September 2019 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Cryptocurrency: Fed Plays $225B in Interbank Repo
by grarpamp 22 Sep '19

22 Sep '19

Investors and cryptos watching random charts this week... https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fed-has-lost-control-rates-again https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EE1gNvNWwAAXjXZ.jpg https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/domestic-market-operations/monetary-poli… https://apps.newyorkfed.org/markets/autorates/tomo-results-display?SHOWMORE… https://twitter.com/biancoresearch/status/1173934708863983617 https://www.ft.com/content/345da16e-d967-11e9-8f9b-77216ebe1f17 https://archive.is/PbCtz One of the most important sources of financial market lubrication came under severe strain this week, raising concerns that the Federal Reserve’s attempt to unwind post-financial crisis intervention may have gone too far. Repurchase agreements are the grease that keeps the financial system’s wheels spinning, allowing different market participants to borrow and lend to each other to cover short-term cash needs. On Tuesday, the wheels stopped turning. The so-called repo rate soared to a high of 10 per cent, when it typically trades in line with the Federal Reserve’s target interest rate of between 2 per cent and 2.25 per cent. The New York branch of the Fed had to step in and inject tens of billions of cash into the system in an attempt to restore order, doubling down on Wednesday with a second short-term injection.

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Secret F.B.I. Subpoenas Scoop Up Personal Data From Scores of Companies
by coderman 22 Sep '19

22 Sep '19

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/us/data-privacy-fbi.html](https://www.ny… Secret F.B.I. Subpoenas Scoop Up Personal Data From Scores of Companies Image[The headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington.]The headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington.CreditCreditLeah Millis/Reuters By [Jennifer Valentino-DeVries](https://www.nytimes.com/by/jennifer-valentino-devries) Sept. 20, 2019Updated 3:47 p.m. ET The F.B.I. has used secret subpoenas to obtain personal data from far more companies than previously disclosed, newly released [documents](https://www.documentcloud.org/search/projectid:45842-Termination… show. The requests, which the F.B.I. says are critical to its counterterrorism efforts, have raised privacy concerns for years but have been associated mainly with tech companies. Now, records show how far beyond Silicon Valley the practice extends — encompassing scores of banks, credit agencies, cellphone carriers and even universities. The demands can scoop up a variety of information, including usernames, locations, IP addresses and records of purchases. They don’t require a judge’s approval and usually come with a gag order, leaving them shrouded in secrecy. Fewer than 20 entities, most of them tech companies, have ever revealed that they’ve received the subpoenas, known as national security letters. The documents, obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation through a Freedom of Information Act [lawsuit](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/05/victory-eff-wins-national-se… and shared with The New York Times, shed light on the scope of the demands — more than 120 companies and other entities were included in the filing — and raise questions about the effectiveness of a 2015 law that was intended to increase transparency around them. “This is a pretty potent authority for the government,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas who specializes in national security. “The question is: Do we have a right to know when the government is collecting information on us?” The documents provide information on about 750 of the subpoenas — representing a small but telling fraction of the half-million issued since 2001, when the Patriot Act expanded their powers. The credit agencies Equifax, Experian and TransUnion received a large number of the letters in the filing. So did financial institutions like Bank of America, Western Union and even the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. All declined to explain how they handle the letters. An array of other entities received smaller numbers of requests — including Kansas State University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, probably because of their role in providing internet service. Other companies included major cellular providers such as AT&T and Verizon, as well as tech giants like Google and Facebook, which have [acknowledged](https://www.verizon.com/about/portal/transparency-report/us-r… [receiving](https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/sharing-national-security-letters-public/) [the letters](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/reinforcing-our-commitment-to… in the past. Albert Gidari, a lawyer who long represented tech and telecommunications companies and is now the privacy director at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, said Silicon Valley had been associated with the subpoenas because it was more willing than other industries to fight the gag orders. “Telecoms and financial institutions get little attention,” he said, even though the law specifically says they are fair game. The Federal Bureau of Investigation determined that information on the roughly 750 letters could be disclosed under a 2015 law, the USA Freedom Act, that requires the government to review the secrecy orders “at appropriate intervals.” The Justice Department’s interpretation of those instructions has left many letters secret indefinitely. Department [guidelines](https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/nsl-ndp-procedures.pdf/view) say the gag orders must be evaluated three years after an investigation starts and also when an investigation is closed. But [a federal judge](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/judge-critici… [noted](https://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/sites/dcd/files/16-518Opinion_Redacted.… “several large loopholes,” suggesting that “a large swath” of gag orders might never be reviewed. According to the new documents, the F.B.I. evaluated 11,874 orders between early 2016, when the rules went into effect, and September 2017, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, requested the information. “We are not sure the F.B.I. is taking its obligations under USA Freedom seriously,” said Andrew Crocker, a lawyer with the foundation. “There still is a huge problem with permanent gag orders.” Image[Richard Salgado, Google’s director of law enforcement and information security. The company has been public about the secret subpoenas it has received from the F.B.I.]Richard Salgado, Google’s director of law enforcement and information security. The company has been public about the secret subpoenas it has received from the F.B.I.CreditTom Williams/CQ Roll Call, via Getty Images The Justice Department declined to comment. National security letters, which the F.B.I. has issued since the 1980s, have long been a point of contention in the debate over privacy and security. Initially, the bureau had to show “specific and articulable facts” indicating that the target was an agent of a foreign power. Now, the F.B.I. must certify that the information is “relevant” to a terrorism, counterintelligence or leak investigation. “NSLs are an indispensable investigative tool,” the Justice Department argued in the Freedom of Information Act case. The department has said in [legal documents](https://www.eff.org/files/2017/01/10/redacted_opposition_brief.p… that the information gleaned from the letters is important to identifying subjects and their associates, while helping to clear the innocent of suspicion. According to [a 2007 report](https://oig.justice.gov/special/s0703b/final.pdf) from the Justice Department inspector general, the F.B.I. didn’t track how often information from the letters was used in criminal proceedings. But the report also said the letters had led to guilty pleas for arms trading, at least one conviction for material support of terrorism, and multiple charges of fraud and money laundering. The tool was [also cited](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/us/politics/crossfire-hurricane-t… in efforts to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Much of the concern about the letters has focused on the gag orders, which accompany nearly every request and prevent the recipient — typically indefinitely — from disclosing even the existence of the letter. The federal government has argued that the secrecy is necessary to avoid alerting targets, giving would-be terrorists clues about how the government conducts its surveillance or hurting diplomatic relations. After a series of court rulings found that the gag orders violated First Amendment protections, Congress enacted the review requirements. The documents obtained through the lawsuit include the number of orders reviewed, as well as redacted copies of 751 letters from the F.B.I. informing companies and organizations their gag orders had been lifted. These so-called termination letters do not reveal the contents of the original national security letters, but indicate which entities received them. Because so few gag orders have been reviewed and rescinded, it isn’t possible to say whether the companies that received the most termination letters also received the most national security letters. But given the overall secrecy around the program, the termination letters offer a rare glimpse into these subpoenas. Equifax, Experian and AT&T received the most termination letters: more than 50 each. TransUnion, T-Mobile and Verizon each received more than 40. Yahoo, Google and [Microsoft](https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2014/05/22/new-success… got more than 20 apiece. Over 60 companies received just one. The underlying national security letters were not included in the documents, and it is unclear when most of them were issued and who the individual targets were. Tech companies have disclosed more information about the letters they received than the major phone providers, which included general information about them in transparency reports. “We have fought for the right to be transparent about our receipt” of national security letters, Richard Salgado, Google’s director of law enforcement and information security, said in a [2016 statement](https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/sharing-national-security-letters-public/) explaining why the company was releasing [the subpoenas](https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/us-national-secu…. “Our goal in doing so is to shed more light on the nature and scope” of the requests, he added. Other companies have generally remained mum. In response to inquiries, a TransUnion spokesman would say only that the company “has not disclosed the receipt of any national security letters.” A spokesman for Equifax said it was “compliant with the national security letters process.” Mr. Gidari, the former tech lawyer, attributed some of that lack of reporting to differences in company culture, noting that tech firms were more predisposed to openness, and financial institutions less likely to discuss any outside access to customer data. And most small companies, he said, don’t have the resources to keep long-term track of or challenge the subpoenas. “That’s the problem with the Freedom Act: It procedurally pretended to solve the problem,” he said. “But the whole structure of this involves presumption in favor of the government for perpetual sealing.”

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Man Accused of Using Drone to Airdrop Explosives Onto Ex-Girlfriend's Property
by jim bell 22 Sep '19

22 Sep '19

https://www.newsbreakapp.com/n/0MsZ5HCv?s=a3&pd=02h1yVjC Man Accused of Using Drone to Airdrop Explosives Onto Ex-Girlfriend's Property Gizmodo Prosecutors have accused an autoworker of using a drone to drop bombs on his ex-girlfriend’s home in Washington Township, Pennsylvania.

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Salting Leaks and Releases by FOIA and Court
by John Young 22 Sep '19

22 Sep '19

Suspend full belief in orchestrated leaks and releases by FOIA and courts of "classifed" material, lipsticked with redactions and withholdings. Gotten kind of stupid with hoo-hawing headlines about stuff no way to double-check. Pretense of redacting and withholding to protect sources and identities is formulaic. A swell deception operation is the openness about testing crypto, a boon to those who relish the free exposure, praise contributors, tut-tut concealing, never emphasizing long-standing practice of implanting backdoors, weaknesses and backstabbing comsec, infosec, above all natsec. Fair amount of that has been a characteristic of cypherpunks since its beginning, perhaps due to the Internet and Web design to do just that, SM and searches, porn and illursory anonymity, take your pick of belief and salting a con.

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Johnstone nails it
by Steven Schear 22 Sep '19

22 Sep '19

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/novelty-joke-pm-from-fake-country-meets-…

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Opensource Chef SW Co $upports Govt Thugs [re: HESSLA License]
by grarpamp 21 Sep '19

21 Sep '19

https://www.zdnet.com/article/developer-takes-down-ruby-library-after-he-fi… https://twitter.com/shanley/status/1173692656192385024 https://www.usaspending.gov/#/award/85073015 https://github.com/sethvargo/chef-sugar A software engineer pulled a personal project down after he found out that one of the companies using it had recently signed a contract with the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The engineer, Seth Vargo, cited the ICE's "inhumane treatment, denial of basic human rights, and detaining children in cages," as the reason for taking down his library. The project was called Chef Sugar, a Ruby library for simplifying work with Chef, a platform for configuration management. Varga developed and open-sourced the library while he worked at Chef, and the library was later integrated into Chef's source code. Earlier this week, a Twitter user discovered that Chef was selling $95,000-worth of licenses through a government contractor to the ICE. The news didn't go well with Vargo, who, yesterday, September 19, took down the Chef Sugar library from both GitHub and RubyGems, the main Ruby package repository, in a sign of protest. "I have a moral and ethical obligation to prevent my source from being used for evil," Vargo wrote on the now-empty Chef Sugar GitHub repository. Vargo's actions didn't go unnoticed, and in a blog post published later in the day, Chef Software CEO Barry Crist said the incident impacted "production systems for a number of our customers." The Chef team fixed the issue by scouring some of the older Chef Sugar source code and re-uploading it on their own GitHub account. Following public criticism of the contract, Chef Software CEO Barry Crist responded by saying the company had been a long-time ICE collaborator for years, since the previous administration, long before ICE became the hated agency it is today. "While I understand that many of you and many of our community members would prefer we had no business relationship with DHS-ICE, I have made a principled decision, with the support of the Chef executive team, to work with the institutions of our government, regardless of whether or not we personally agree with their various policies," Crist said. "I want to be clear that this decision is not about contract value - it is about maintaining a consistent and fair business approach in these volatile times. I do not believe that it is appropriate, practical, or within our mission to examine specific government projects with the purpose of selecting which U.S. agencies we should or should not do business," Crist added.

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Surveillance Databasing Dossier - Rambam HOPE, SurvCamMan, Top Spy Cities Corps Feds
by grarpamp 21 Sep '19

21 Sep '19

Surveillance Camera Man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg Too bad he doesn't use it to engage in actual conversations on privacy, starting with the other cams visible in some of the scenes https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=surveillance+camera+man Rambam Privacy, Anonymity, and Individuality The Final Battle Begins HQ - HOPE XI 2016 https://youtube.com/watch?v=FHwl6AyL6js http://www.adsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/watchful_eyes.jpg http://www.adsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/creepcamz.jpg https://www.wired.co.uk/article/surveillance-technology-biometrics https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surveilled-cities/ https://technology.ihs.com/583114/north-american-security-camera-installed-… https://www.eff.org/press/releases/new-report-finds-border-communities-inun… https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/americans-deserve-their-day-court-abo… https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/us/data-privacy-fbi.html https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/facebooks-dating-service-full-red-fla… https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/five-concerns-about-amazon-rings-deal… https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-dhs-uncover-information-about-b… http://usatoday.com/story/money/2018/11/09/americans-more-concerned-data-pr… https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/equifax-consumer-trust-after-b… https://www.muckrock.com/foi/atlanta-325/2018-vigilant-data-sharing-informa… https://www.banfacialrecognition.com/map/ https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/surveillance-technologies/co… https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/09/ecuador-allanamiento-violent…

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Ars Technica: Medicine show: Crown Sterling demos 256-bit RSA key-cracking at private event
by jim bell 21 Sep '19

21 Sep '19

Ars Technica: Medicine show: Crown Sterling demos 256-bit RSA key-cracking at private event. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/medicine-show-crown-… Jim Bell's comment:. Are they talking about a 256 bit key, or a 512 bit composite key ?

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Google Says It's Achieved Quantum Supremacy, a World-First: Report
by jim bell 21 Sep '19

21 Sep '19

https://gizmodo.com/google-says-its-achieved-quantum-supremacy-a-world-fir-…

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snowflake's lies
by Punk 21 Sep '19

21 Sep '19

and by snowflake I mean edward snowden 'ex' agent of the child murdering americunt empire. snowflake vomited : "This layering method is called onion routing, which gives Tor its name: it’s The Onion Router. The classified joke was that trying to surveil the Tor network makes spies want to cry. Therein lies the project’s irony: here was a US military–developed technology that made cyberintelligence simultaneously harder and easier, applying hacker know-how to protect the anonymity of IC officers, but only at the price of granting that same anonymity to adversaries and to average users across the globe." so according to this little piece of lying shit, tor 'grants' the same anonimity to the NSA and to ross ulbricht, or any other ppl who are now in jail(or dead) thanks to tor. it's amazing that the little piece of snowden shit never heard about tor's 'global adversaries'....despite the fact that his 'job' was being THE 'global adversary' "In this sense, Tor was even more neutral than Switzerland." hilarious "For me personally, Tor was a life changer" wow listen to brother snowflake's testimony! he accepted tor as his personal saviour! That's why the asshole is now exiled in russia. Tor didn't again work too well eh.

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