-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- on or about 970928:1225 Tim May <tcmay@got.net> purported to expostulate: [snip Brad Dolan's announcement of Hamas crypto use...] +But I told you all this several weeks ago. Through sources I have no +intention of discussing, I discovered that PGP 5.0 is indeed being used +by the Palestinia freedom fighters in their war against the Zionist +occupiers of their homeland. They got 5.0 shortly after it was +released...and got it their forces by more direct means that that +"public relations fig leaf" of scanning in source code. I'm sure they, like ANY other "terrorist", "undesirable", "foreign", "despicable" USG or LEA denigrated "scum" had an unlimited number of PGP5 copies the day it hit Egghead, or probably long before, and they were all using earlier, more manual, versions before that. just how long after you walk out of Egghead does it take to send a copy to anywhere in the world. Of course, the _approved_ "gentlemen" such as the Karen freedom fighters rebels in Burma and other "approved" freedom fighters were probably given a hand carried copy from our state department. I wonder if the Taleban fanatics received a courtesy copy? in other words, our clueless and power hungry, privacy denying incompetents in Washington missed the boat again. If Hamas Liberation Fighters or the Freedom Fighters whatever, can not get US encryption, they will be forced to use inferior Russian encryption --yeah, right! justice is served? does Washington really believe they can stop worldwide encryption if they stop US encryption. America, the international 800 lb gorilla bully? Not in this case, you can not control crypto with guns anymore than you can forever suppress free speech. Next, as Tim points out, is the domestic political issue and the total stupidity of the Clinton administration as they sacrifice smart diplomacy to satisfy a vocal and overly influential minority whose interests are completely contrary to the American reality. A zionist is a zionist before s/he is an American. and it is these same activists who will sell out our own privacy and security as US LEA and their friends kneejerk themselves into banning raw crypto, and castrating the Bill of Rights, justified by the hysterical "fact" HAMAS is free to pursue their policies of liberating their stolen land with PGP! HAMAS did it before without PGP; life goes on. +(The Palestinian farmer living in Jaffa, with title going back several +generations, is not much impressed when a Jew from Krakow arrives with +ZOG soldiers to expel him from his orange groves, citing the Old +Testament as his title to the land. Any wonder that he and his children +and their children think blowing up some ZOG residents is a reasonable +response?) yup: the United Nations comes in and says that is so; the British evicted 300,000 Palestinians from their homes after WWII to cover their guilt of the Holocaust [actually, the reason the Brits carved up the holy land was to avoid taking all the refugees in], do you think that Palestinian farmer cares? --they're all the same to him. kill them all; Allah is just. all that farmer knows is that someone he does not know, and for whom he owes no allegience, says that land his family has had since the diaspora is not his --he does not know what the diaspora was, and he does not care. +I described this use of PGP to some PGP, Inc. employees at the last +Cypherpunks meeting. Two of them seemed deeply concerned. Apparently +the "freedom fighters" that Phil Z. so conspicuously refers to, the +Karen guerillas in the jungles of Myanmar/Burma, are somehow different +from the Hamas freedom fighters seeking reclamation of their own land +and destruction of the illegal ZOG state. yup, welcome to American liberals. Read Friedman in the NY Times OpEd pages: aggression is bad anywhere; unless, of course, the Israelis are punishing the wicked Palestinians who have the audacity to ask for the land they owned for a 1000 years or so to be returned. how many hundred thousand 'stateless' Palestinians does the King of Jordan support and suffer their political restlessness and sores from concentration camp conditions? they had homes before 1947. Now, how many millions of stateless Palestinians are spread around the Middle East, fermenting like bad wine? how many generations of Palestinians have never known anything except the deprivation, poverty, and statelessness of the concentration camps? The Czechs, after WWII, forced over 500,000 ethnic Germans off land they had been a part of for at least 20 generations, with almost 200,000 lives lost. anybody bother about that in history? after WWI, the Turks slaughtered the Armenians by the millions --still denied in history. the list goes on; who's next? if the US does not look after its quickly vanishing ideals, maybe we're next. it all depends on your perspective as to who is wearing the white hat; and the official US position is HAMAS is a terrorist entity --NUTS. HAMAS just wants what was taken from them returned; HAMAS actually started out as an organization to provide schooling and health care for the Palestinians --and that is still HAMAS' major function. like Hezbollah. Hezbollah has been transformed into a militant organization by the military occupation of South Lebanon and Israel's support of the Lebanese Christian militia. Hezbollah does not actually claim they want to take Israel; they just want south Lebanon; sounds to me like a resistance movement like the free French in WWII who were legally terrorists in their own land. Why should Hezbollah be denied PGP? we would have given it to the French Resistance. For almost 100 years, US governments have "impartially" considered US foreign interests by the definition that "impartial" means in the _economic_ interests of a small class of banker and industrial moguls, movers, and shakers --with one major exception: Israel, facilitated via the virtually total ownership and control of US media by zionists: NYTimes, Washington Post and Newsweek, Time-Warner, CBS, ABC, NBC, Disney, Los Angeles Times... which is more than enough to control not only the media itself, but the access to the news itself. The concept that the US exports democracy and human rights is, and has been, a total fallacy in this century. The United States government is the world's largest dispensor of international terror and governmental meddling --it's only business. The democratic ideals which Alex de Tocqueville waxed eloquently about American governmment in the 1830s, underpinned by _local_ government, were washed away with the surrender of states' rights in the 14th amendment after the Civil War. In this century, the CIA (and predecessors) along with US financial despots, like old Joe Kennedy and Senator Bush, have had a hand in either supporting a Hitler [Bush] or a Stalin [Kennedy] or de-stabilizing virtually every government in the world at one time or another --including destabilizing the Labour party in favour of Iron Maggie's interests within the last 20 years. with the changing of the guard in Washington, I wonder if Major's government was destabilized to further Clinton's interests, or to silence the conservative Brits' derision of Bubba? notice the tone of Brit (well deserved) snotting on Clinton has changed since Tony Blair took office. +PGP and strong crypto is spreading quickly to many freedom +fighters...and even some terrorists (even by my definition). Who +expected otherwise? absolutely so. US foreign policy has not been in the interest of the United States for some time --it has been detrimental to US interests since Bubba and his blind swamp rats assumed power --still thinking after 6 years they are on a campaign trail. supporting the Israeli political dictatorship who will take (or steal by espionage or reverse engineering US donated hardware) our secrets and sell them to the highest bidder is not in the best interests of the US. the US learned nothing from the '72 oil embargo. and how the US can justify supporting 3 million _expensive_ non-citizen units with annual multi-billions of our hard earned dollars, while gaining the absolute enmity of a couple billion other non-citizen units is beyond me. and Americans at home, even if they have been 'informed" that America --not necessarily American individuals-- is the world bully, often worse than Russia (or the British Empire, which was rather fatherly in many ways), refuses to believe the U.S. still believes in gunboat diplomacy --to this day. pax americana! In one form of another, either by action or inaction --the sin of commission or omission--, the US has dirty hands in the stinging indictment rendered against this century by Kofi A. Annan, Secretary-General of the UN, given for the MIT commencement ('97) I begin with the struggle between reason and unreason. When the history of the twentieth century is written, this struggle will figure very prominently in it. On the plane of international affairs, the outbursts of unreason in this century surpass in horror and human tragedy any the world has seen in the entire modern era. From Flanders' fields to the Holocaust and the aggressions that produced World War II; from the killing fields of Cambodia and Rwanda to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia; from the twenty-five million refugees who roam the world today to untold millions, many of them children, who die the slow death of starvation or are maimed for life by land-mines--our century, even this generation, has much to answer for. but-- does this justify limiting the freedoms of US citizens? does this give Mr. FBI movie personality F[reeh,uck] claim to unbridled power of surveillance? F[reeh,uck] thinks it does. does the fact that HAMAS chose a superior US encryption product over an inferior international product justify banning encryption? US enlightened foreign policy, national security, and LEAs think so. F[reeh,uck] and his LEA cheerleaders are nothing more than yesterdays dumb farmers who locked the barn door after the horse ran away. This does not speak well towards encouraging our confidence in the Beltway moles, blinded by years in the tunnel vision of power. be prepared for another emergency assault on encryption now that HAMAS is "on board". lock the barn now that the horse is gone. -- "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other." --Benjamin Franklin ______________________________________________________________________ "attila" 1024/C20B6905/23 D0 FA 7F 6A 8F 60 66 BC AF AE 56 98 C0 D7 B0 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: latin1 Comment: No safety this side of the grave. Never was; never will be iQCVAwUBNDHeob04kQrCC2kFAQG2ogQAm6ovl9njhhNZdWG47tFZGIbdf625+4zY G69Z/hxc40kYN4uqxoRluaYOIa/tw7JloUHAhBqe7lR9e+hIInDQjgbUcdPV53Hz 3/kjmxWFCvgI2wlXI4TnivaD7L0KkogCDVhdvE9uT4NB9F/ASp92YOnUuh9k+dhx bN5hexMJaw4= =Ag5M -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----