December 2015 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Russian citizen won a case against surveillance in the European Court of Human Rights
by Anton Nesterov 06 Dec '15

06 Dec '15

tl;dr Roman Zakharov, Russian journalist and activist, tried to sue Russian government since 2003 for intercepting his mobile telephone communications and the Russian laws on surveillance as unconstitutional. He failed and then went to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that Russian laws violate Article 8 of ECHR and forced Russia to pay 40,000 euro of compensation. Here is the text http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-159324 It also has a good review of Russian laws about surveillance. -- https://nesterov.pw GPG key: 0CE8 65F1 9043 2B11 25A5 74A7 1187 6869 67AA 56E4 https://keybase.io/komachi/key.asc

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Named Data Networking
by dan＠geer.org 06 Dec '15

06 Dec '15

Does anyone here have a grounded opinion about NDN (Named Data Networking)? If that's as new to you as to me, I'm reading here: http://named-data.net It seems to have a lot of implications that I'm trying to think through, not the least of which is the idea that the Internet can and must evolve from an end-to-end communication system to being, itself, a content distribution network. The reason for thinking this way is that "YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, etc., account for more than half of the world's internet traffic" and that reality "is inefficient and unsecure because the information-centric overlay is a poor match to the Internet's conversationally-oriented underlay." I am, myself, perpetually sceptical of efforts to start over, or to put policy into the network itself, such as NDN's aim to make every transmitted packet be signed and to make the network stateful including providing in-network memory. As always, "Who is this for?" needs an answer that looks well ahead. --dan

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Sheeple
by dan＠geer.org 06 Dec '15

06 Dec '15

Some would say that to tell the truth you must use fiction... ----------- Episode 18, CBS television show "Person of Interest" FINCH is a physically damaged billionaire programmer who developed machine intelligence for the government REESE is his sidekick muscle. ----------- REESE No photos? FINCH Not everyone in New York has a driver's license, REESE. First three digits of the social suggest that Jordan Hester was born in Georgia. REESE I'm supposed to recognize him by his accent? FINCH Or her. I can't even verify the gender. Hester's living off the grid. No photos online and nothing on the social networking sites. REESE I've never understood why people put all their information on those sites. Used to make our job a lot easier in the C.I.A. (takes another sip from his cup) FINCH Of course, that's why I created them. REESE You're telling me you invented online social networking, FINCH? REESE stands up. FINCH goes to his computer, setting down his doughnut. FINCH The Machine needed more information. People's social graph, their associations. (opens up search on social networking website for "Jordan Hester") The government had been trying to figure it out for years. Turns out most people were happy to volunteer it. The business wound up being quite profitable, too. Unfortunately, Jordan Hester seems to be more cautious than most, but I was able to run a credit check. REESE looks at papers on glass board. FINCH picks up his doughnut again.

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Cryptography is not a science currently
by Ryan Carboni 05 Dec '15

05 Dec '15

Recently The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work was published online by Philip Rogaway. I am going to explain that the disciplinary culture of cryptography is not a scientific discipline. Cryptography itself is a science. Cryptography in many respects is the inverse of forensic science, while forensics follow a protocol, their results are no better than guessing. While cryptography's results are concrete, the culture is a serious failure. Cryptographers are well aware of the moral implications of their work... since Diffie and Hellman condemned DES's short key length ( http://www.toad.com/des-stanford-meeting.html ). If according to Rogaway, "Most academic cryptographers seem to think that our field is a fun, deep, and politically neutral game—a set of puzzles involving communicating parties and notional adversaries", the fault is not with most cryptographers, but with all cryptographers. Paranoid fear surrounded the AES competition, that a cipher might have a backdoor (it turns out backdooring ciphers are more difficult than expected). Yet after the AES report turns out the full of lies ( http://csrc.nist.gov/archive/aes/round2/r2report.pdf ), that additions are more vulnerable to timing attacks then... table lookups, one should do some critical self analysis. That a cryptographer calls for some sort of self-analysis long after the AES competition, the SHA-3 competition, basically after all the currently accepted ciphers have become entrenched is alarming. Each and every cryptographer seems to fail to understand what the US intelligence community actually does. They truly do, they do not seem to understand that for anyone of import, they'd develop biographies on people, if one is important enough, they might create a psychological profile. Maybe this sounds paranoid. But given that the greatest intelligence scandals involve what is believed to be true to be absolutely false and what is believed to be false to be absolutely true, paranoia is to be expected if the state takes an interest in your profession. And all cryptographers know that the state is interested in cryptography. What about the constant struggles of cryptographers getting their papers published in the seventies and eighties? Maybe only Dan Bernstein remembers that he went to court just to publish his own cipher. Naturally for Philip Rogaway, these issues came to a head after the Snowden disclosures (I'm still waiting for the next drip). For anyone to discredit themselves in the first paragraph of a forty-six page PDF is amazing. Potentially if all cryptographers somehow manage to ignore this immense logical failing is an indictment against the entire cryptographic profession. Especially given that it is commonly accepted that mathematics requires logic. Truly Rogaway is the Chomsky of Cryptography. Chomsky will deny the Cambodian holocaust and claim that oppression in the US "isn't that bad". For anyone to run out and say they are taking on the elite without knowing a damn thing about anything, I wish them a lot of luck. I might as well post a modest suggestion: cryptographers should support an FPGA integrated into the CPU or the ability to use integrated graphics for cryptography. This would remove entrenchment of standards, and allow people to pick their own ciphers. It's possible the AES-NI instructions were developed after the NSA panicked at seeing AES usage in TLS drop rapidly after the timing attacks were revealed. The AES-NI instructions are overkill, and seem to take CISC too literally. One only needs, mixcolumn+subbytes, subbyte, reverse+mixcolumn+subbytes, AESIMC and subbytes instructions of 32-bit sizes each (no need for AESENC, AESENCLAST, AESKEYGENASSIST, AESDECLAST, AESDEC, AESIMC), it would save one instruction, and the instruction will use only one operand. The way the AES-NI instructions are designed precludes usage for Rijndael with 256 bit blocks, and it seems odd that the AES-NI instructions only accept data from the XMM registers. Rigidity should be viewed with suspicion. "Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him." -Sun Tzu

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Shadowy Western governments?
by Zenaan Harkness 05 Dec '15

05 Dec '15

See full article and link below. "No longer are their [terrorists] attacks carried out without many, if not a majority, suspecting the governments in the West at least as equally as shadowy terrorist organizations." Perhaps some find it hard to believe? --- OK, these guys appear to be trying to present an Islamic/ Iran position to English readers, yet don't have any links (in this article at least) to primary information or quotes of the alleged email interview. Quite frustrating. My first reaction was dismissive of such poor 'journalistic practice', yet I get a sense of genuine intent to create a better public dialog which overrides my initial reaction. Based on this I briefly searched without success for a "Contact" link, to email them which this viewpoint I have about their article, as I would like to see all sides of public debate lift their respective games. I will forward this privately to the whois (non-cloudflare) email in the hope that this might be useful to someone there... any better suggestions appreciated. Evidently having a "Contact" email/ form is also recommended for a news website. Zenaan http://www.islamicinvitationturkey.com/2015/12/03/leaders-letter-helped-dis… Leader’s letter helped ‘discover shadowy faces of terrorism’: American Analyst IIT Exclusive News, Imam Ali Khamenei, Iran, Leaders of Ummah, Middle East, North America 3 December 2015 10:10 An independent American analyst believes after Leader’s letter, international public awareness would never allow governments to support terrorism without impunity. Anthony Cartalucci wrote to Payman Yazdani of Mehr News International Service in an email interview about the recent and second letter by the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei to youth in Europe and the US, where he said the letter contributed to an environment which would make public alert, who otherwise would only watch passively their fellow governments’ nebulous acts in sponsoring terrorism. Cartalucci also believed that the West had shifted the blame to Islam and Islamic countries, since they saw clearly the backlash of their own act in arming atrocious terrorists in Islamic lands: In his second letter to western youth, Ayatollah Khamenei has talked about the terrorism and its roots. What is the significance of this issue? To solve any problem, one must first understand it fully. The problem of terrorism has long been poorly understood by the majority of the Western public, and even policymakers. Their inability to grasp the true roots of terrorism have allowed it to flourish indefinitely. For most in the West, the reality that special interests in their own governments have created and perpetuated terrorism intentionally as a geopolitical tool is incomprehensible. Unfortunately, it is also the truth and until they grasp that, those behind the terrorism will have a carte blanche to continue using it both at home and abroad, as a proxy force of violence, and as a tool to create fear and coercion. The wars, instability, growing domestic police states, distrust among nations, and even within nations, among citizens, refugee crises, and others all are wrought from the use of terrorism as a geopolitical tool. Thus, it is at work within the heart of some of the most pressing issues of our time. The Leader has emphasized in his message that Islam is the religion of peace; why do some try to introduce Islam as the religion of violence? The majority who claim Islam is a religion of violence are merely repeating witlessly propaganda they themselves heard. The source of this propaganda are the same interests which themselves are driving the violence – particularly the state sponsors of terrorism, the United States, their Persian Gulf allies, NATO, and others. By blaming Islam and appealing to both ignorance and bigotry which are still deeply rooted in Western culture, these very interests feeding the violence can deflect blame onto others – in this case, Muslim nations and peoples. By appealing to ideology, rationality, history, geopolitics, and critical thinking can be side-stepped and emotional responses can easily be elicited. Why would some try to make connections between Islam and terrorism after any terrorist act happening around the world? Again, it is a matter of deflecting responsibility by those who are actually driving terrorism. The recent attacks in Paris were carried out by terrorists the United States and its closest regional allies have been arming, training, funding, and harboring for years now. All of the attackers were well known to Western intelligence agencies. By all indications, this attack should have been easily foiled by Western security agencies, but it was not. Conveniently, it was carried out on the eve of the Vienna talks on Syria, and just as the West’s agenda in Syria began unraveling in the face of a joint Syrian-Russian-Iranian alliance. Some would say this was a little “too convenient.” Blaming the attacks on Islam is the best way to appeal to people’s emotions directly, and hopefully overwhelm their ability to critically think and ask just who really benefited from the conveniently-timed attacks and why, again, Western security agencies knew of the attackers beforehand but made no attempts to stop them from carrying out their horrific acts of violence. What is the importance of this letter at this juncture? The importance of this letter is that it adds to a growing body of evidence and voices around the world speaking up and confronting state sponsors of global terrorism. The constant efforts of those who know the truth to inform those who yet do not, is having a gradual effect on the special interests driving global terrorism. No longer are they able to act with impunity. No longer are their attacks carried out without many, if not a majority, suspecting the governments in the West at least as equally as shadowy terrorist organizations. It is important for this process, this dialogue to continue, to speak to the truth with every opportunity and in every format, so that as people begin to see the truth for themselves, they can also take note of who has been saying it all along. Interview: Payman Yazdani

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Ethics not moral crap but...
by Cari Machet 04 Dec '15

04 Dec '15

"The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work" http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.html

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essential understanding - Kafkatrapping
by Zenaan Harkness 03 Dec '15

03 Dec '15

The points raised in this blog are essential in today's SJW/ "Social Justice Warrior" (how politically correct that sounds) climate of communication - the Kafkatrapping techniques described here may provide an important "ahah!" moment to those who have been subjected to such emotional/ linguistic constructs in the past, or who may have to face such constructs in the future. Here's to competently handling more of today's pervasive bullshit. Zenaan http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122 Kafkatrapping Posted on 2010-07-18 by Eric Raymond Good causes sometimes have bad consequences. Blacks, women, and other historical out-groups were right to demand equality before the law and the full respect and liberties due to any member of our civilization; but the tactics they used to “raise consciousness” have sometimes veered into the creepy and pathological, borrowing the least sane features of religious evangelism. One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap. In this essay, I will show that the kafkatrap is a form of argument that is so fallacious and manipulative that those subjected to it are entitled to reject it based entirely on the form of the argument, without reference to whatever particular sin or thoughtcrime is being alleged. I will also attempt to show that kafkatrapping is so self-destructive to the causes that employ it that change activists should root it out of their own speech and thoughts. My reference, of course, is to Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, in which the protagonist Josef K. is accused of crimes the nature of which are never actually specified, and enmeshed in a process designed to degrade, humiliate, and destroy him whether or not he has in fact committed any crime at all. The only way out of the trap is for him to acquiesce in his own destruction; indeed, forcing him to that point of acquiescence and the collapse of his will to live as a free human being seems to be the only point of the process, if it has one at all. This is almost exactly the way the kafkatrap operates in religious and political argument. Real crimes – actual transgressions against flesh-and-blood individuals – are generally not specified. The aim of the kafkatrap is to produce a kind of free-floating guilt in the subject, a conviction of sinfulness that can be manipulated by the operator to make the subject say and do things that are convenient to the operator’s personal, political, or religious goals. Ideally, the subject will then internalize these demands, and then become complicit in the kafkatrapping of others. Sometimes the kafkatrap is presented in less direct forms. A common variant, which I’ll call the Model C, is to assert something like this: “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}, you are guilty because you have benefited from the {sinful,racist,sexist,homophobic,oppressive,…} behavior of others in the system.” The aim of the Model C is to induce the subject to self-condemnation not on the basis of anything the individual subject has actually done, but on the basis of choices by others which the subject typically had no power to affect. The subject must at all costs be prevented from noticing that it is not ultimately possible to be responsible for the behavior of other free human beings. A close variant of the model C is the model P: “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}, you are guilty because you have a privileged position in the {sinful,racist,sexist,homophobic,oppressive,…} system.” For the model P to work, the subject must be prevented from noticing that the demand to self-condemn is not based on the subject’s own actions or choices or feelings, but rather on an in-group identification ascribed by the operator of the kafkatrap. It is essential to the operation of all three of the variants of the kafkatrap so far described that the subject’s attention be deflected away from the fact that no wrongdoing by the subject, about which the subject need feel personally guilty, has actually been specified. The kafkatrapper’s objective is to hook into chronic self-doubt in the subject and inflate it, in much the same way an emotional abuser convinces a victim that the abuse is deserved – in fact, the mechanism is identical. Thus kafkatrapping tends to work best on weak and emotionally vulnerable personalities, and poorly on personalities with a strong internalized ethos. In addition, the success of a model P kafkatrap depends on the subject not realizing that the group ascription pinned on by the operator can be rejected. The subject must be prevented from asserting his or her individuality and individual agency; better, the subject must be convinced that asserting individuality is yet another demonstration of denial and guilt. Need it be pointed out how ironic this is, given that kafkatrappers (other than old-fashioned religious authoritarians) generally claim to be against group stereotyping? There are, of course, other variants. Consider the model S: “Skepticism about any particular anecdotal account of {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression,…}, or any attempt to deny that the particular anecdote implies a systemic problem in which you are one of the guilty parties, is itself sufficient to establish your guilt.” Again, the common theme here is that questioning the discourse that condemns you, condemns you. This variant differs from the model A and model P in that a specific crime against an actual person usually is in fact alleged. The operator of the kafkatrap relies on the subject’s emotional revulsion against the crime to sweep away all questions of representativeness and the basic fact that the subject didn’t do it. I’ll finish my catalog of variants with the verson of the kafkatrap that I think is most likely to be deployed against this essay, the Model L: “Your insistence on applying rational skepticism in evaluating assertions of pervasive {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia, oppression…} itself demonstrates that you are {sinful,racist,sexist,homophobic,oppressive,…}.” This sounds much like the Model S, except that we are back in the territory of unspecified crime here. This version is not intended to induce guilt so much as it is to serve as a flank guard for other forms of kafkatrapping. By insisting that skepticism is evidence of an intention to cover up or excuse thoughtcrime, kafkatrappers protect themselves from having their methods or motives questioned and can get on with the serious business of eradicating thoughtcrime. Having shown how manipulative and psychologically abusive the kafkatrap is, it may seem almost superfluous to observe that it is logically fallacious as well. The particular species of fallacy is sometimes called “panchreston”, an argument from which anything can be deduced because it is not falsifiable. Notably, if the model A kafkatrap is true, the world is divided into two kinds of people: (a) those who admit they are guilty of thoughtcrime, and (b) those who are guilty of thoughtcrime because they will not admit to being guilty of thoughtcrime. No one can ever be innocent. The subject must be prevented from noticing that this logic convicts and impeaches the operator of the kafkatrap! I hope it is clear by now that the particular flavor of thoughtcrime alleged is irrelevant to understanding the operation of kafkatraps and how to avoid being abused and manipulated by kafkatrappers. In times past the kafkatrapper was usually a religious zealot; today, he or she is just as likely to be advancing an ideology of racial, gender, sexual-minority, or economic grievance. Whatever your opinion of any of these causes in their ‘pure’ forms may be, there are reasons that the employment of kafkatrapping is a sure sign of corruption. The practice of kafkatrapping corrupts causes in many ways, some obvious and some more subtle. The most obvious way is that abusive and manipulative ways of controlling people tend to hollow out the causes for which they are employed, smothering whatever worthy goals they may have begun with and reducing them to vehicles for the attainment of power and privilege over others. A subtler form of corruption is that those who use kafkatraps in order to manipulate others are prone to fall into them themselves. Becoming unable to see out of the traps, their ability to communicate with and engage anyone who has not fallen in becomes progressively more damaged. At the extreme, such causes frequently become epistemically closed, with a jargon and discourse so tightly wrapped around the logical fallacies in the kafkatraps that their doctrine is largely unintelligible to outsiders. These are both good reasons for change activists to consider kafkatraps a dangerous pathology that they should root out of their own causes. But the best reason remains that kafkatrapping is wrong. Especially, damningly wrong for anyone who claims to be operating in the cause of freedom. UPDATE: A commenter pointed out the Model D: “The act of demanding a definition of {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression} that can be consequentially checked and falsified proves you are {sinful,racist,sexist, homophobic, oppressive}.” UPDATE2: The Model M: “The act of arguing against the theory of anti-{sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression} demonstrates that you are either {sinful,racist,sexist, homophobic, oppressive} or do not understand the theory of anti-{sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression}, and your argument can therefore be dismissed as either corrupt or incompetent.” Model T: Designated victims of {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression} who question any part of the theory of {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression} demonstrate by doing so that they are not authentic members of the victim class, so their experience can be discounted and their thoughts dismissed as internalized {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression}.

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Retired Obama, pensioner Kerry, US President Snowden: RT’s 2035 promo
by Zenaan Harkness 03 Dec '15

03 Dec '15

:) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THrZZ95i8zQ

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The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work
by Riad S. Wahby 03 Dec '15

03 Dec '15

Phillip Rogaway (Professor of CS at UC Davis) has released in the form of an essay his keynote talk from Asiacrypt. Very interesting reflection on the politics of crypto, historically and at present. -- "The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work" Phil Rogaway http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-fn.pdf Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension. The Snowden revelations motivate a reassessment of the political and moral positioning of cryptography. They lead one to ask if our inability to effectively address mass surveillance constitutes a failure of our field. I believe that it does. I call for a community-wide effort to develop more effective means to resist mass surveillance. I plea for a reinvention of our disciplinary culture to attend not only to puzzles and math, but, also, to the societal implications of our work. -- -=rsw

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Vuvuzuela Messaging App
by grarpamp 03 Dec '15

03 Dec '15

https://github.com/davidlazar/vuvuzela Vuvuzela is a messaging system that hides metadata using noise. The Github README has more information and a link to the paper. The issue tracker highlights some of the remaining challenges.

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