March 2020 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Crypto AG: US Spies Kept Quiet on Assassinations
by John Young 15 Mar '20

15 Mar '20

https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/2020/0315.html#cg15 More on Crypto AG <https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/03/more_on_crypto_.html>[2020.03.06] One follow-on to the story of <https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/02/crypto_ag_was_o.html>Crypto AG being owned by the CIA: <https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812499752/uncovering-the-cias-audacious-oper…>this interview with a Washington Post reporter. The whole thing is worth reading or listening to, but I was struck by these two quotes at the end: ...in South America, for instance, many of the governments that were using Crypto machines were engaged in assassination campaigns. Thousands of people were being disappeared, killed. And I mean, they're using Crypto machines, which suggests that the United States intelligence had a lot of insight into what was happening. And it's hard to look back at that history now and see a lot of evidence of the United States going to any real effort to stop it or at least or even expose it. [...] To me, the history of the Crypto operation helps to explain how U.S. spy agencies became accustomed to, if not addicted to, global surveillance. This program went on for more than 50 years, monitoring the communications of more than 100 countries. I mean, the United States came to expect that kind of penetration, that kind of global surveillance capability. And as Crypto became less able to deliver it, the United States turned to other ways to replace that. And the Snowden documents tell us a lot about how they did that.

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This doesn't sound legal
by Ryan Carboni 15 Mar '20

15 Mar '20

This doesn't sound legal. https://web.archive.org/web/20120321123520/http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/fr… Ultimately, we ended up talking to bin Laden's first trainer, Ali Mohammed, Ali Abdul Saud Mohammed, who is currently in jail. He taught bin Laden. In one of the first training classes that Ali Mohammed conducted was Sheikh bin Laden; Ayman al-Zawahiri; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who's chief of military operations at the time; Saif al-Adel, who's still one of the 22 most wanted fugitives, and others. ... What he tells us and what he did would make the hair on the back of your head stand up. This is the type of stuff, again, that we dealt with in the usual setting that the bureau found themselves in, in ... a regular interview, because each one of these defendants, if you will, had legal representation. And those lawyers played a very vital role in gaining their subjects' cooperation with the United States government. Each one of them was seduced by our legal system that many people poke fun at, thinks cumbersome. If you could listen to these guys, and they'll tell you -- I'm referring to Al Qaeda members -- "You mean to tell me that the United States government will give me the legal representation?" "Correct." "You mean to tell me that if I cooperate with you, that you will at least possibly protect me against retaliation?" "Yes." "You mean that you could unite me with my family?" "Yes."

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Multiple Vulnerabilities (systemd, thunderbird, sudo, etc.)
by destroyer 15 Mar '20

15 Mar '20

https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202003-10 (thunderbird) https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202003-12 (sudo) https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202003-20 (systemd) https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202003-16 (SQLite) https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202003-18 (Libvirt)

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[rms@gnu.org: Re: list of people censored on lists.debian.org]
by Zenaan Harkness 15 Mar '20

15 Mar '20

----- Forwarded message from Richard Stallman <rms(a)gnu.org> ----- From: Richard Stallman <rms(a)gnu.org> To: Zenaan Harkness <zen(a)freedbms.net> Cc: daniel(a)pocock.pro, cypherpunks(a)lists.cpunks.org, wayward4now(a)gmail.com, chevhq(a)gmail.com, dan(a)geer.org, lwn(a)lwn.net Reply-To: rms(a)gnu.org Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2020 23:07:17 -0400 Subject: Re: list of people censored on lists.debian.org [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] > This is depressing to see - from Linus Torvalds and the Linux > Foundation, to Git in recent times, to Richard Stallman (RMS), > founder of the Free Software Foundation (USA) being "resigned" by > the so-called "FSF community" I resigned from the FSF board and management to spare the FSF from the damage that the mob that was attacking me were likely to do. Please do not accuse the FSF of treating me badly. That is untrue and unjust. -- Dr Richard Stallman Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org) Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org) ----- End forwarded message -----

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A Coventry Moment
by Peter Fairbrother 15 Mar '20

15 Mar '20

A Coventry Moment There is a story that Winston Churchill let Coventry burn under German bombing in order to protect the secret that the Nazi Enigma codes had been broken. He made a hard decision to spend lives now, in order to promote the greater good later. On TV recently we have seen Boris Johnston looking Churchillian, having apparently made a similar sort of decision about the coronavirus epidemic - spending 400,000 British lives now in order to gain some future advantage. The problem is that we don't know what that advantage is. It all seems a bit nebulous. - At the start of the epidemic, when we thought that it would prove impossible to stop the infection, the policy of delay made some sense - spread the peak to decrease maximum hospital load and thereby save lives. That 400,000 or so (a million in real numbers) people would die was unfortunate, but inevitable. There was nothing we could do about it. But then the Chinese stopped their epidemic, showing that there was no need for 400,000 people to die, and everything changed. Except the policy. - Herd immunity is just what happens if you don't do anything to stop any disease which leaves the patient immune after it has run its course. It is at best a distraction. One possible line of Government thinking is that after we implement strong containment we would then have a still-vulnerable population, giving rise to the fear that we might have to continue strict measures indefinitely. Possible, but what measures? Strict universal isolation is almost certainly not necessary once the disease is under control, though strict attention to detail will still be necessary. Proper control of entry to the country with quarantine where appropriate is the major continuing need; but other countries will be doing something similar, and international travel will not be easy for years anyway. Better social distancing - the elbow or foot tap, enlarging personal space, avoiding contact where possible; protective measures like handwashing and handrub, masks and respirators, perhaps gloves and goggles; widespread testing and diligent contact tracing once the epidemic is under control (with short-term but mandatory isolation/quarantine for those testing positive) are probably all that is needed. But we can follow the Chinese example as they relax controls, and limit measures here to those which are necessary and which work. Medium term, if people get "isolation fatigue", and the disease spreads? We would still be better off if we implement strict confinement now. We would have had time to make a billion masks, time to prepare a hundred million tests, time to open hospital beds, time to get the needed equipment - and most of all time to research the disease. For instance, how much would closing schools help? To answer that we need to know whether and to what extent children get the disease in a very mild form and pass it on, or do they just not get it at all - and we do not know the answer to that question. How long does the virus stay active on various surfaces? We don't know. What are the most important secondary and minor routes of infection? We don't know. Why are older people more likely to die, and can anything be done to prevent this? We don't know. How do we immunise the population? We don't know. How do we cure the disease? We don't know. But we do know how to stop it. - Mr Johnston is not Winston Churchill. Churchill himself never faced the "Coventry Dilemma", that was just one of many similar teaching stories used to emphasise the need for secrecy at Bletchley Park. It wasn't real. Many hard life-and-death balancing decisions were made by Churchill during the war, but the "Coventry Dilemma" was not one of them. As for COVID-19, there is no sacrifice here to be made for the greater good. Any sacrifice of lives would just be an unconscionable waste, somewhere between manslaughter with reckless disregard for life and pointless mass murder. There is no greater good to be had. We can kill the disease. We do not need to kill the population, or 400,000 or a million of it. The Chinese have effectively killed the disease in China. Pretty soon they will be thinking about quarantining people entering the country, if they aren't already. That is the kind of turnaround we should be trying for. - As an aside, the real hard decision would not have been to focus efforts on amelioration at the cost of many lives, for some greater eventual good; but instead to implement strong confinement on ethical grounds, even if we thought it couldn't work. But we know strong containment can work. It has been done. It worked. There is no obvious downside to doing it. There is no hard decision to make. There is no Coventry Moment. There never has been. Peter Fairbrother

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Chelsea Manning Supporters Raise A Quarter Million Dollars In Two Days
by Razer 15 Mar '20

15 Mar '20

YewBETCHA! "In the likely event that you need some news to give you a bit of faith in humanity today, you should know that supporters of whistleblower Chelsea Manning have raised over a quarter million dollars to pay the cruel, draconian fine that was heaped upon her for her principled stand against testifying at corrupt secret grand jury proceedings. In just two days after Manning was released from prison, more than six thousand donors banded together to pay off the $258,000 fine assigned at a thousand dollars a day by a federal judge on top of imprisonment to coerce her to testify. Fundraising was so enthusiastic that it had overshot the goal and reached $267,002 before the GoFundMe was closed. Those of us who support Manning have been looking at this more as a fine on us than on her, because of course we were never going to let a heroic whistleblower spend the rest of her life under crushing debt. The fact that the money came together so quickly and easily, though, says a lot about the beauty of humans in my opinion." https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/chelsea-manning-supporters-raise-a-quart…

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The Fates of American Presidents Who Challenged the Deep State
by Ryan Carboni 15 Mar '20

15 Mar '20

https://apjjf.org/2014/12/43/Peter-Dale-Scott/4206.html I believe that a significant shift in the relationship between public and deep state power occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in the Reagan Revolution of 1980. In this period five presidents sought to curtail the powers of the deep state. And as we shall see, the political careers of all five—Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter—were cut off in ways that were unusual. One president, Kennedy, was assassinated. Another, Nixon, was forced to resign. To some extent the interplay of these two forms of power and political organization is found in all societies. The two were defined by Hannah Arendt in the 1960s as “persuasion through arguments” versus “coercion by force.” Arendt, following Thucydides, traced these to the common Greek way of handling domestic affairs, which was persuasion (πείθειν) as well as the common way of handling foreign affairs, which was force and violence (βία)." The two represent not just different techniques of government but different cultures and mindsets, in fundamental tension with each other. This tension increases, and predictably tips toward violence, if a well-organized open community expands beyond its own borders and is increasingly occupied with the business of supervising an empire. It is repeatedly the case that progressive societies (like America) expand. As their influence expands, their democratic institutions, based at bottom upon persuasive power among equals, are supplemented by new, often secret, institutions of top-down violent power for the control of alien populations abroad, often speaking different and unfamiliar languages. The more the society expands, the more these institutions of violent power encroach upon and supplant the original democracy.

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All free men obey authority to the extent that it is unjust
by Ryan Carboni 14 Mar '20

14 Mar '20

All free men obey authority to the extent that it is unjust, beware the situation in which you cannot respond to their just arguments.

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[OT] [COVID-19] Pornhub's Premium Content Is Free All Month to Italians Stuck in Coronavirus Lockdown
by Cecilia Tanaka 14 Mar '20

14 Mar '20

Pornhub's Premium Content Is Free All Month to Italians Stuck in Coronavirus Lockdown https://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2020/03/pornhub-premium-subscriptions-free-italy/ I love Italy and PornHub is pure love, awww... All VPNs changed to Italy right now, hahahaha!!! ;D

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Woar Poarn: Fw: Russian vs Turk air power and defence - [PEACE]
by Zig the N.g 14 Mar '20

14 Mar '20

Russia's air force capabilities are simply stunning .. ----- Forwarded message from Zenaan Harkness <zen(a)freedbms.net> ----- From: Zenaan Harkness <zen(a)freedbms.net> Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2020 23:01:25 +1100 Subject: Russian vs Turk air power and defence Wow. This is an amazing difference. Without NATO, Turkey is cooked. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEeYk65jzko Short article here: http://thesaker.is/one-russian-airbase-could-take-down-turkeys-entire-fight… .. What it is important to keep in mind is not only that Turkey needs Russia far more than vice versa – but also that, in regards to Syria, the balance of power between the two parties remains extremely one-sided. While NATO’s willingness to overtly support Turkey should it provoke an armed conflict with Russian forces remains highly questionable, an assessment of the military capabilities of both parties shows a tremendous Russian advantage in the field in the event of an armed conflict – with the far smaller size of Russian units in Syria compensated for by overwhelming technological supremacy. ... ----- End forwarded message -----

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