January 2014 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Kiev Protest: Cell/Net LibTech Law
by grarpamp 22 Jan '14

22 Jan '14

http://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/blog/maybe-the-most-orwellian-text-messag… https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPR http://craphound.com/images/dictatorship-en.jpg http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25838962

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Re: What more is there? [infil/exfil]
by Anonymous Remailer (austria) 22 Jan '14

22 Jan '14

On 01/20/2014 07:56 PM, grarpamp wrote:> On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 2:57 PM, Anonymous Remailer (austria) > <mixmaster(a)remailer.privacy.at> wrote: >> > I too wish the leaks would come at a faster pace. But I don't think >> > The pace is ok, it keeps up the pressure. The real question is, > is what remains? More of this same stuff we all knew was happening > anyways? Or is there more deeper stuff we only questioned but > shrugged off due to the hardness/fantasy of it all? > > - decryption of aes? cracked rsa? Unlikely, unless it's buried deep within files that Snowden took. Remember, during his very first few interviews, he encouraged us to continue to use encryption and made the statement "encryption works". He also trusted RSA enough to use it to encrypt communications with Greenwald and Poitris (sp?). > - automatic and global translation to stored text of all voice calls? Very real possibility. Commercial tech is almost there. Assuming government is 3-5 years ahead, they might well have that. But I really don't see that as much of a threat. It just saves analysts time. > - gratuitous unwarranted passing of crimetips to LEA? Likely already being done. In fact, there seems to be some evidence that this has happened in several instances. > - fundamental metadata knowledge of all persons/associations? Probably possible but not really feasible. Too difficult to filter even using selectors. But I'm sure they're close. Still, there are ways to communicate without generating useful metadata so it might not matter. > - political puppetstringing? I'd say this is nearly guaranteed. In fact, I suspect this is why Congress has been so slow to do anything about it. The NSA has them by the balls. If you were running a large, illegal, operation, wouldn't you first gather as much dirt on the people who could shut it down as possible? > I suggest the answer lies in budget analysis... the possibilities > within a well spent budget. Or a seriously conscientious leaker at > the top who is yet to come... since so far Snowden seems limited > to confirming lower level obviousness. Good point. You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see code. I'd like someone to drop the code to one of these massive systems online for us to analyze. But I suppose documents and program details would be just as useful.

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independently assisting oversight of highly classified programs
by coderman 22 Jan '14

22 Jan '14

per the Schneier brief with congress[0]: """ ... Lofgren asked me to brief her and a few Representatives on the NSA. She said that the NSA wasn't forthcoming about their activities, and they wanted me -- as someone with access to the Snowden documents -- to explain to them what the NSA was doing... I suggested that we hold this meeting in a SCIF, because [...] top secret documents [...] The problem is that I, as someone without a clearance, would not be allowed into the SCIF. So we had to have the meeting in a regular room. EDITED TO ADD: This really was an extraordinary thing. """ Wyden has an aide whose primary efforts and expertise revolve around the classification of national security programs, funding, and information.[1] however this person is dedicated to keeping Wyden within bounds as far as what he publicly discusses. consider the opposite end of the spectrum: anonymous supporters and sources who are able to analyze and disseminate specifics of these programs deemed priorities by hamstrung and handbound public servants. how would you prioritize the efforts of such an ad-hoc group? (presumably the intent would be legislative and monetary impact, rather than advertising revenue via popularity, which may vary scope and focus a little or a lot...) would the ability to extensively and widely reverse engineer intelligence agency efforts significantly alter the position of various legislators with regards to these programs? (or are the details insufficient to alter already concrete and lucrative positions?) this is particularly relevant given the Obama pass to congress with respect to intelligence agency oversight and program limits[2]. best regards, 0. "Today I Briefed Congress on the NSA" https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/01/today_i_briefed.html 1. sorry, i can't find this off hand; there was a rolling stone or other profile done which discussed this person from beaverton/tigard areaoutside Portland, OR metro. 2. "Remarks of President Barack Obama: Results of our Signals Intelligence Review" http://cryptome.org/2014/01/obama-nsa-13-0117.htm

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Guccifer Arrested and Archive
by John Young 22 Jan '14

22 Jan '14

http://cryptome.org/2014/01/guccifer-arrested.htm Guccifer Archive (~7GB) http://pastebin.com/ph02cfxw

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Live Q&A with Edward Snowden: Thursday 23rd January, 8pm GMT, 3pm EST
by Alex J. Martin 22 Jan '14

22 Jan '14

http://www.freesnowden.is/asksnowden/ "Edward Snowden will be answering questions submitted by the public on his official support site, freesnowden.is <http://www.freesnowden.is>, this Thursday 23 January at 8pm GMT, 3pm EST. The support site is run by The Courage Foundation and is the only endorsed Snowden Defence Fund. <http://freesnowden.is/donate/index.html> This is the first Snowden live chat since June 2013 and will last for an hour starting at 8pm GMT, 3pm EST. Questions can be submitted on twitter on the day of the event using the #AskSnowden hashtag. Edward Snowden's responses will appear at http://www.freesnowden.is/asksnowden The live chat comes exactly a week after US President Barack Obama gave an address in response to the public concerns raised by Edward Snowden's revelations about US surveillance practices. In the live chat, Edward Snowden is expected to give his first reaction to the President's speech. Courage (formerly the Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund) is a trust, audited by accountants Derek Rothera & Company in the UK, for the purpose of providing legal defence and campaign aid to journalistic sources. It is overseen by an unrenumerated committee of trustees. Edward Snowden is its first recipient. freesnowden.is <http://www.freesnowden.is> was commissioned by the trustees of Courage to provide information on the threats Edward Snowden faces and what can be done to support him, and details all revelations made to date <http://freesnowden.is/revelations/index.html> in a convenient central archive."

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The Enquirer
by Anonymous Remailer (austria) 22 Jan '14

22 Jan '14

THE CYPHERPUNK ENQUIRER "Just when we thought we were out, they drag us back in ..." Recently reviewed documents leaked by Edward Snowden reveal that, following the discovery of large quantities of pornography on hard drives retrieved from the Abbottabad compound where Osama bin Laden was assassinated, the NSA became concerned that al Queda was using steganographic techniques to hide various communications within the jpgs and animated gifs, and began a program (known internally as 'Project Creampie') to collect all the pornography on the internet into one giant database, presently located at the new NSA data storage center in Bluffdale, Utah, that could be searched by various interns and subcontractors. Progress has apparently been slowed due to subcontractor Hewitt Packard's problems in designing and building a computer keyboard impervious to "precious bodily fluids". In response to the newly discovered NSA obsession with feelthy peectures, the old al-queda.net NSA bait URL has been changed to porn-are-us.org. Responding to charges of 'language-ism', the Obfuscated C contest opened itself to languages other than just C this year, and the clear winner in the English category was our own John Young of cryptome.org. "We don't have a clue what he's saying," the nominating committee stated, "but we sure as hell know what he means." The judging committee was impressed by Mr. Young's ability to be almost totally incomprehensible while still getting his point across, and by the fact that he had obviously attained bootstrap status, and in addition is Turing complete. The debate over whether Mr. Young qualifies as P or NP has yet to be resolved. In a shout-out to the old DEFCON ritual of playing 'Spot the Fed', the RSA Conference has announced a contest to 'Spot Tim May', the winner receiving an 'I Outed Tim May' tee shirt and a personal bodyguard for the conference duration. Interest appears to be limited due to the boycott. After a long absence, the Cypherpunks steering committee, due to recent revelations about NSA spying, has once again opened One Time Pad season. The early leader appears to be Ian Goldberg's (of UC Berkeley's 'Glow in the Dark Campanile' fame) proposal to distribute OTP bits via entangled photons, awaiting only Phillip Hallam-Baker's work on developing a room-temperature Bose-Einstein condensate. Open source programmers have already initiated a Kickstarter campaign to develop a delivery method for the distribution of OTPs that would avoid the internet completely and still be RFC 1149, 2549, and 6214 compliant. The NIST is facing further controversy following claims that it intentionally 'backdoored' the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator. Now an IETF taskforce, after several months of study, has determined that NIST's proposal to increase the security of a venerable UNIX encryption algorithm by 'doubling the cycle length' actually makes the algorithm more susceptible to cryptanalysis. Cryptographers are recommending that all programs that use the new algorithm immediately revert to the old 'ROT13' standard. Quote of the Week: "In conclusion, the main thing we did wrong when designing ATM security systems in the early to mid-1980s was to worry about criminals being clever; we should rather have worried about our customers - the banks' system designers, implementers, and testers - being stupid." Ross Anderson, "Security Engineering" SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia was arrested yesterday and charged with threatening to assassinate POTUS Barak Obama. Justice Scalia was released 6 hours later after scientific vocal analysis of his Skype call to Justice Samuel Alito revealed that his actual statement was, "Let's kill the precedent". The FBI blamed the British GCHQ for providing them a poor quality recording, to which a GCHQ spokesperson replied that the recording was "exactly what the NSA gave us". The Microsoft Corporation denied it provided any Skype information to the NSA whatsoever via a press representative whose trousers were quickly extinguished by an attentive aide. Tonight on NSA TV - "Sexting with the Stars" Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga in hot girl-on-girl action! (security clearance 'Secret' or above required)

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cypherpunks buy the farm
by coderman 22 Jan '14

22 Jan '14

regarding various altcoin pools for various eventualities: consider a cypherpunk insurance pool with coins allocated fractionally by some agreed upon method or individual contribution. in the event of their untimely demise for any reason, said funds delivered to designated entity named by prior cryptographic signature (which must be frequently re-attested). would it be useful to have a pool for cypherpunks who "buy the farm"? expenses per "buy the farm" may be as trivial as re-homing your cat and books, or as extensive as a large family with medical complications, significant debt obligations, and unexpected costly events of unplanned nature requiring support decades into the future. <span id="VOTE" action="makeitso" class="broken"> --- the only restriction which may be advisable is prohibiting the designated beneficiary from running a death pool against specific or general groups of individuals. my distributed graph solver still crunching, but preliminary results suggest that a critical threshold of cypherpunks with wills to death pools combined with a specific trigger set of few otherwise natural deaths multiplies into a maelstrom of murder; presuming of course that a reasonably robust death prediction market or assassination market comes into existence which satisfies the pre-conditions of my computational game theory model of this multi-party, multi-round stratagem mapped over a topological isomorphism of the entire set of probabilities for a given set of initial conditions into a single high order topological manifold transformation collected in aggregate for an overall motif of risk... will advise. best regards,

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Dying Grandma's Coded Messages.
by Jim Bell 22 Jan '14

22 Jan '14

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/the-internet-helps-decode-grandmother-… http://ask.metafilter.com/255675/Decoding-cancer-addled-ramblings Jim Bell

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Been there, done that.
by Jim Bell 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

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Feinstein: NSA Metadata Stays
by grarpamp 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/01/20/1410221/senator-dianne-feinstein-nsa…

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