- cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

No one understands the technology they have access to anymore
by Ryan Carboni 12 Feb '20

12 Feb '20

It's not like assassinations for hire can't be hacked, right? https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/privacy-and-surveillance/police… The power of stingrays, and the lengths to which police will go to conceal their use, are demonstrated by an ongoing case in Florida, State v. Thomas. As revealed in a recent opinion of a Florida appeals court, Tallahassee police used an unnamed device — almost certainly a stingray — to track a stolen cell phone to a suspect’s apartment. (The case’s association with stingrays was first pointed out by CNET’s Declan McCullagh in January). They then knocked on the door, asked permission to enter and, when the suspect’s girlfriend refused, forced their way inside, conducted a search, and arrested the suspect in his home. Police opted not to get warrants authorizing either their use of the stingray or the apartment search. Incredibly, this was apparently because they had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the company that gave them the device. The police seem to have interpreted the agreement to bar them even from revealing their use of stingrays to judges, who we usually rely on to provide oversight of police investigations. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/bureau-prisons-tests-micro-jamming-technolog… This week, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) conducted a pilot test of micro-jamming technology at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, S.C. The test – the first collaboration of this kind in a state corrections facility – was conducted to determine if micro-jamming could prevent wireless communication by inmates using contraband cellphones in a housing unit. This test follows two earlier tests at a federal corrections facility in Cumberland, Maryland. Contraband cellphones present an ongoing safety and correctional security concern for the public as well as for correctional facilities across the country. Contraband cellphones have been used to run criminal enterprises, distribute child pornography, and facilitate the commission of violent crimes—all while inmates are incarcerated. In South Carolina, officials attributed the deadly April 15, 2018 prison riot in part to contraband cellphones. And on March 5, 2010, a South Carolina inmate ordered a hit on a 15-year corrections veteran from behind bars. He was shot six times and severely wounded.

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How the CIA used Crypto AG encryption devices to spy on countries for decades - Washington Post
by jim bell 12 Feb '20

12 Feb '20

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-security/cia-cr…

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[MINISTRY] capitalism v fascism/ corporatism - what are we (the West) living under?
by Zenaan Harkness 11 Feb '20

11 Feb '20

This is a write up which some whom you might consider sending it to, could find easy to read, which is the utility of this piece. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-22/destroying-capitalism-has-failed-… Destroying The "Capitalism Has Failed" Narrative Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com, http://www.internationalman.com/articles/capitalism-has-failed Today, more than at any time previously, Westerners are justifying a move toward collectivist thinking with the phrase, “Capitalism has failed.” https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/20180122_cap.jpg In response to this, conservative thinkers offer a knee-jerk reaction that collectivism has also had a dismal record of performance. Neither group tends to gain any ground with the other group, but over time, the West is moving inexorably in the collectivist direction. As I see it, liberals are putting forward what appears on the surface to be a legitimate criticism, and conservatives are countering it with the apology that, yes, capitalism is failing, but collectivism is worse. Unfortunately, what we’re seeing here is not classical logic, as Aristotle would have endorsed, but emotionalism that ignores the principles of logic. If we’re to follow the rules of logical discussion, we begin with the statement that capitalism has failed and, instead of treating it as a given, we examine whether the statement is correct. Only if it proves correct can we build further suppositions upon it. Whenever I’m confronted with this now oft-stated comment, my first question to the person offering it is, “Have you ever lived in a capitalist country?” That is, “Have you ever lived in a country in which, during your lifetime, a free-market system dominated?” Most people seem initially confused by this question, as they’re residents of either a European country or a North American country and operate under the assumption that the system in which they live is a capitalist one. So, let’s examine that assumption. A capitalist, or “free market,” system is one in which the prices of goods and services are determined by consumers and the open market, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority. Today, none of the major (larger) countries in what was once referred to as the “free world” bear any resemblance to this definition. Each of these countries is rife with laws, regulations, and a plethora of regulatory bodies whose very purpose is to restrict the freedom of voluntary commerce. Every year, more laws are passed to restrict free enterprise even more. Equally as bad is the fact that, in these same countries, large corporations have become so powerful that, by contributing equally to the campaigns of each major political party, they’re able to demand rewards following the elections, that not only guarantee them funds from the public coffers, but protect them against any possible prosecution as a result of this form of bribery. There’s a word for this form of governance, and it’s fascism. Many people today, if asked to describe fascism, would refer to Mussolini, black boots, and tyranny. They would state with confidence that they, themselves, do not live under fascism. But, in fact, fascism is, by definition, a state in which joint rule by business and state exists. (Mussolini himself stated that fascism would better be called corporatism, for this reason.) In recognizing the traditional definition of fascism, there can be no doubt that fascism is the driving force behind the economies of North America and Europe. In addition, the concept of any government taking by force from some individuals the fruits of their labour and bestowing it upon others is by no means free-market. It is a socialist concept. And, in any country where roughly half of the population are the recipients of such largesse, that country has, unquestionably, settled deeply into a socialist condition. However, this is by no means a new idea. As Socrates asked Adeimantus: Do not their leaders deprive the rich of their estates and distribute them among the people; at the same time taking care to preserve the larger part for themselves? So, which is it? Are we saying here that these countries are socialist or fascist? Well, in truth, socialism, fascism, and, indeed, communism are all forms of collectivism. They all come under the same umbrella. So, what we’re witnessing is liberals, rightfully criticising the evils of fascism, but failing to understand it for what it is—a form of collectivism. Conservatives, on the other hand, do their best to continue to operate under their countries’ socialist laws, regulations, and regulatory bodies, whist continuing to imagine that a remnant of capitalism remains. And so we return to the question, “Have you ever lived in a country in which, during your lifetime, a free-market system dominated?” Such countries do exist. It should be pointed out, however, that even they tend to move slowly toward collectivism over time. (After all, it’s in collectivism that they gain their power.) However, some countries are “newer,” just as the US was in the early nineteenth century and, like the US, the governments have not yet had enough time to sufficiently degrade the economies that have been entrusted to them. In addition, some citizenries are feistier than others and/or are less easy to convince that, by allowing themselves to be dominated by their governments, they’ll actually be better off. Whatever the reasons, there are most certainly countries that are far more free-market than the countries discussed above. But, what does this tell us of the future? What can be done to turn these great powers back to a more free-market system? Well, the bad news is that that’s unlikely in the extreme. To be sure, we, from time to time, have inspired orators, such as Nigel Farage or Ron Paul, who remind us what we “should” do to put these countries back on track, so that they serve the people of the country, rather than its leaders. But, historically, such orators have never succeeded in reversing the trend one iota. History tells us that political leaders, in their pursuit of collectivism, never reverse the trend. They instead ride it all the way to the bottom, then bail out, if they can. However, it is ever true that, in some locations in the world, there have always been free-market societies. Over time, they deteriorate under the hands of their leaders and, as they do, others spring up. The choice of the reader is to look upon the world as his oyster - to assess whether he is more or less content with the country he’s in and confident that it will continue to be a good place in which to live, work, invest, and prosper, or, if not, to consider diversifying, or even moving entirely, to a more rewarding, more capitalist jurisdiction.

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A plan for Offst mobile app
by realcr 11 Feb '20

11 Feb '20

Hey, Offst is a digital credit card, powered by trust between people. It is an open source project, licensed under AGPL3. So far the main development on Offst was focused on designing a reasonable open protocol, and on developing the core parts of Offst. One thing that was neglected was a good graphical user interface. I recently began on figuring out what an Offst mobile app would look like, and so I sketched an initial draft for what the user flow should look like. You can find it here: https://www.freedomlayer.org/offst/mobile-app-plan/ Any ideas are highly appreciated! Some other quick links: Offst's repository: https://github.com/freedomlayer/offst Previous posts on Offst's blog: https://www.freedomlayer.org/offst/

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More evidence that the US has a secret bioweapons program than there is a massive secret Hollywood making deep fakes
by Ryan Carboni 11 Feb '20

11 Feb '20

I realize knowledge of economics has corroded to the point that everyone thinks everything you want is sitting in an Amazon warehouse and you can order it the next day, but that isn't the case. It is possible that the program is only for peaceful research, but if so, where are the peace dividends? Don't tell me we've created airborne HIV faster than a vaccine or treatment for normal HIV. https://freebeacon.com/national-security/russia-says-u-s-expanding-bioweapo…

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Operation Big Itch, 2019-nCoV, and Economic BioWar directed at China
by Razer 11 Feb '20

11 Feb '20

"The appearance of a new strain of coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan last month, which has since spread to more than 20 countries, has sparked social media-driven panic around the world. People are scouring the Internet for information about this coronavirus outbreak, which the World Health Organization has declared a global health emergency, and they are being bombarded with information dealing with both the reasons why it appeared, and whether or not it could spread to become a global pandemic. The deadly novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is currently thought to have originated in wild animals like bats, but this theory has yet to be scientifically proven. The American Project Syndicate media organization has published dogmatic and undisguised anti-Chinese propaganda, without going into any detail on the medical side of the problem, claiming that the affliction of Chinese autocracy is responsible for the coronavirus epidemic. An article available on the online Turkish news portal OdaTV states that “the epidemic in China can be interpreted as a biological attack,” stressing that China’s coronavirus outbreak is directly related to America’s geopolitical interests, a country which has long been using indirect strategies in its war with rival China. The piece provides points to support this argument, noting that Washington is trying to reign in China’s growth, prevent the country from implementing its One Belt One Road initiative, and lower Chinese economic output. The United States is using its naval fleet and allies to surround China in the Pacific, preventing China from circumventing the Strait of Malacca, fomenting unrest, blocking China from accessing Eurasia over land through East Turkestan, and using sanctions and trade wars to try and undermine China’s production and economy And although it is currently hard to say for sure whether the virus originated naturally or artificially, whether it was used as a biological weapon as part of the bigger war between China and the US, one thing is clear, which is that the coronavirus epidemic that has broken out in China will have a profound effect on the country, and it will naturally affect Chinese manufacturing, trade, the economy, and Chinese priorities, which the United States will clearly benefit from. A similar position is taken in the Norwegian news outlet Steigan, suggesting that we reflect on the fact that the United States is now feeling very intimidated by China’s rapid growth, is already waging a trade war against China, and it is not too far-fetched that certain American politicians could well have resorted to biological warfare. The publication makes another point to back up the argument that this is a possibility, reminding people the United States is already working on a number of military plans to ensure US world domination. Of particular note is the US plan to hack Russia’s power grid and shut down power plants, which The New York Times wrote about in 2019, and the US are intensifying their cyberattacks. The American strategy which has been implemented since 2012 has entered an offensive phase, with the aggressive introduction of potentially crippling malware, and at a depth hat has never been tried before. Even if you do not believe that the coronavirus was created intentionally, the fact that it would have been possible should be enough to set alarm bells ringing for many. Indian researchers have cast doubt over whether the new coronavirus could have a natural origin, and have questioned segments of its RNA, as they are unlike those of other coronaviruses such as SARS, and instead appear to be closer to those of HIV. The scientists found that the spikes which form the “crown” of the virus in short regions of proteins are genetic inserts which bear resemblance to pieces of the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV-1. The researchers pointed out that these kinds of inserts are not found in other coronaviruses. In other words, if the virus had mutated in a natural way, it would not have been able to receive insertions from the immunodeficiency virus. Oddly enough, it should also be noted that the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is similar to other coronaviruses, such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which was first discovered in Saudi Arabia (2012) and subsequently spread to other countries in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. The new coronavirus also shares similarities with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which was first discovered in China in 2002 and spread to countries all over the world, but SARS was quickly brought under control and contained, and there were no more cases of contraction recorded after 2004. MERS and SARS are both coronaviruses. There are suspicions that these viruses were created in laboratories, tested on animals, and they could only have been transmitted to people through human intervention. The viruses were then bioengineered to make it possible for them to be spread from human to human. Both SARS and the new 2019-nCoV virus also have a feature which ethnic Han Chinese are more susceptible to. Considering this information, it is not surprising that a number of media outlets in different countries have begun exploring the link between the outbreak of the new 2019-nCoV virus in the Chinese city of Wuhan and activities sponsored by the CIA and the Pentagon at over a hundred secret and obscure biological laboratories engaged in the manufacturing and testing of biological warfare agents. A few years ago, one of these laboratories registered in Ukraine was uncovered, which was working on a virus that ethnic Russians would be susceptible to. Since there is no one “Russian race” and Russia is a multiethnic state, it is reported that the initial trials failed. However, these suspicions that the CIA or the Pentagon could possibly have secretly planned to use the new 2019-nCoV virus as a biological weapon did not just appear out of nowhere. Let’s not forget the secret Operation Big Itch, which the CIA tried to implement in 1954. Back then, they carried out the biological weapons tests at a remote US Army facility in the Utah desert. Their goal was to determine whether it would be possible to use tropical rat fleas (Xenopsyllacheopis, a species discovered in Egypt in 1901 and named after Pharaoh Cheops) in biological warfare as a disease vector. The fleas were carriers of plague bacteria, and the “researchers” wanted to determine how the they could be used for mass infection. Two sub-munitions of biological cluster bombs were even developed simultaneously: the E14 bomb designed to hold 100,000 insects, and the E23 bomb for twice the massive amount. As for bats, and whether they could have been used in secret bioweapon programs, as Bulgarian sources note, we should not forget that bats are a source of Ebola, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and other deadly diseases. The US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) which funds the America’s secret biolabs is conducting a number of studies on pathogens of military importance in bats as part of biological weapons research in its Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), and there are also projects for ethnicity-targeted biological weapons (biogenetic weapons), which primarily attack specific ethnic groups or genotypes. Although there has never been any official public confirmation that these weapons are being developed, documents show that the United States has long been collecting biological material from certain ethnic groups, particularly from ethnic Russians and Chinese. For instance, the US Air Force has been specifically collecting Russian RNA and synovial tissue samples for a federal project, which is even published on the US Federal Contractor Registration. Links onsite: https://journal-neo.org/2020/02/11/the-coronavirus-what-are-we-actually-dea…

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Tor Speculated Broken by FBI Etc - Freedom Hosting, MITTechReview
by grarpamp 11 Feb '20

11 Feb '20

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615163/a-dark-web-tycoon-pleads-guilty-b… https://twitter.com/techreview/status/1226212530856611840 https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.451238/gov.uscourts.md… https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.247657/gov.uscourts.md… https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/doj-drops-case-against-child-po… http://darknetq7skv7hgo.onion/ Given the variety of known weaknesses, exploits, categories of papers, and increasing research efforts against tor and overlay networks in general, and the large number of these "mystery gaps" type of articles (some court cases leaving hardly any other conclusion with fishy case secrecy, dismissals, etc)... the area of speculative brokeness and parallel construction seems to deserve serious investigative fact finding project of global case collation, interview, analysis to better characterize. Feb 8, 2020 A dark web tycoon pleads guilty. But how was he caught? The FBI found Eric Marques by breaking the famed anonymity service Tor, and officials won’t reveal if a vulnerability was used. That has activists and lawyers concerned. When the enterprising cybercriminal Eric Eoin Marques pleaded guilty in an American court this week, it was meant to bring closure to a seven-year-long international legal struggle centered on his dark web empire. In the end, it did anything but. Marques faces up to 30 years in jail for running Freedom Hosting, which temporarily existed beyond reach of the law and ended up being used to host drug markets, money-laundering operations, hacking groups, and millions of images of child abuse. But there is still one question that police have yet to answer: How exactly were they able to catch him? Investigators were somehow able to break the layers of anonymity that Marques had constructed, leading them to locate a crucial server in France. This discovery eventually led them to Marques himself, who was arrested in Ireland in 2013. Marques was the first in a line of famous cybercriminals to be caught despite believing that using the privacy-shielding anonymity network Tor would make them safe behind their keyboards. The case demonstrates that government agencies can trace suspects through networks that were designed to be impenetrable. Marques has blamed the American NSA’s world-class hackers, but the FBI has also been building up its efforts since 2002. And, some observers say, they often withhold key details of their investigations from defendants and judges alike—secrecy that could have wide-ranging cybersecurity implications across the internet. “The overarching question is when are criminal defendants entitled to information about how law enforcement located them?” asks Mark Rumold, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that promotes online civil liberties. “It does a disservice to our criminal justice system when the government hides techniques of investigation from public and criminal defendants. Oftentimes the reason they do this kind of obscuring is because the technique they use is questionable legally or might raise questions in the public’s mind about why they were doing it. While it’s common for them to do this, I don’t think it benefits anyone.” Freedom Hosting was an anonymous and illicit cloud computing company running what some estimated to be up to half of all dark web sites in 2013. The operation existed entirely on the anonymity network Tor and was used for a wide range of illegal activity, including the hacking and fraud forum HackBB and money-laundering operations including the Onion Bank. It also maintained servers for the legal email service Tor Mail and the singularly strange encyclopedia Hidden Wiki. But it was the hosting of sites used for photos and videos of child exploitation that attracted the most hostile government attention. When Marques was arrested in 2013, the FBI called him the “largest facilitator” of such images “on the planet.” Early on August 2 or 3, 2013, some of the users noticed “unknown Javascript” hidden in websites running on Freedom Hosting. Hours later, as panicked chatter about the new code began to spread, the sites all went down simultaneously. The code had attacked a Firefox vulnerability that could target and unmask Tor users—even those using it for legal purposes such as visiting Tor Mail—if they failed to update their software fast enough. While in control of Freedom Hosting, the agency then used malware that probably touched thousands of computers. The ACLU criticized the FBI for indiscriminately using the code like a “grenade.” The FBI had found a way to break Tor’s anonymity protections, but the technical details of how it happened remain a mystery. “Perhaps the greatest overarching question related to the investigation of this case is how the government was able to pierce Tor’s veil of anonymity and locate the IP address of the server in France,” Marques’s defense lawyers wrote in a recent filing. In the original indictment, there is little information beyond references to an “investigation in 2013” that found a key IP address linked to Freedom Hosting (referred to in the document as the “AHS,” or anonymous hosting service). Marques’s defense lawyers said they received only “vague details” from the government, and that “this disclosure was delayed, in part, because the investigative techniques employed were, until recently, classified.” Peter Carr, a Justice Department spokesperson, said the letter is “not in the public record.” The defense attorneys did not respond to questions. Related story The NSA found a dangerous flaw in Windows and told Microsoft to fix it The secretive security agency identified the vulnerability and is taking public credit as part of an effort to “build trust.” Not-so-full disclosure US government agencies regularly find software vulnerabilities in the course of their security work. Sometimes these are disclosed to technology vendors, while at other times the government decides to keep these exploits for use as weapons or in investigations. There is a formal system for deciding whether an issue should be shared, known as the Vulnerabilities Equities Process. This is meant to default toward disclosure, under the belief that any bug that affects the “bad guys” also has the potential to be used against American interests; an agency that wants to use a major bug in an investigation has to get approval, or else the bug will be publicly disclosed. US officials say the vast majority of such vulnerabilities end up disclosed so that they can be fixed, ideally increasing internet security for everyone. But if the FBI used a software vulnerability to find Freedom Hosting’s hidden servers and didn’t disclose the details, it could still potentially use it against others on Tor. This has observers concerned. “It’s not uncommon to play these games where they hide the ball about the source of their information,” the EFF’s Rumold says. Tor is free software designed to let anyone use the internet anonymously by encrypting traffic and bouncing it through various nodes to obfuscate connections to the original users. Users could include Americans sick of being tracked by advertising companies, Iranians attempting to circumvent censorship, Chinese dissidents escaping national surveillance, or criminals like Marques attempting to stay ahead of international police. The users are diverse in every way, but software vulnerabilities can affect all of them. In a 2017 criminal case, the US government put the secrecy of its hacking tools above all else. Prosecutors chose to drop all charges in a case of child exploitation on the dark web rather than reveal the technological means they used to locate the anonymized Tor user. Freedom Hosting’s closure was the first in a series of stunning successes by international law enforcement that shut down some of the most high-profile criminal websites in history. Two months after Marques was caught, the free-wheeling marketplace Silk Road was shut down in another FBI-led operation. After facilitating at least hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, Silk Road became a symbol of the apparent invulnerability of the criminals inhabiting the dark web. Although it lasted less than three years, it was clear that Silk Road’s founder, nicknamed Dread Pirate Roberts, felt invincible. Close to the end, the anonymous figure was giving interviews to magazines like Forbes and writing political essays about his cause and the ideology behind it. Then, in October 2013, Ross Ulbricht—a 29-year-old online bookseller—was arrested in San Francisco and charged with running Silk Road. He was eventually sentenced to life in prison, a punishment that far exceeds whatever Marques might receive at his sentencing date in May. Freedom Hosting and Silk Road were just the most well-known dark web sites that were brought down by law enforcement despite the anonymity that Tor is meant to provide. “We can’t have a world where a government is allowed to use a black box of technology from which spring these serious criminal prosecutions,” Rumold says. “Defendants have to have the ability to test and review and look at the methods that are used in criminal prosecutions.

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Facialized: Clearview AI's Hoan Ton-That Abuses Human Semantics, Thiel FB
by grarpamp 11 Feb '20

11 Feb '20

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/10/tech/clearview-ai-ceo-hoan-ton-that/inde… Peter Thiel, who sits on Facebook's board was an early investor in Clearview. Facebook, Thiel, and Ton-That all declined to comment on whether Thiel knew about how Clearview was downloading Facebook data and that it was against Facebook's rules. Over the last month, fears about facial recognition technology and police surveillance have intensified, all thanks to Ton-That's startup, Clearview AI. First came a front-page investigation in The New York Times, revealing Clearview has been working with law enforcement agencies to match photos of unknown faces to people's online images. Next, cease-and-desist letters rolled in from tech giants Twitter, Google and Facebook. Lawmakers made inquiries and New Jersey enacted a statewide ban on law enforcement using Clearview while it looks into the software.

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Cryptocurrency: Lulz, Halvening, TickTock, DNS Blocks Rout dotCOM Monopoly Scam
by grarpamp 11 Feb '20

11 Feb '20

Widespread adoption and use by peoples and biz is not large enough yet, so fudbears were able to sink the $10k party in a failboat of lulz after only one day. And hardly any solid privacy coin, or crosschain DEX, or no-history UTXO db, or txrate, exist yet either. Fundamentals before price! Halvening in three months going to make BTC BCH inflation even less than USD printing... will be hard for even retarded WallSt banksters and naysayers to keep from filling their bags. MEP Godfrey Bloom - Busting Balls on Monetary Policy !!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnGxfrWaqP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqAGeM-Lt2g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4ewGvLKgQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbLFo02jlH8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVkR8Mz_ytI https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQcJLtVXYAAbIx-.jpg What time is it in coinland... https://www.qwant.com/?q=cryptocurrency+clocks https://www.qwant.com/?q=cryptocurrency+calendar https://www.redbubble.com/shop/cryptocurrency+clocks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22272966 ICANN-Verisign dotCOM pricefixing rentseeking monopoly scam sparks launch of distributed blockchain DNS tech to route around... https://www.namecheap.com/blog/icann-allows-com-price-increases-gets-more-m… https://docs-beta.ipfs.io/concepts/ipns/ https://handshake.org/ https://ens.domains/ https://www.namecoin.org/

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Learn Python the NSA Way
by grarpamp 11 Feb '20

11 Feb '20

(U) FOUO^W Lesson 01: Introduction: Your First Python Program https://nsa.sfo2.digitaloceanspaces.com/comp3321.pdf

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