September 2016 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Inside the fight to reveal the CIA's torture secrets
by Cecilia Tanaka 11 Sep '16

11 Sep '16

Inside the fight to reveal the CIA's torture secrets https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/09/cia-insider-daniel-jones-se… - c.

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Manning on hunger strike.
by jim bell 10 Sep '16

10 Sep '16

I did many hunger strikes in Federal prison during 2002-2009. The longest, 100 and 2/3s days, ended about November 3, 2009. I lost 50 pounds. I also did a 68 day strike, a couple of 50 day strikes, and many 30+ day strikes.Manning won't last 2 weeks as described. The initial main threat is to drink only water: That means that you will piss away your electrolytes (sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, phosphate, etc) After a week or so you'll feel bad, and you THINK it's due to lack of calories. Not true: Its the electrolyte imbalance which is the problem. The reason I was able to go the times I listed? I drank a cup of milk each day. Look at the label for milk: It contains enough electrolytes to maintain an average person. Do that, and you can continue until your fat reserves are gone. Note: The Federal Bureau of Prisons policy (called a "Program Statement") specifically states that consumption of liquids alone shall not be construed as eating food. https://www.bop.gov/policy/progstat/5562_005.pdf " Health Services and Food Service staff may offer alternativebeverages, including liquid nutritional supplements, ifauthorized by the physicians. Any beverages other than drinkingwater must be documented (e.g. BP-S292) and that informationrelayed to Health Services staff. Acceptance of liquids aloneshould not be documented as accepting a meal." Jim Bell http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/9/12867164/chelsea-manning-hunger-strike-gen… × "Chelsea Manning has launched a hunger strike seeking better medical treatment for her gender dysphoria, according to a statement released today by her representatives. Beginning today, Manning will decline all food and any liquids other than water. She will also refuse to cut her hair until her demands are met. "I need help. I am not getting any," Manning’s statement reads. "Today, I have decided that I am no longer going to be bullied by this prison." Currently serving 35 years in prison for releasing more than 600,000 military documents to WikiLeaks, Manning has long struggled to receive treatment for her gender dysphoria while in prison. In 2014, she sued the army for the right to more comprehensive treatment with legal assistance from the ACLU. This summer, Manning was hospitalized after a reported suicide attempt, and faces the possibility of indefinite solitary confinement as a result of subsequent administrative charges. In the statement, Manning addresses the suicide attempt directly, describing it as the result of a long-standing lack of care for her gender dysphoria. Manning’s statement is reproduced in full below:" "I need help. I am not getting any. I have asked for help time and time again for six years and through five separate confinement locations. My request has only been ignored, delayed, mocked, given trinkets and lip service by the prison, the military, and this administration. >I need help. I needed help earlier this year. I was driven to suicide by the lack of care for my gender dysphoria that I have been desperate for. I didn’t get any. I still haven’t gotten any." ">I needed help. Yet, instead I am now being punished for surviving my attempt. When I was a child, my father would beat me repeatedly for simply not being masculine enough. I was told to stop crying—to "suck it up." But, I couldn’t stop crying. The pain just got worse and worse. Until finally, I just couldn’t take the pain anymore. ">I needed help, but no one came then. No one is coming now." ">Today, I have decided that I am no longer going to be bullied by this prison—or by anyone within the U.S. government. I have asked for nothing but the dignity and respect—that I once actually believed would be provided for—afforded to any living human being. >I do not believe that this should be dependent on any arbitrary factors—whether you are cisgender or transgender; service member or civilian, citizen or non-citizen. In response to virtually every request, I have been granted limited, if any, dignity and respect—just more pain and anguish. >I am no longer asking. Now, I am demanding. As of 12:01 am Central Daylight Time on September 9, 2016, and until I am given minimum standards of dignity, respect, and humanity, I shall—refuse to voluntarily cut or shorten my hair in any way; consume any food or drink voluntarily, except for water and currently prescribed medications; and comply with all rules, regulations, laws, and orders that are not related to the two things I have mentioned. ">This is a peaceful act. I intend to keep it as peaceful and non-violent, on my end, as possible. Any physical harm that should come to me at the hands of military or civilian staff will be unnecessary and vindictive. I will not physically resist or in any way harm another person. I have also submitted a "do not resuscitate" letter that is effective immediately. This shall include any attempts to forcibly cut or shorten my hair or to forcibly feed me by any medical or pseudo-medical means." ">Until I am shown dignity and respect as a human again, I shall endure this pain before me. I am prepared for this mentally and emotionally. I expect that this ordeal will last for a long time. Quite possibly until my permanent incapacitation or death. I am ready for this. >I need help. Please, give me help"

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Big Dataz Isn’t Just Watching You—It’s **Designed** To Make You Poorer
by Razer 10 Sep '16

10 Sep '16

There's are a number of reasons why 'teh gubmint wants ur dataz', and it's not ONLY about killing 'terrorists' or suppressing potential insurrection. It's about ripping you off for every penny they and their corporate BFFs can shake out of you. Rr Big Data Isn’t Just Watching You—It’s Making You Poorer Cathy O’Neil’s new book, Weapons of Math Destruction, shows mathematical models aren’t free of ideology. BY Pankaj Mehta, In These Times, Sept 6 2016 By some estimates, humanity now produces 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day—more than a hundred times the amount of data in the entire Library of Congress. This data ranges from Facebook posts to military-grade satellite photos. Increasingly, this data is analyzed by complex mathematical models that determine more and more aspects of our lives, from the advertisements we see to whether we have access to private insurance. Yet despite their growing importance, these models often remain hidden. Advocates of such mathematical modeling, in both the public and private sectors, portray it as a neutral and efficient alternative to fallible and biased human decision-making. Mathematician, data scientist and popular blogger Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, doesn’t agree. She argues that many mathematical models are ideological tools that exacerbate oppression and inequality. Her examples range from the crime models used by police departments to determine which neighborhoods to patrol, to the recidivism models used by judges to hand out prison sentences. O’Neil is passionate about exposing the harmful effects of Big Data–driven mathematical models (what she calls WMDs), and she’s uniquely qualified for the task. She earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard and landed a tenure-track at Barnard. But she became bored with the pace and insularity of academia, and left to work as a quantitative analyst at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw. There, she had a front-row seat for the 2008 financial crisis. This experience fundamentally changed O’Neil’s relationship to mathematics. She realized that far from being a neutral object of study, mathematics was not only “deeply entangled in the world’s problems but also fueling many of them.” People in power were “deliberately [wielding] formulas to impress rather than clarify.” This disillusionment led O’Neil to get involved with Occupy Wall Street and start educating the public about the dangers of WMDs through her blog, MathBabe. She is careful to point out that there is nothing inherently destructive about mathematical modeling. Sophisticated data modeling enables much of modern technology, from wireless communication to drug discovery. How can one distinguish a destructive math model from an ordinary, or even helpful, one? O’Neil identifies three key features of WMDs: lack of transparency, lack of fairness and, most importantly, operation on a massive scale. O’Neil grounds her argument in case studies of WMDs in a variety of settings: finance, higher education, the criminal justice system, online advertising, employment decisions and scheduling, and credit and insurance provision. The “value-added” model for teacher evaluation, which looks at improvements in individual students’ test scores—a favorite of the so-called “educational reform” movement—is touted as an objective measure of a teacher’s worth. Yet this is far from the truth. O’Neil cites an analysis by blogger and educator Gary Rubinstein of New York’s 2010 value-added scores for public school teachers. O’Neil explains that “Of teachers who taught the same subject in consecutive years, one in four registered a 40-point difference. [This] suggests that the evaluation data is practically random.” O’Neil argues that this is because the value-added model, which relies on predictions of student performance, suffers from a built-in logical flaw: No statistical model can accurately make predictions about a class of 25 or 30 students—the sample size is too small. Yet the high-stakes testing regime continues to wreak havoc on the trajectories of students and teachers alike. Other WMDs, known as e-scores, use data such as ZIP codes, web-surfing patterns and recent purchases to evaluate a person’s credit-worthiness. Unlike the more familiar FICO credit scores that are freely available and regulated by the government, these secretive e-scores are “unaccountable, unregulated and often unfair.” Whereas FICO scores are based on your own financial history, e-scores compare you to other people with similar profiles. This may seem benign, but it can result in feedback loops that reinforce existing social inequities. If you live in a poor ZIP code, then your e-score will drop, meaning less credit and higher interest rates—essentially, an algorithmic redlining of the poor and working class. More: http://inthesetimes.com/article/19364/the-numbers-do-lie

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A note about Listmail arriving from "SigaInt"
by Razer 10 Sep '16

10 Sep '16

> > SIGAINT Public Mail Server > > This IP address is used by a public email service that provides privacy to help journalists and activists combat the dragnet surveillance that exists on the Internet today. > > If you detect abuse coming from this IP address, please let us know by emailing abuse(a)sigaint.org. > > HOW TO SIGNUP WITH SIGAINT: > > Go to https://www.torproject.org/ and download the Tor Browser Bundle for your computer. Then use the Tor Browser Bundle to go to our .onion website directly. > > The only correct .onion address for SIGAINT is: http://sigaintevyh2rzvw.onion/ > ROTF! Sigaint is a Cloudflare-pwned site! Registrant Org See PrivacyGuardian.org was found in ~550,569 other domains Dates Created on 2014-05-23 - Expires on 2017-05-23 - Updated on 2016-07-29 IP Address 104.28.0.41 - 308 other sites hosted on this server IP Location United States - Arizona - Phoenix - Cloudflare Inc. ASN United States AS13335 CLOUDFLARENET - CloudFlare, Inc., US (registered Jul 14, 2010) Domain Status Registered And Active Website Whois History 419 records have been archived since 2014-05-23 IP History 11 changes on 8 unique IP addresses over 2 years Hosting History 2 changes on 3 unique name servers over 2 years Whois Server whois.pir.org http://whois.domaintools.com/sigaint.org SigaInt is proud of it's 'direct peering' within tor to Mail2Tor too! Rr

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Re: New list confirmation (Re: cpunks list relocation imminent (was: Re: moving on))
by Александр 10 Sep '16

10 Sep '16

forwarding part of my private conversation to the whole list: The new list is not the preferable solution, you know. It's the only thing we see right now, but... We should realize, that this splitting up will KILL the original list. It will kill the whole concept and the core idea of the Cypher-Punk list/movement. The Snowden revelations and all the shit going on in the world in the last 10 years has brought us (people with brain & spirit) to a clear and unambiguous understanding that *"THE CYPHERPUNK LIST-CONCEPT MUST EVOLVE, -> THUS MUST BE CHANGED, BECOMING MUCH BROADER". *And the focus, as John Young wrote, cannot be on Apolitical (relatively) crypto-math-numbers only as it was before... Times have irreversibly changed -> thus the issues for discussion must be much much *BROADER*. .

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Cypherpunks Charter
by Stephen D. Williams 10 Sep '16

10 Sep '16

(Apologies for rehashing this, but it seems a good time to make another pass at consensus.) This is how I always thought about the Cypherpunks charter: Cypherpunks exists to promote free speech, establish that free speech includes the freedom to have secure private speech, and to explore how this can be accomplished. In support of this, to understand implications of technology-enabled free speech and the technical, commercial, and political moves needed to protect free speech. While the Cypherpunk Manifesto focuses mainly on predicting how the then-new ideas might play out, it is very thin on clarity of what should happen and what roles those present should play. I think that was intentional and strategic. It was also written at the beginning of a period of serious conflicts about using encryption at all, public knowledge of encryption and secure methods, export, government access and control boundary exploration, etc. What this does not include is promoting or bashing particular political systems or plotting their demise or constantly going on about insane nonsense. What is your concise summary of Cypherpunks? Can you justify it? What does the above get wrong and why? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-anarchism [2] http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html Recent commentary repeated for coherency, entertainment, and to forestall the need for certain predictable responses: Regardless of what Tim may or may not have wanted to happen in some or all cases, it doesn't say it in his signature, or in the manifesto. Cypherpunks has always straddled a number of areas; exploring the implications of crypto-anarchism is one of them. Even in May's quotes in [1], it isn't necessarily the point to have a collapse of a system as a goal, but to examine it as a possibility. I think the attitude is that if you come to believe that encryption and other security measures must be available, perhaps as an extension of free speech, and those cause weak or broken systems to collapse, then so be it. Some discussion of "* anarchy" isn't really anarchy, it is just maybe anarchy to someone fixated on a fixed definition of their favorite system. Or a signal by someone suggesting such a departure. Any real political anarchy has been a failure. The philosophokiddie cypherpunks are thoroughly punked and parodied in Mr. Robot: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-creator-of-mr-robot-explains-its-hackt… sdw

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New list confirmation (Re: cpunks list relocation imminent (was: Re: moving on))
by Greg Newby 09 Sep '16

09 Sep '16

As I just wrote, this message should be going out via the *new* server and settings. It's addressed to cypherpunks(a)lists.cpunks.org, as opposed to the regular address, cypherpunks(a)cpunks.org Viva la Resistance! - Greg On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 09:35:04AM -0700, Greg Newby wrote: > Dear cpunks subscribers, > > As discussed on the list last week, Riad S. Wahby is exiting gracefully from hosting the Cypherpunks list at https://cpunks.org > > We have coordinated a transfer of the list to a server I manage, and the configuration appears to be fairly functional. We have put this at cpunks(a)lists.cpunks.org (versus cpunks(a)cpunks.org) > > I will send a test message to the NEW list momentarily, so subscribers will knoow they are getting both. > > Please write back to this list, or directly to me, if you notice any problems or anomalies. The mailman list settings, subscribership, etc. should be the same, except that subscribers since around August 25 are not yet on the new list. > > You can check your list settings and view the archives at the new location: https://lists.cpunks.org/ > > Once everything is confirmed to be functional, we will change from the old list to the new list, and update DNS and server records so the old email address and list URL work on the new location. We've set DNS TTL to expire quickly, once the changeover happens. > > Best, > Greg > >

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Why Government Always Gets Cybersecurity Wrong
by Cecilia Tanaka 09 Sep '16

09 Sep '16

Why Government Always Gets Cybersecurity Wrong https://fee.org/articles/why-government-always-gets-cybersecurity-wrong/ sea sea -- "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

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Podcast: Ethics and ‘The Zuckerberg Files'
by Cecilia Tanaka 09 Sep '16

09 Sep '16

Podcast: Ethics and ‘The Zuckerberg Files’ https://iapp.org/news/a/podcast-ethics-and-the-zuckerberg-files/ "In this episode of The Privacy Advisor Podcast, UC Berkeley's Anna Lauren Hoffman discusses her work in data ethics as she explores the intersection of data, technology, and culture. Specifically, the ways the design and use of technology can either help or hinder values like justice and fairness. She also was behind a project called "The Zuckerberg Files." Conceived over drinks at a conference one night, she and her colleagues discussed the fact that it's too bad, for all the insight Facebook has on its users, users don't have the same look at Facebook. So, they decided to grab some research assistants and, well, Facebook Facebook. They grabbed everything Facebook CEO Zuckerberg had ever said publicly, including in interviews, videos, posts on his own wall, etc. The result is a stunning digital archive, illustrating the narrative Zuckerberg repeats and repeats, and the effect that may have on public consciousness." sea sea -- "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

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Re: New list confirmation (Re: cpunks list relocation imminent
by dan＠geer.org 09 Sep '16

09 Sep '16

I have stopped reading this list for one reason: the number of messages. Arrivederci

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