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Newbie Question
by Law Abiding Citizen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm new to encryption, having just purchased PGP. I want to abide by the law, but I don't know who to send a copy of my secret key to. Do I send it to the FBI guy who shot the unarmed woman, the FBI guy, Kahoe, who ordered evidence of the FBI murder of citizens destroyed, or to one of the other four top FBI officials who helped with the cover-up? Do I have to send a copy of my secret key to the CIA, as well? If so, do I just give it to my drug dealer and have him pass it along to his connection, or should I just give it to a Jewish person and tell them to have the Mossad pass it along to the CIA? Also, I like sticking large, foreign objects in my rectum. Can I legally do that myself, with a toilet plunger, or are they restricted to only use by LEA's in meeting the legitimate needs of law enforcement. Insincerely, A.L-A. Citizen

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Re: "Show me an example of terrorists using the Internet or (fwd)
by Blanc 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jim Choate wrote: >> Stalkers, thieves, rapists, drug addicts, perverts, etc., or just real >> animals from the animal kingdom, strike at the most inopportune times, when >> there are no officially sanctioned police forces around to be of help. > >I have to object to the inclusion of drug addicts, they do what they do >because the legislators and police want to stick their noses in other >peoples business. If drug addicts resort to crime then society as a whole >must garner some of the responsibility of putting them in that situation. .................................................... We weren't discussing why people commit crimes against others, Jim. We were discussing the disagreeability of having & using guns. And yes, killing doggies is also a Bad Thing. Generally. ('cept when they're foaming at the mouth, snarling, with red blazing eyes, lunging directly at you. That is a Very Bad Doggie.) .. Blanc

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NYTimes Editorial slams F[reeh,uck] and calls on Clinton to stamp it out!
by Attila T. Hun 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- The lead editorial, the stated opinion of the paper itself, in this mornings NYTimes slams F[reeh.uck]'s initiative as "crossing the line" and that Clinton "needs to stamp out a bad idea." strong words, newspaper policy editorial, important words. The NYTimes actually has a clue, a strong clue. support the NYTimes! The NYTimes syndicate feeds thousands of the US papers, particularly the small town papers and is considered gospel by many. http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/editorial/03fri4.html The Clinton Administration has proposed several unworkable plans over the years to keep powerful encryption programs that scramble telephone and computer messages out of the hands of foreign terrorists and criminals. But it has never tried to put the need to eavesdrop on criminals above the privacy rights of ordinary Americans. Last month the F.B.I. Director, Louis Freeh, crossed that line by urging Congress to outlaw the manufacture and distribution of encryption programs the Government cannot instantly crack.... ...The plan is unworkable because uncrackable encryption software is readily available abroad. Congress could try to forbid Americans to use any unbreakable encryption, regardless of who makes it. But that would trample on rights that Americans jealously protect to communicate free of Washington's interference. The best way to reduce many types of industrial and financial crime is to provide citizens powerful encryption so they can communicate without fear of corporate spies and thieves.... ... Before encryption controls pick up more momentum, the White House needs to stamp out a bad idea. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: latin1 Comment: No safety this side of the grave. Never was; never will be iQCVAwUBNDS47L04kQrCC2kFAQFFJAQA1/jnXjczlvUyVZ/8G6iVnLdD7+dmGw5k 8DnMy5Gw4nuR6cPBFjGLnomvZI2OXgJ4RFR/8Mv3pG9MBohPxOKq6nGdWjZV60F/ 8GpInE/Unb6hzFIxjET7a3wbjgt93PrmZjjSwfHCSiUBqUQXYcH0RUpyNF9zl0o8 HD7uS5WgVow= =7ZNz -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Traffic Analysis (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Fri, 03 Oct 1997 01:34:56 -0400 > From: "Robert A. Costner" <pooh(a)efga.org> > Subject: Re: Traffic Analysis > Remailers in general will throw away messages at times. Sometimes on > purpose, sometimes by accident. This is not replaced by any cover traffic. Perhaps this should be added. > For purposes of argument, we could say that a remailer throws away > messages that violate usage policies. This accounts for some amount of > traffic, let's just say 10% to name a figure. Way too high for commercial use. Get it down to something like .01 and that would be workable I suspect (haven't done the math). Course this raises the issue of who pays for dumped mail on a commercial box. Should the customer pay since it was their action that instigated the drop? Or perhaps the remailer since they were selling a service which they didn't provide at their discretion? > Of course this sounds > reprehensible, Not to me. It's your box and your money, set any policy that you desire. If I as a user don't like it, I'll beat feet... > so you ask what sort of message gets thrown out? Some > examples might be: > > * 3,000 copies of the same message to the same person > * Any mail from Sanford Wallace at Cyberpromo.com > * A 300MB mailbomb Let's generalize a bit to see if we can get a clearer picture. - traffic that seems to be duplicate. What if the digital signature on each one is valid implying the originator intended to send the 3,000 pieces. Do you dump them and take the money? - traffic from specific parties whose reputation capital is low. As a business should this really matter as long as the creetin pays the bill? - traffic of an abnormal format Don't see any issues with this one. Are there any other classes that you can think of that you might want to filter on? > Basically some messages that constitute abuse (without examining actual > content) get tossed. Ok, so you are doing header filtering. > These are "valid" messages from people which the > remailer might decide to not continue to send. Much of this mail never > even reaches the remailer code as it gets tossed at an earlier level. > Since about 10% of incoming traffic gets tossed, it would seem that this > would somehow effect traffic analysis. This traffic is not replaced, and > much of the dropped traffic is not even know to the remailer. How much > would this actually effect traffic analysis? Let's see if we can put some numbers to it... We receive n pieces of mail. n/10 is tossed at reception based on header filtering. For each mail that gets to the remailer code we sent m cover messages and 1 real message. So the remailer handles a total of (n - n/10) + (m + 1)(n-n/10) pieces in a given time period, t. Let z stand for (n - n/10) the actual number of processible traffic, we can reduce this to z + (m + 1) z. Let's assume now that we go ahead and transmit cover for those emails we get something like z + (m + 1) z + m ( n/10 ). We don't add a 1 to the m(n/10) because we don't have a real outgoing to process. So the total traffic load of the remailer can be represented by: L = z + (m + 1) z + m ( n/10 ) or, L = (n - n/10) + (m + 1)(n - n/10) + m(n/10) Now if you look at a travelling salesman problem you see quickly that the complexity grows quite quickly. This produces a traffic analysis load of something of the form, T = L ^ v Where v represents the complexity factor in dealing with the possible combinations possible. So, without actualy plugging numbers in there, I would say it looks like a small increase in output could grow pretty quickly because of the power growth factor in the extra traffic and processing it. > As a side point, software problems will at times cause chained messages to > get tossed. From time to time certain remailers become incompatible with > each other, or user held public keys do not get updated properly. This > will also cause messages to get tossed. Ok, let's add a 'software failure' category. > Cracker sends messages as "Anonymous" and does not allow replies to be > returned to the sender. Redneck on the other hand allows each user to pick > a pseudonym and allows relies to be returned to the sender. This is known > as a "nym". The whole point of a nym is to be able to receive replies (as > well as establish reputation capital). People who have nyms on the > remailer want to receive email back to them. Nyms are managed and > authenticated with PGP. My question is would it foil traffic analysis if a > number of remailer server generated messages were to go out to the nyms > without ever having matching incoming traffic? If I understand you the remailer would send outbound traffic to its input for distribution to your subscribers? I don't believe it would factor into the analysis at all if all the source destinations are the same. Outbound traffic from party A that went to party B would be important to track. So, if you wanted to do this sort of stuff and you wanted Mallet to chase their tail I would randomly pick source addresses from my subscriber base and send the bogus messages to my subscribers making shure nobody received an email from themselves. Then it looks like everyone is involved in a conspiracy... > >A commercial remailer should not keep records of its use. However, I suspect > >that eventualy remailers will be required to keep usage records by law. > > I'd be willing to be involved in a first amendment challenge against any > such law. I suspect we would win in the US. At least we won the last 1st > amendment challenge against remailers. (ACLU vs Miller) It has nothing to do with limiting speech so I doubt you'd have a 1st leg to stand on. Furthermore, the 1st doesn't guarantee the right to anonymity. If you want to claim that as a fundamental right you'd need to use the 9th and 10th. It does have to do with being able to trace the perp back if needed. I am not saying I agree with it, just recognize that reasonable people will see this lack of tracability via a court order as a clear threat to their security at all levels. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there | | be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. | | | | -Alan Greenspan- | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http:// www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Re: Stronghold
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dimitri Vulis reposted parts of the Stronghold/censorship drama: Dimitri: This replay continues your artful distortion of the exchanges, presumbly to make your best case, yet it still fails to explain your original beef with Stronghold. Perhaps this is unfair, but it now appears that you are using the disputed censorship issue to cloud your reluctance, or inability, to substantiate a fault in Stronghold. Send me the Stronghold fault, I'll be happy to add it to the other crypto-security stuff that wasn't supposed to be published. This is not meant to defuse the censorship matter, that's still live ammo.

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Re: Stronghold
by phelix＠vallnet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Nope. Like I said, I'm not selling Stronghold or any competing product, I >don't lose anything when someone foolishly buys it, so why should I present >any evidence? I (and several other people on this mailing list) were threatened >by C2Net's lawyers; so to avoid unpleasant disputes, I told them I won't be >publishing whatever I might know about their product. > So, why don't you (and several other people on this mailing list) use the ananymous remailers to present your evidence. Others have wondered why people would use remailers. Here's a prime example. Use the remailer (if you have anything to say).

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Re: Traffic Analysis (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Fri, 03 Oct 1997 05:41:58 -0400 > From: "Robert A. Costner" <pooh(a)efga.org> > Subject: Re: Traffic Analysis > At 02:07 AM 10/3/97 -0500, Jim Choate wrote: > >> For purposes of argument, we could say that a remailer throws away > >> messages that violate usage policies. > > > >Way too high for commercial use. Get it down to something like .01 and that > >would be workable I suspect (haven't done the math). > > You may be confusing actual traffic, with valid customer traffic. (BTW - > the 10% reject figure was totally pulled out of the air. Since there is no > logging on a remailer, I'm just making an educated guess.) Almost all > commercial sendmail implementations reject a large amount of traffic and > call it "spam filtering". It's very effective, but the fact is that > incoming mail traffic is blocked before any program such as a remailer can > see the messages. Some of this is done by IP address, some is done through > other methods. I'm merely suggesting that a commercial remailer will have > similar policies. Duh. Look you picked the numbers and the scenarios, if you got a bitch about 'em talk to yourself...their your ugly baby. > >Course this raises the > >issue of who pays for dumped mail on a commercial box. Should the customer > >pay since it was their action that instigated the drop? Or perhaps the > >remailer since they were selling a service which they didn't provide at > >their discretion? > > For usage policies, I would think it is the originating user's fault. Acceptable. > For > middleman mail rejects, it is the middleman remailer's fault. So how do we rollback the payments if say the nth hop breaks the delivery? If I were a user and one of the remailers dropped the traffic I would want all my money back, I'm paying for delivery to a specific party. It is clear that the n-1 remailers has no claim to the charges since the email was not delivered to the recipient. Yet, it is not fair to take their income simply because some other remailer dropped mail due to a policy problem, which they clearly didn't have since they delivered the traffic to the next hop successfuly. Perhaps the remailer with the restrictive hop should pay the n-1 remailers. This would certainly provide clear financial incentive for remailers to have liberal fair use policies (which I support fully) and act as true commen-carries simply doing a job mechanicaly like the phone system or the network infrastructure itself. The bottem line is that if commercial anonymous remailers will survive they have to be as liberal with handling traffic as my routed is. > For public > key errors, it is the originating user's fault. Is it? If this were commercial systems the key server would NOT be on any remailers involved otherwise we have a prime target for man-in-the-middle attacks. So, assuming the user gets the key and the remailers get the keys from a 3rd party server which delivers the incorrect keys for whatever reason. Who pays for the failure then? To me it looks like the key server, but they aren't involved in traffic control but key control. While it is clearly fair to charge them for costs (say 1 remailer hop) incurred due to bad keys (which could be the original submitters fault), who pays the other remailers who handle the traffic and loose the income through no fault of their own? Also, what happens if the key is good but the software glitches (which is indistinguishable from a bad key at the source level)? Are you proposing we re-send for free all along the chain? I don't think the remailers which succeded will take kindly to that. If the MTBF for a remailer is n then the MTBF for m remailers is n*m. In other words the remailer chain gets less reliable as it gets longer. > >If I understand you the remailer would send outbound traffic to its input > >for distribution to your subscribers? I don't believe it would factor into > >the analysis at all if all the source destinations are the same. Outbound > >traffic from party A that went to party B would be important to track. > > Giving an example that overly simplifies things... I think my idea here was > that for some number of nyms, they would each receive an average of, say, > five messages each day. All five messages would be addressed from the > remailer and PGP encrypted. Let me say it again, traffic analysis doesn't look at the contents, cryptanalysis does. Whether the contents are encrypted or not is irrelevant. The word 'encrypted' NEVER occurs in traffic analysis. You encrypt the contents because it is assumed that the network analysis has already succeeded. Ok, so the recipient has no way to reply to specific parties unless the contents contain the source address in a source encrypted block. In such a case Mallet is going to look at the recipient and begin traffic analysis on them. Which Mallet is going to do as soon as they either submit or recieve traffic from that node anyway. Seems moot. An effective Mallet collects statistics on all participants indiscrimenantly. This is another example of the apparently unrecognized and implicit assumption that Mallet is only going to look at one party in the chain. Bad assumption. Traffic analysis will succeed ONLY if the *network* is analyzed, not some specific node in that network. This sounds like a message pool where a recipient must attempt decode on every packet they recieve. The ones not meant for them fail. I don't believe this is a commercialy viable process because of the amount of work on the recipients machine. I have a further question. The cover traffic that shows up in the recipients mailbox unrequested is spam isn't it? Also, when the recipient uncovers the last block is it going to say "This space intentionaly left blank"? Or can users of your remailer expect to recieve email full of hex gibberish they can't decode since they don't have a key? My suspicion is that if you are sending cover traffic to anything other than a /dev/null recipient with an a priori agreement you are not going to keep your users long. > Four of the messages would be from real people > trying to communicate with the owner of the nym. One would be a bogus > message sent to confuse traffic analysis. Turn those numbers around and you might manage to cover the traffic. The cover traffic MUST be greater than the 'real' traffic to be effective. My suspicion based on about 4 months of playing with MixMaster 1.5 years ago is that this ratio must be several orders of magnitude unless your traffic is measured in the millions+ of transactions per day. > All four real messages would > come into the remailer encrypted to the remailer and addressed to the > remailer. My thought was that fake outgoing messages to the nym would look > identical to real messages, thereby helping obscure the "mix" just a little > better. This helps hide the identity of the sender of the email that is > headed to a nym. All the outgoing traffic better look the 'same' it's nothing but a standard TCP/IP routing header and the contents (which we never look at). The remailer software is irrelevant on this issue. Traffic analysis relies on the stability of the protocols and their source & destination info not what they are used for. As for the rest of it, take the equation I gave in a previous email and feed it into a spreadsheet. Develop the equations that define the network using the same sort of structures and proceedures you use for a travelling salesman problem (check a local library). If you're asking me to do that work then I need money, I'll talk about work for free - I don't do work for free. > email. The remailer keeps this info in an internal database (as it must) > and is not available to anyone other than the remailer software. The remailer only needs records of transactions while a transaction remains un-committed. The only long term record it should keep is the number of transactions processed and how much money is currently on the books. The records are not available unless somebody cracks the box and begins to tool around the OS ... Mallet is pretty sneaky he reads CERT and collects hacker software too. If your remailer is keeping records of transactions after the transactions close you are not secure. You are actualy providing further incentive to Mallet. > Having just spent a year and a half involved in a federal court case over > the 1st amendment right to anonymity on the net, and winning, I'd have to > disagree with you here. Our affidavit specifically mentioned remailers, > among other things. Just exactly where is anonymity mentioned in the 1st? And since it clearly is not how do you extend: ARTICLE I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Is your claim that the remailer is a press? (I rhetoricaly bet not) If so then every computer irrespective of use is a press and protected. Are you going to follow this line in future cases? Or is your argument that the traffic is speech and therefore the carrier of the traffic is immune to prosecution? If so you may have some problems in the future when the judges and prosecutors get a better clue. Because the 1st's speech clause protects the source of speech not the carrier - that's why the founding fathers specificaly mention freedom of the press - to extend that protection to the carrier. Or did you use the commen-carrier approach? My money is that you used the second line of reasoning which means you can expect it to be over-turned in the coming years. Unless somebody manages to get a court to recognize computers as presses and extend those protections fully or networked computers (not the applications they are put to) in general as commen-carrier the battle isn't over. Now if you throw the 9th and 10th in there (which I further rhetoricaly bet you didn't) you got a winning combo. Rhetorical question: do you realize that all networked computers are remailers at the routed level? Did you extend your argument thusly? ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there | | be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. | | | | -Alan Greenspan- | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http:// www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Re: Stronghold
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jeff Barber <jeffb(a)issl.atl.hp.com> writes: > This is revisionist history. I can't recall any intimation at the > time that any messages were filtered from the unfiltered list. There were three lists. The unfiltered list did not go through the moderator's hands in any way and continued to received all messages (which is how unfiltered subscribers found out about the problem). The filtered list had the posts approved by the moderated. Then there was supposed to be a "flames" list where the moderator sent posts he had rejected. In theory, the moderated+flames lists should have the same contents as the unfiltered list. Here is the original statement by the moderator laying out his policy: > 3) Cypherpunks who wish to read all posts to the list may do so > by taking advantage of either of two optional lists. The first > (cypherpunk-flames(a)toad.com) will consist solely of messages > expurgated from the main Cypherpunks list. (Those who subscribe > to "flames" will be able to easily monitor my moderating > decisions.) The second (cypherpunks-unedited(a)toad.com) will > contain all posts sent to Cypherpunks. It will be the equivalent > of the current open, unmoderated list. It will appeal to those > who don't want list moderation. > > 6) Because every message submitted to Cypherpunk will be posted > to two of the three sister lists, I don't intend to lose much > sleep over whether or not this or that moderating decision was > perfect. I will do the best job I can, within the constraints > listed here. If I err, it isn't fatal. Everyone who wants one > will have two Cypherpunk venues for their posts. Sounds fair > enough to me. What do you think? Here is a message from a pseudonymous poster laying out what actually happened. Many list members may not have seen this message, unless they were subscribed to the unfiltered list. > Well, as it turns out, a number of messages have made it neither to > cypherpunks nor to cypherpunks-flames. Making matters worse, however, > not only are certain messages being suppressed from both lists, but > even messages mentioning that fact get suppressed from both the > cypherpunks and the cypherpunks-flames lists! and here is a letter to him from the moderator, confirming this fact: > Hi, > > On 7 Feb 1997, Against Moderation wrote: > > > What I object to more strongly and think is wrong is the > > fact that it went to *neither* list. > > Unfortunately, it's not as simple as that. As soon as I can > arrange it with John, I am going to stop moderating the list. > In the interim, I *will not* be sending your post onto either > the Flames or the Moderated lists. This is done for legal > reason. As it is, you have already published a libel on the > unedited list by repeating Dimitri's libel. This exposes you to > legal liability, but as an anonymous poster, you are somewhat > insulated from the consequences of your act. In sum, no messages were filtered from the unfiltered list, which is how cypherpunks who avoided moderation learned of the situation. The messages were eliminated from the regular (moderated) list, but they were not sent to the "flames" list, contrary to the stated policies. No hint was given to the subscribers to the moderated list, which was the majority, that this was being done. Messages referring to these facts were also filtered. A sad episode indeed.

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legal question of DSA-based signatures?
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have before me a statement made by Information Security Corp.: "The Comptroller General has ruled that, for the purposes of electronic commerce, DSA-based digital signatures are as legally binding as hand- written signatures." Can anyone verify this?

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Note to cypherpunks in Chile
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Next week I'll be speaking at REUNA-InternetWorld'97 in Santiago, Chile, staying at the Hotel Plaza San Francisco. I'd love to meet anyone who wants an update on U.S. Net-politics (or vice versa). -Declan ------------------------- Declan McCullagh Time Inc. The Netly News Network Washington Correspondent http://netlynews.com/

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