reaching your destination (ie the store) but it would require you to pass through the picket line (ie get a single page as your first responce to your request) and be exposed however briefly to their speech. > Yes and it is the participants who are sending the packets. If I am > sending packets between point A & B you have no right to interfere with > those transmisions. You are right, I WOULD have a right to interfere with their reception which is after all what I am talking about. I am in no way discussing slowing or otherwise altering the request from the user, I am specificaly talking about adding a single page to the servers output. Straw man. > You donot have the right to re-route them or substute > them for others. If you have somthing to say put up a web page and if I am > interested I'll stop by and take a look. You don't have the right to force > me to look. To do so would be a serious perversion of the 1st Amendment. Absolutely, and none of this has anything whatsoever to do with the issue at hand. Another straw man. If you are using a publicly funded thoroughfare I CAN consitutionaly FORCE you to see my message if YOU insist on going to that particular store. It isn't the user who is being picketed, it is the server. You as a user of the system have nothing to say about it, unless as alluded by another cpunk you want to picket the picketers (which is completely legal and happens quite often). _______________________________________________________________________ | | | Speak the truth, but leave immediately after. | | | | Slovenian Proverb | | | | Jim Choate ravage(a)ssz.com | | The Armadillo Group www.ssz.com | | Austin, Texas, USA 512-451-7087 | |_______________________________________________________________________|

2 1

Re: Password pirates plunder XXX sites, from The Netly News
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A huge number of passwords to pay-only porn sites are loose on the Net. Just surf newsgroups like alt.sex.passwords or do a simple search through a typical web engine and long lists of logins are easy to find. There is an easy solution to this problem. Just use one-time passwords. Put it in a cookie. Every time the customer accesses the service you give him a new one. He doesn't have to do anything. If he gives his password away it won't work for him any more. John

2 1

ALERT: Senate to vote on mandatory key escrow as early as Thu June 19!
by Shabbir J. Safdar 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

============================================================================= ____ _ _ _ / ___|_ __ _ _ _ __ | |_ ___ | \ | | _____ _____ | | | '__| | | | '_ \| __/ _ \ _____| \| |/ _ \ \ /\ / / __| | |___| | | |_| | |_) | || (_) |_____| |\ | __/\ V V /\__ \ \____|_| \__, | .__/ \__\___/ |_| \_|\___| \_/\_/ |___/ |___/|_| SENATE COMMERCE COMMITTEE SET TO VOTE ON MANDATORY KEY ESCROW LEGISLATION AS EARLY AS THURSDAY JUNE 19TH! CALL NOW! Date: June 17, 1997 Expires July 1, 1997 URL:http://www.crypto.com/ crypto-news(a)panix.com Redistribution of crypto-news is allowed in its entirety. _____________________________________________________________________________ Table of Contents ALERT - Senate Committee Set to Vote on Key Escrow What YOU CAN DO NOW! Background On The Encryption Issue How to start or stop receiving crypto-news About This Alert _____________________________________________________________________________ ALERT - SENATE COMMITTEE SET TO VOTE ON BILL TO GUARANTEE GOVERNMENT ACCESS TO YOUR PRIVATE ONLINE COMMUNICATIONS On Tuesday June 17, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Bob Kerrey (D-NE) introduced legislation which would all but mandate that Americans provide guaranteed government access to their private online communications and stored files. The bill, known as "The Secure Public Networks Act of 1997" (S.909) represents a full scale assault on your right to protect the privacy and confidentiality of your online communications. Please take a moment to read the instructions below and, if your Senator is a member of the Commerce Committee, please take a moment to call your Senator TODAY! Though offered on Capitol Hill as a compromise, the McCain-Kerrey bill is virtually identical to draft legislation proposed earlier this year by the Clinton Administration while doing nothing to protect the privacy and security of Internet users. The bill closely mirrors draft legislation proposed by the Clinton Administration earlier this Spring. Specifically, the bill would: * Compel Americans to Use Government-Approved Key Recovery Systems * Make Key Recovery a Condition Of Participation in E-Commerce * Allow Government Carte Blanche Access to Sensitive Encryption Keys Without a Court Order * Create New Opportunities for Cybercrimes * Codify a low 56-bit Key Length Limit on Encryption Exports * Create Broad New Criminal Penalties for the Use of Encryption The full text of the bill, along with a detailed analysis, is available online at http://www.cdt.org/crypto/ ________________________________________________________________________ WHAT'S HAPPENING NOW On Thursday June 19, the Senate Commerce Committee is scheduled to hold a vote on S. 377, the Promotion of Commerce Online in the Digital Era (Pro-CODE) Act - an Internet-friendly encryption reform bill sponsored by Senators Burns (R-MT) and Leahy (D-VT). Senator McCain, the Commerce Committee Chairman, is expected to try and substitute his proposal for Pro-CODE - gutting the proposal and inserting provisions which would all but mandate guaranteed government access to your private communications. Please take a few moments to help protect your privacy and security in the Information Age by following the simple instructions below. ________________________________________________________________________ WHAT YOU CAN DO NOW ** THE COMMITTEE IS EXPECTED TO VOTE AT 9:30 AM Eastern JUNE 19 ** ** IT IS CRITICAL THAT YOU CALL YOUR SENATOR TODAY ** A list of Senate Commerce Committee members is printed below. If your Senator is on the list, please call TODAY. NOTE - If your Senator is not on the list, please visit http://www.crypto.com/adopt and ADOPT YOUR LEGISLATOR. You will receive targeted alerts next time your Representatives or Senators are poised to vote on this and other critical Internet Related issues. 1. If your Senator's name is on the list below, pick up the phone and call them at 202-224-3121. Ask for your Senator's office. Order: Frist, Abraham, Snowe, Stevens, Browe, Bryan. * = has publicly stated opposition to the McCain-Kerrey bill. + = has publicly stated support to the McCain-Kerrey bill. William Harrison Bill Frist, R-TN Spencer Abraham, R-MI ALL THESE SENATORS ARE Olympia Snowe, R-ME TELEPHONABLE AT 202-224-3121 Ted Stevens, R-AK John B. Breaux, D-LA Richard H. Bryan, D-NV +John McCain, R-AZ, Chairman *Conrad R. Burns, R-MT Slade Gorton, R-WA *Trent Lott, R-MS Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-TX *John Ashcroft, R-MO *Sam Brownback, R-KS +Ernest F. Hollings, D-SC, Ranking minority member Daniel K. Inouye, D-HI Wendell H. Ford, D-KY +John D. Rockefeller, IV, D-WV +John F. Kerry, D-MA *Byron L. Dorgan, D-ND *Ron Wyden, D-OR 2. Ask for the staffer that handles the encryption issue 3. Urge your Senator to OPPOSE THE McCAIN-KERREY BILL (S. 909) at the Commerce Committee Markup on June 19: SAY THIS -> I am a constituent calling to urge the Senator to oppose the McCain-Kerrey "Secure Public Networks Act" at the Committee markup on June 19. The bill all but mandates key-recovery encryption and represents a grave threat to privacy and electronic commerce on the Internet. We need a solution to this issue that protects privacy and security on the Internet, and the solution being offered by Senators McCain and Kerrey isn't it. I hope you will take a strong stand on this important issue. 4. IMPORTANT! -- PLEASE LET US KNOW HOW IT WENT! Go to the feedback page for your member of Congress at http://www.crypto.com/feedback/ and let us know how it went. This will help us coordinate our strategy on the ground in DC. 5. Please forward this alert to your friends and colleagues who live in your congressional district (do not forward after June 25) 6. Finally, relax! You have done more to help fight for privacy and security on the Internet in 5 minutes than most people do in a year! We appreciate your support! ________________________________________________________________________ BACKGROUND ON THE ENCRYPTION POLICY ISSUE Complete background information, including: * A down-to-earth explanation of why this debate is important to Internet users * Analysis and background on the issue * An analysis of the Risks of Key-Recovery by leading cryptographers * Text of the Administration draft legislation * Text of Congressional proposals to reform US encryption policy * Audio transcripts and written testimony from recent Congressional Hearings on encryption policy reform * And more! Are all available at http://www.crypto.com/ ________________________________________________________________________ WHAT'S AT STAKE Encryption technologies are the locks and keys of the Information age, enabling individuals and businesses to protect sensitive information as it is transmitted over the Internet. As more and more individuals and businesses come online, the need for strong, reliable, easy-to-use encryption technologies has become a critical issue to the health and viability of the Net. Current US encryption policy, which limits the strength of encryption products US companies can sell abroad, also limits the availability of strong, easy-to-use encryption technologies in the United States. US hardware and software manufacturers who wish to sell their products on the global market must either conform to US encryption export limits or produce two separate versions of the same product, a costly and complicated alternative. The export controls, which the NSA and FBI argue help to keep strong encryption out of the hands of foreign adversaries, are having the opposite effect. Strong encryption is available abroad, but because of the export limits and the confusion created by nearly four years of debate over US encryption policy, strong, easy-to-use privacy and security technologies are not widely available off the shelf or "on the net" here in the US. A recently discovered flaw in the security of the new digital telephone network exposed the worst aspects of the Administration's encryption policy. Because the designers needed to be able to export their products, the system's security was "dumbed down". Researchers subsequently discovered that it is quite easy to break the security of the system and intrude on what should be private conversations. This incident underscores the larger policy problem: US companies are at a competitive disadvantage in the global marketplace when competing against companies that do not have such hindrances. And now, for the first time in history, the Clinton Administration and members of the US Senate have proposed DOMESTIC RESTRICTIONS on the ability of Americans to protect their privacy and security online. All of us care about our national security, and no one wants to make it any easier for criminals and terrorists to commit criminal acts. But we must also recognize encryption technologies can aid law enforcement and protect national security by limiting the threat of industrial espionage and foreign spying, promote electronic commerce and protecting privacy. What's at stake in this debate is nothing less than the future of privacy and the fate of the Internet as a secure and trusted medium for commerce, education, and political discourse. ________________________________________________________________________ HOW TO START OR STOP RECEIVING CRYPTO-NEWS To subscribe to crypto-news, sign up from our WWW page (http://www.crypto.com) or send mail to majordomo(a)panix.com with "subscribe crypto-news" in the body of the message. To unsubscribe, send a letter to majordomo(a)panix.com with "unsubscribe crypto-news" in the body. Requests to unsubscribe that are sent to shabbir(a)vtw.org will be ignored. ________________________________________________________________________ ABOUT THIS ALERT This message was brought to you by the Center for Democracy and Technology (http://www.cdt.org) and the Voters Telecommunications Watch (http://www.vtw.org/) who have joined together to create the Adopt Your Legislator Campaign - a unique and effective way of creating dialogue between members of Congress and their Constituents on critical Internet-related issues. For more information on the Adopt Your Legislator Campaign, please visit http://www.crypto.com/adopt/ ______________________________________________________________________________ end alert 06.17.97 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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RE: McVeigh? Nimrods.....
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I was having dinner with Don Haines, a friend of mine who's a legislative counsel with the national ACLU, when the McVeigh verdict came down. A Canadian prosecutor who was having dinner with us said: "So McVeigh did it after all." Don replied: "No. He was found guilty of the crime." There is a difference. -Declan On Wed, 4 Jun 1997, Chris DiBona wrote: > <rant> > > Okay folks...what the hell is wrong with you? First off, this whole McVeigh > Crap is a bit off topic..but we all know this. The amazing thing about the > string of posts has been that people have forgotten that He has been found > guilty of murdering quite a few people. Guilty, Guilty, Guilty. Jury of > his peers, dare I say, people like us all. Randomly selected. This is how > our system works. > > Yes there are flaws in the system. > > Yes the US govt. has it's problems in the past, present and future. > > Yes people have died because schnooks in DC have had thier heads up thier > ass. Or not. > > So whether or not you belive he did it.....how can anyone be _for_ what > _happened_. People died senselessly, I can't believe that anyone (in this > case Duncan Frissell frissell(a)panix.com, lets give credit where it is due) > can be so callous and , frankly, sick , to say : > > <> > As to the Children of OKC, people who turn the care of their children over > to > government employees or contractors do not place too high a value on those > children. > <> > > Are you serious? You should be ashamed that you think this way. Do you > really > think those children who died weren't cared for? You are a sick person who > should seriously consider therapy. Anyone who read this and said "Yeah!" > is > on the same plane. > > To all the people who defend blowing shit and people up to get thier point > across.... > > Okay..so the IRA does it, and HAMMAS does it, and the CIA does it. So does > the > PLFP the FARC and a zillion other terrorist groups. And it appears McVeigh > did it. > But that doesn't make blowing up children in freakin' day care all right. > Do you > understand this? There is no reason to blow up kids. It's wrong. For any > reason. > Bad. Duncan...looking over your past posts.. .I've got to wonder if you > were on acid > when you wrote this, many of your posts were fairly cozigent. But this? Do > you have > children? Any cousins who are children? A nephew or neice? Do these > children > who may be important to you have parents who "care" about them enough to > scour the planet to find a good,safe day care that isn't withing the blast > radius or > shooting range of : > > A government office. > A large corporations headquarters. > A law firm. > A post office. > A town square. > A restaurant. > A bank. > Anywhere some asshole might have a gun and go loopy. > Anywhere some asshole might have a car be drunk and go loopy. > Anywhere some asshole might have a gun and a car and be drunk and go loopy. > > If they even could, I'm someone somewhere will find a way to fuck up that > safe place. > > You get the point, I could go on....but I won't. Perhaps you should think > and read > over your posts before you post again. The only good thing (and I mean > ONLY) to > come out of the whole Mcveigh thing being discussed here on cypherpunks, is > that it has allowed me to add to my killfiles people who have for some > reason, > had a prefrontal. > > To all the dipshits who could possibly think otherwise. I should also > mention it > is an EQUALLY fucked up thing to blow up adults. > > Like my fellow Santa Clara County Resident Bill Frantz said : > > For cypherpunks this comes down to: Make code, not bombs. > > Chris DiBona > > </rant> > >

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